Chances are your blog will never reach that traffic level, and so your blog will not earn you a livable income from advertising alone. How can you make your blog profitable then? By following an age-old formula.
Read more �
Saturday, 29 June 2013
How To Get People To Buy Stuff from Your Blog
Chances are your blog will never reach that traffic level, and so your blog will not earn you a livable income from advertising alone. How can you make your blog profitable then? By following an age-old formula.
Read more �
Friday, 28 June 2013
6 SEO Reasons Why you Should Stop Using Zemanta
Recently in Feb 2013 Blogger integrated Zemanta with Blogspot blogs. Zemanta is indeed a great editorial plugin that helps you to write blog posts easily but unfortunately all such automated blogging tools does not help you to write well Optimized Blog posts that could protect you from the latest Google Penguin 2.0 Penalty! Penguin 2.0 is written especially to kill spam and unnatural links. Zemanta blogging Plugin as you will discover later in this post could badly impact the inbound and outbound link balance of your entire blog, if you are not well versed with SEO link attributes. If you are new to zemanta then you must first read this post:
Following are the four important reasons why we think you should temporarily stop using zemanta to produce blog posts unless zemanta promises to improve their API:
1. Too Many external Image links
Zemanta has add-on and extensions for all major browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and safari. Zemanta Plugin adds two links to the images. One inside the caption and one to the image itself. New bloggers who are not well versed with SEO pitfalls of these links often don't bother removing the caption and unlinking the image, considering it to be ethical to give credits to the rightful owner of the image.
This causes a serious imbalance between your internal and external links causing a serious loss to site wide PageRank.
2. Loss of Image Search Traffic:
You won't get traffic from Image Search because your images wont load from your server but the site you linked. In short all these images that you add through zemanta are not uploaded on your image folder, so you are simply destroying your Image Search traffic.
3. Increase in 404 Errors:
Zemanta image links could return a 404 not found crawling errors in your webmaster tools if the images are deleted by the original owner. These images are uploaded on external servers. Suppose you added an image to your blog post which is stored on Flickr. But what if that image is deleted some months later by the Flickr account holder? The image wont display and would return a 404 error to the search crawler.This would cause a serious increase in crawling errors inside your webmasters account.
4. Increase in server errors:
zemanta suggests images mostly from its users blogs, Wikipedia or Flickr. If too many requests are sent for an image, then the website whose image is linked could possibly exceed its bandwidth limit and could go down. Most sites often don't allow external sites to directly use their Image Links and often limit the accessibility. If the user has not put such a restriction on images and you are using his image on your blog then it is acceptable but what if next month he puts the restriction? All your images would be gone - destroying both your readership and SEO reputation.
5. Misleading nofollow Option
Now here is a funny thing. If you click on Preferences Tab inside your zemanta account and look at the bottom of page under the sub-tab Look. You will see the following description for nofollow link attribute.
If you carefully see, its written rel="link_nofollow". I wonder when did this new attribute got introduced? At least I have never heard of it on any forum! I would request the Zemanta Developer to edit this line and change it to rel="nofollow" instead. This is the right way to write it.
The problem with this option is that if you activate it then it will nofollow all links on your post no matter whether they are external or internal! If you nofollow an internal link you are simply confusing the robot with content inside your very own blog and stopping the robot from crawling your internal pages. Further this option adds nofollow everywhere but not to the image links which again is surprising.
If you don't activate it then it will pass your PageRank juice to all external sites that appear under the related posts sections unless you manually nofollow them.
Therefore I would advise never to use this option because it is poorly scripted.
Isn't this option misleading for users who are not well versed with SEO and just clicks this option thinking it may nofollow external links only?
6. In-Text Links irrelevancy
The in-Text Links option gives you the ability to automatically link phrases to related sites. But most often the in-Text links suggestions consist of root domain URLs only. Zemanta mostly gives link suggestions which point to homepages only and not the relevant page except for wikipedia. So if you are talking about a Facebook Plugin, it wont gives suggestions to the plugins page but would instead point to Facebook.com
So if you are simply throwing external links without natural relevancy you are simply making your blog prepared for a delicious punch by Penguin Penalty!
Do you use Zemanta?
We tried to be as precise and clear as possible and mentioned all possible pitfalls of using this utility on your Blogger, Wordpress or TypePad blog. We love zemanta API ourselves and we would love it even more if these SEO points are kept in mind by the team and some serious updates are rolled out to ensure that people who use zemanta may stay safe and protected from Search Engine Algorithmic updates and may not lose precious organic traffic by blindly using the tool. They can also publish some tutorials to educate their users with the SEO guidelines and better optimized use of the tool. Amazingly they just posted about Penguin update themselves on their blog but shared no tips to their users on how to better use the plugin!
How long have you been using zemanta and what experiences would you like to share with us?
Stay safe and keep your SEO plug on always. Peace and blessings buddies :)
Note: We don't share reasons without proves and have no personal offence towards any Online Business. We simply educate our readers with Search Engine requirements, policies and help them remain safe and protected. This post should be taken as a positive criticism, which if Zemanta team try to correct could change our views later.
Tuesday, 25 June 2013
Launching our 3rd Successful Blog!
Its 25th of June and the right time to unveil a new hatched egg in front of you all. The third successful blog of STC Network . We named it Rich Income Ways! Thanks to God and your consistent support, feedback and needed motivation, we are able to launch our third Major Blog project which would aim at introducing new faces in Blogosphere, Freelancing communities and Online Business Industry. This blog is indifferent in niche to our second blog Smart Earning Methods. The major difference is that we could not openly share luxury, lifestyle and success stories of existing entrepreneur and Internet Marketing giants on our Second Sister blog (which is under maintenance) and to fill up this gap we needed a more broader and fresher Domain where we could openly talk on these trending stories. Visit Now!This new Site is Hosted on Hostgator, built on Genesis Framework and uses the Genesis Focus child Theme. Redesign and development done by us.
The blog aims at educating specifically 4 important people going through a different life circle and these 4 people are:
- Students
- Housewives
- Jobless
- Retirees
1. Students
I was a student myself unless someone had guided me the right way with their precious tutorials and helpful guide I would be no where today. I learnt the fundamentals of Online business from students of my age and not from those Online Marketing Liars out there who keep on bragging about helping you with entrepreneurship ideas but they do no good except motivating you with their baseless stories and forcing you to revolve around their circle and finally either download their free eBooks (for self promotion), join their sponsored Products or ultimately purchase their final output.
There is no short cut to Survival be that offline or Online
As students ourselves, we understand how hard it is to make a living online when you have zero investment in hands and tons of academic tasks on your head. Therefore to share the best available practical earning strategies, we are contributing online and share all these tips based on our personal experience and practical implementation of every simple method. Whether we talk of content Writing, Freelancing, Graphics Designing, Talent selling, Commissions or share Job Resources we aim at presenting you with every possible rich Income Methods possible online.
2. Housewives
Married women who browse online from their homes and have their husband credit Card in their hands are first victim to these Online Monsters. Roughly Millions of dollars of Fake Work-From-Home Scam advertisements are done on Adwords, Facebook and other networks just to make sure these women are convinced and forced to follow an email list that starts with free promotions but ends with a Product sell. If a Marketer is able to attract even 1000 new credit card holders out of 1 Million people who signed up for an Earning or Traffic formula which costs $50/sale, he is able to push in $50,000 into his Bank each month using his Automatic Email Delivery system!
Do you know how much it costs to attract 1 Million on Facebook alone?
If the advertiser has optimized his Ad well and optimized it for Page Clicks not CPM then it would cost him less than $3 per 1000 clicks. Which means just $3000 US Dollars for 1 Million targeted visitors! Believe it or not, it is even cheaper on some other Ad networks. Once the visitor hits their landing page, their fantasizing videos, words play and Fancy graphics play well to blind them completely and force them to join the list. Thus a total $47,000 Free cash straight in their pockets. Its happening everywhere if you open your eyes..
Internet Marketers know well the growing boom in Online shopping and ease of Payment transaction and they try every possible method to force you into a transaction. Since women and hopeless unemployed graduates are an easy target, they easily get into the trap. Thanks to Paypal, MoneyBookers and Payoneer, Internet scams have become even more easy!
In order to educate youngsters and especially women with all these Fake Money Making Engines and Traffic Formulas, we will be sharing tutorials to make them identify the good from bad and use their cooking, embroidery, Fashion or any home skill that they may have to start making handsome money online.
Practical Example:
Last year I met Sanjana, a housewife from India and with an addiction to Indian Sarees and Indian Jewelry collection. Our job was to guide her through A-Z of content Marketing, blog development, Search Engine Optimization and turning her home skills into an Online Business. Luckily based on the tips and services we offered, Sanjana is now running two popular blogs for free on blogger with traffic that has even left behind MBT! She is now making enough income through AdSense and Online clothing and Jewelery Services to help her family live a well cherished life. She is now a happy STC Network Customer for the past one year.
If sanjana can do it so could you. All that we request you is to read the articles well, practice the tips next and keep experimenting with a lot of patience because there is never a quick free lunch online!
3. Jobless
I am sure you know this term well. With growing recession and lack of Jobs due to over population and increased competition, graduates and youngsters are frequent victims of this phase of life. Jobless is every word that you hear on TV, Newspapers and Online. Again since these people are half broken inside and have often lost hopes in good income, they can easily be fooled to suck the remaining budget out of their lives by forcing them to Scam Earning Mechanisms. The reason why we never link or talk of those big fishes online that you hear of everyday is because we honestly don't respect them. We are in blogosphere since 2008 and we have kept a close watch on their Online campaigns and especially email lists and tweets.
Now its time these potential and skill youngsters be taught with practical methods of exhibiting their skills and to get a much better life online. But note! there is no space with us or anywhere else where you ask for a quick success mechanisms. Hard work is all that counts here.
4. Retirees
We all have grandfathers and we know how bad it seems when they are paid an average retirement income which is 40%-50% less than their Normal Working wage. Yes that sucks badly. Most of these adults have rich resource of knowledge base or I should rather say a river of Precious Experience. We have communities Online where they can utilize their skills more productively. They can record consultancy videos and spread them online through YouTube or paid Video broadcasting Services. They can share their real estate ideas, authorship ideas, Forex or Medical tips and what not? Most of our customers even include famous writers, University professors and Novelist. What we suggested them were to publish their Press Releases, Written documents or Text Books online and turn every chapter into an online web page in order to let the crazy Search bots crawl and index these great learning resources. In return they can put ads on their site to turn every new visitor into cash!
Internet is booming tremendously and what it lacks is qualified and skilled contributors like these 55-60 years of age Golden folks. They are the first to contribute to Wikipedia!
We will try our level best to help them make best use of their existing skills on all our network blogs.
Why Success Stories?
We will often talk of luxury, lifestyle and net worths. The purpose behind this is not to motivate you to fantasize a life of celebrities or the Rich but to make you realize that they were also just normal middle class members of the society like us. It was only a matter of 1-2 years of hard work that pushed them to where they are today. So benefiting from their ideas and strategies is what that counts more.
We publish even about luxury and Lifestyle in order to give some entertainment to our readers but we never aim at making you dream of such wastage of money! Sometimes you need off-topic stuff to keep your readers active and entertained.
STC Network Team
I must inform everyone that we now have two new members in the family:
- Yusra Adil: Our New content Writer
- Ahmed Nasir: Our Senior Web Developer
Our existing employees include:
- Qasim Zaib - Senior Content Writer & My emergency Plug!
- Nida Zaidi - Senior Content Writer & Marketer
- Rahman Majeedi: Our Senior Graphics Designer
I just hope we continue providing you with rich resources and providing the best online medium to learn almost everything you need. Our authors are friendly helpers and guiders. If you have questions or need their help, you are most welcome to approach them through their blog posts. The contact pages are only meant for Advertisement queries and Premium Services.
Need to hear you!
My sole purpose behind launching new sites is always experimenting with new platforms, tools and playing with growing changes in Search algorithms. I am a student like you and I learn things by trial and error and prefer remaining noob when it comes to learning. Whatever I learnt so far, I will post them in coming weeks. I don't know what is coming next but with trust in God and in friends like you, I am sure we have a better stop ahead. I have kept even a bigger surprise for MBT users and this new project will be launched before coming EID inshAllah. It's a complete new CMS built and developed for our blog users and it has nothing to do with Wordpress or Blogger. This new idea is the most unique and I am sure it will entertain the readers more.
PS: Please don't forget visiting this new blog and make sure you like its Fan Page to show your love like always! :)
Wish to here precious views and suggestions of my beloved MBT readers below. Peace and blessings buddies. :)
Sunday, 23 June 2013
Google Answers most common Reconsideration Request and Backlinks questions
When to file a reconsideration request
Google has some clear-cut quality guidelines that it uses to determine when a website is spam, and is effecting search results in an adverse way. If your website violates these guidelines, then it will most probably be put under a manual penalty. You will get notifications of such penalties in your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard (it is important that you set one up now if you haven't already). Once you learn about the penalty, you can take steps to remove it, and then, and only then should you file a reconsideration request.Remember that reconsideration requests only work if your site has been manually penalized. If your site dropped in search results ranking, and is performing poorly after an algorithmic update, then a reconsideration request wouldn't do much good.Mostly, you will be notified if there's been a manual penalty. But, if you don't see any messages from Google in GWT, but you found some problems with your site after debugging, then you can resolve that problem and file a reconsideration request again.
Analysing and cleaning up your backlinks
You can use any of the various tools provided by Google to analyze your backlink profile. One good tool is the Links to your site section in Google Webmaster Tools. You can use it to look at your backlinks you gained during a particular period of time. You can also use Google Analytics to achieve the same end. Another handy backlink analysis tool is the Moz OpenSiteExplorer. You can use it to check on the Page and Domain authority of links to your website. Using these tools for analysis, you can pick out the spammy, auto generated, or low quality backlinks you need to remove.Once you've picked out the backlinks you want to clean, contact the web site owners, and get your backlinks removed manually. If that doesn't help, you can use Google's Link Disavow tool to disregard those backlinks. Beware though! This can be risky, so check and double check the integrity of each backlink before disavowing it.
Writing a Reconsideration request
Once your bad backlinks have been removed, you can file a reconsideration request. While writing the request, make sure you provide adequate documentation. The more detailed it is, the more are your chances of success. It shows how much effort you've put into getting your good name back onto Google. And besides, the more detailed information you provide, the more Google understands your problem, and the better it'll be able to help you.Once you submit a request, you will be notified immediately in GWT that your request has been submitted. Normally, it takes just a few days for Google to manually analyze your request. Once it is processed, you will be notified immediately. The average turnaround time can vary from a couple days to a few weeks, depending on how many requests are currently being processed by Google. Requests submitted during a time when Google is updating its algorithms can take a long time, because there are a lot of people requesting during this time.
Got any more questions? Please feel free to ask in the comments section below, or head over to the Google Webmaster Forums for a more detailed discussion on your problem. All the best :)
Wednesday, 19 June 2013
AdSense Publisher Scorecard: Best Tips & Practices
What are the Scorecard Categories?
Above is a screenshot of my AdSense Account. You can clearly see the three important bolded categories which are further divided into sub categories:
1. Revenue Optimization:
By Revenue Optimization we mean improving anything that increases your overall Page CTR and RPM value and boost your earning. We received two 2/5 blue dots here and a yellow icon that indicates that this section needs improvement. It can be optimized by making three major improvements and that are:
These recommended formats are often 336x280, 300x250, 728x90 or 160x600. If you are running any Ad formats other than these then please upgrade them immediately.
How to Improve it?
To improve this section use recommended ad formats that I mentioned above and you must keep your Ads above the fold. I would suggest to keep a 336X280 Text/Image Ad just below Blog Post tiles and a 728x90 big banner just below your blog header. Add a 160X600 skyscraper to your Sidebar.
Please make sure to keep your web design such that these ads may appear above the fold. The visitor must see the ads when your site loads without having to scroll down. Use the following App by Google to test if your ads are above the fold or not:
We recently developed a Plugin called AdSense Booster to add AdSense ads just above the excerpt/read more tag. This plugin was developed for blogger blogs. But you can get the same functionality even in wordpress by installing Quick AdSense Plugin. I must tell you that our earnings increased by 40% after we installed this simple plugin which is now available to even blogger users and we are using the same plugin to show a 468 X 60 Ad just below the opening paragraph. You can see it live in this post just below the first paragraph.
I would suggest that you must enable this if you haven't already done. AdSense bot knows best when to display Text or Media Ad based on the content on your site. If you are choosing just text ads or image ads then you are loosing the opportunity of an optimized Click through Rate.
How to Improve it?
Go To My Ads Tab inside your AdSense account and then click the "Edit ad Type" link below your Content Ad units. Choose the option Text & image/rich media ads as shown below:
Do this for all your AdSense for content Ad zones.
(c) Reduce Crawler Errors
This is one major section which people often underestimate and this returns in low earning. I always strongly recommend our clients to do a through validation of both their site HTML structure and robots.txt file. You must let the AdSense bot to crawl and scan your content the easiest way possible and don't block its way with Messy Fancy Scripts.
If you check our scorecard we received a green Tick which shows an Excellent Score. To reduce crawler errors first make sure all Jquery scripts that you use are placed within the <head> and </head> tags. Clean up your site HTML structure and remove any script that is increasing your site speed and causing the browser to crash.
Google has a list of crawlers for different tasks such as for detecting images, videos, smart phones or AdSense Ads. In order to make sure you allow AdSense Googlebot to crawl your site you must give it rights to do so by adding the following line in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
See our robots.txt file as an example.
Note: Blogger users have this added by default. Wordpress users may manually add this.
2. Site Health
Here as usual Google expects you to improve your Page speed Performance. Matt Cutts did announce on April 2010 that Page Load time would be a deciding factor for websites to rank higher on SERPs. They went so far that they even introduced PageSpeed tools last year which helps you to reduce load time of your webpages. An interesting and complete tutorial is linked below:
Yes we score too bad here as we received a red alert. Which of course is justified because I love the blog to look professional and stand apart. Here we have never listened to Google because we tried our level best to reduce the load time but Google never seemed like getting satisfied! :p I guess we would need to remove some further widgets and images to cut down the Page Load time.
How to Improve it?
Here are some quick and proper ways to reduce load time:
- Use CSS3 features to create backgrounds, gradients, drop shadows and don't use Images. Create elements using CSS3 as much as you can.
- Use small image patterns for backgrounds and scroll them vertically or horizontally instead of using large and big images
- Use CSS Sprites to reduce http requests. You will find severa
- Place all Javascript in one place and one file
- Place all stylesheets in one linked file
- Remove useless Plugins and Widgets
- Never compress CSS nor JavaScript! Even I used to recommend this before but when we talk of site maintenance you will get confused figuring out the compressed code. So please never make a mess out of your code. Keep it well indented and structured.
3. Integrate Google+ Button on your sites
Well how can Google forget promoting their Social network. So yes you must make sure to add Google+ buttons on your site to ensure you get maximum number of +1 recommendations because believe it or not social sharing votes does count a lot.
How to Improve it?
Simply add a GooglePlus button inside your posts and your sidebar. Also create a Google+ Fan Page. Read the following delicious tutorial to get things going.
Scorecard Symbols and Indicators
Following are some interesting details about the various symbols used in your scorecard chart. You can find more help and details on scorecard at Google Groups
1. Following are the three important Scores symbols and their description
| Score | Description |
|---|---|
 | Excellent! No need to make any changes to this category. |
 | Improvements suggested. You are advised to make some further improvements to this item. |
 | Needs improvement! You must or may take quick action to optimize this item |
2. Following are some symbols that would appear after you make the suggested changes.
Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
 | This category�s score has increased by one or more blue dots up to four blue dots. |
 | This category�s score has drop down by one or more blue dots down to three blue dots. |
 | This item�s score has gone up from �Needs improvement� to �Improvements suggested�. |
 | This item�s score has gone down from �Improvements suggested� to �Needs improvement�. |
Need Help?
I guess we covered every single tip and almost all best practices used to make sure you monetize your sites well and improve your CTR and RPM value. If there is anything we emphasize a lot to our clients after SEO then it's the site Design and then Monetization. Please give extra care to how appealing your site design is. You have the right to make it eye-catching by using all Fancy Jquery effects but please be assured that sometimes you need to sacrifice for the sake of a bigger gain. This is one reason why Wikipedia is so ugly yet so powerful.
It's time for some home work, we will do ours, you do yours!. Let me know for any help needed. Peace and blessings buddies. :)
Monday, 17 June 2013
Top 10 Popular Bloggers from Nigeria � 2013
In this post, we shall be looking at the top 10 popular bloggers in Nigeria � 2013, and see what makes them thick. With bloggers in virtually every field you can imagine � blogging, marketing, small business, health, sports, celebrity, photography, relations, SEO, etc. Nigeria, for sure, is a competitive market and only the best get recognized both locally and internationally.
So who are those bloggers doing exceptionally great in Nigeria in 2013? We shall take a little time to look at their profiles and see why they made this list. So here is the list of the top 10 popular bloggers in Nigeria � 2013:
Don Caprio
UPDATE: The listing below was removed to avoid misinformation.
- Did you read? 11 Most Popular Female Bloggers!
2. Loy Okezie
Loy Okezie has written his name on the marbles of blogging in Nigeria, with his blog Techloy, which is arguably the best tech related niche blog in Nigeria and on the African continent. Techloy is the right place to get authentic breaking tech news, mobile and social media trends within emerging African markets. Loy Okezie�s blog was founded in April 2008 as �Startups Nigeria�, but has since metamorphosed into the pace setter in the Nigerian local and African tech news arena. Okezie has been a contributor on BBC�s focus on Africa magazine as well as providing analysis on CNN.
Loy�s experience as a Business Administration graduate has contributed in no small measure at giving him an unprecedented edge over other bloggers in the tech arena. Techloy currently has PR4, Alexa 24,500, domain authority of 43, over 400,000 page views monthly and more than 40,000 unique visitors monthly.
3. Oladunni Liadi
Oladunni Liadi is another lady that should be respected as far as blogging is concerned in Nigeria. She is the owner of Ladunliadi.blogspot.com. One thing about her blog is that it is hosted on the Blogger platform as a .blogspot blog. She has been able to prove a point with her blog that blogging success is not only dependent on the platform you use, as a lot of bloggers believe that for your blog to succeed, it must be hosted on the Wordpress platform.
Fashion lovers and fans of nollywood artists are particularly in love with this blog because of the accuracy of news, style of writing and the visual display quality. If you are interested to get the latest gist in the movie industry in Nigeria, Ladunliadi would be your best choice.
The fact that the blog currently has PR3, Alexa rak of 12,000; over 120,000 page views daily and millions in a month attests to the fact that it is a blog loved by several Nigerians.
4. Nmachi Jidenma
Nmachi Jidenma, no doubt, has firmly established herself in the blogging business, with her blog CP-Africa, which has become a domain for getting latest happenings in Nigeria and the African continent. �Celebrating Progress Africa�, which the acronym stands for, is the owner�s dream place of projecting the good side of Africa to the world. As more and more get to know about the concept of this site, its popularity is sure to triple in 2013 and beyond. As a respected female blogger who started sharing her ideas on her facebook wall in 2009, she later moved to Blogger platform and then to her current domain which now has PR5, Alexa 96,000; Domain authority of 49, facebook likes about 41,600, high subscriber base, etc.
The most interesting thing about Nmachi Jidenma is that she has gathered a lot of experiences working for world class firms like Google, Next Web, JP Morgan�s Technology, technoserve, etc before starting her own special blog. Her experience, no doubt, is playing a vital role in the success of CP-Africa. She is worthy of mention among the top 10 popular bloggers in Nigeria - 2013.
5. Jide Ogunsanya
Jide Ogunsanya is the young Microbiologist-turned-blogger, and the man in the pilot�s seat at Ogbongeblog, a multi niche blog with interest in writing blogging tutorials, media and money-making ideas. His knowledge of Java Programming has helped to position Ogbongeblog as a place to acquire some basic SEO skills. Ogbongeblog is really pulling crowds especially amongst the youths in Nigeria, because of the special tutorials on blogging and internet related solutions it provides to readers. This guy deserves a mention here. He is also the initiator of �Bloggers Lab�, a Facebook group for bloggers. Ogbongeblog currently has PR 3, Alexa 37,000, Domain authority of 41, Subscriber base over 11,228, average Pageviews of 220,000 per month.
6. Myne Whitman
Myne Whitman is one of the few successful female bloggers in Nigeria in 2013. She has successfully groomed her blog Naijastories to the delight of literary work lovers. Naijastories is the haven for original writing, poetry, fiction, news, and literature and events. It is a website set up and committed to promoting Nigerian Fiction. It is a social network site for Nigerian writers. Currently, naijastories has Google PR � 4, Alexa rank - 200,867, Domain authority of 34, Traffic - 100k Pageviews a month, Subscriber base - Over 10,000, and the blog quality is great. Myne Whitman sure knows her onions and should be commended for a nice job, especially for making it in a country where blogging competition is high, and where there are a lot of the male folks in the blogosphere.
7. Uche Eze
Uche Eze is another woman who has influenced blogging positively in Nigeria. Uche�s BellaNaija is one of the most visited blogs, making her one of the top 10 bloggers in Nigeria in - 2013. Bella Naija was founded in July 2006, and has grown tremendously since then, up to the point of becoming a household name in Nigeria.
BellaNaija is purely an entertainment blog designed to be the best music, TV, style, beauty website in Nigeria. Bella Naija enjoys PR5, Alexa5800; domain authority of 57, huge subscriber base and high daily pageviews..
8. Chude Jideonwo
Chude Jideonwo is the owner of Ynaija.com, a place for showcasing Nigeria contents from Radio, TV, magazines, etc.. This site has made a bold statement online and now enjoys a huge readership. Ynaija is one of the hottest websites for Nigerian youths. The site has segments for lifestyle, entertainment, politics, daily news, opinion, enterprise, TV, Teen, etc, to make visitors enjoy the time spent there. Arguably one of the most visited sites in Nigeria, Ynaija enjoys PR 4, Alexa 10,000; Domain authority of 48, high subscriber base and several thousand unique monthly pageviews. It is one of the most popular sites in Nigeria in 2013.
9. Joseph Adediji
Joseph Adediji (Josylad) is among the young bloggers making waves in the blogging business in Nigeria. Joseph is the owner of Blogging Tips Today, a blog that has �empowering and helping bloggers build profitable blogs� as its sole aim. This blog incorporates elements of blogging tips and strategies, writing viral blog posts, making money blogging, traffic generation, social media and search engine optimization into its system. This relatively young blogger is going places and creating positive influences online. He has been featured on great blogs like Comluv, shoutmeloud, Basic Blog Tips, etc. Josylad is one of those top bloggers that are emerging in 2013.
Bloggingtipstoday currently has PR 3, Alexa 95,000, Domain authority of 32, high daily pageviews and though the subscriber base is not as great as the other site mentioned earlier, the site is making substantial progress.
10. Segun Adekoye
Segun Adekoye is the blogger to watch in 2013 as his Naijapose is already making a bold statement in the fashion world. The blog is the fastest-growing fashion and lifestyle blog in Nigeria in 2013. I decided to include this blogger on the list because of the progress he has made within a relatively short period in the blogging world. Segun�s Naijapose was established only in September 2012, but now has Google PR - 1, Alexa rank 78,000; Domain authority of 25, Traffic - 250,000 pageviews a month, and Subscriber base � over 8,000.
Conclusion
These are not the only performing blogs in Nigeria, but I have decided to include them on this list of the top 10 popular bloggers in Nigeria � 2013, because of their exceptional performance in 2013 especially considering their positions the previous years. I am going to come up with another post on a related subject next time to see how some other deserving bloggers can be featured. For now, time is really against me, I have to rest my pen and my keyboard. Please share your previous views and feedback by leaving a comment below.
You Must also Check out! About the Author:
Efoghor Joseph Ezie is the man teaching people How to make money, business ideas, blogging, SEO, affiliate marketing, etc at Bizsuccessguide.com. Efoghor is a blogger, freelance writer, author and small business manager.
Sunday, 16 June 2013
Use Google Analytics To Check out Your Important Backlinks
The number and nature of the backlinks to a website is one of the most important ranking factors, that is still being used in today's user-oriented organic search results. It helps determining the popularity of a website. Rank metrics, such as Google PageRank and Moz Domain/Rank Authority use it for ranking websites. So the more backlinks you have (quality ones, not cheap and spammy ones that people often purchase), the better your site tends to perform in search results. Knowing what your backlinks are, and where they're coming from can provide you with useful insights, and can help you filter out the cheap links in favour of quality ones. Let's take a look at how you can look at your website's backlinks in Google Analytics.
Backlink analysis can be invaluable for the performance of your website in search engines. The first and most useful information you could gather from your backlink data is the amount and nature of broken links. External links might be pointing to a page on your website that you have moved or deleted. Hence, the backlink is going useless, unless you do something about it.
You can also check out the trends, and see what type of pages are being linked by other website. In other words, you can find out what people like about your website, so much so that they are linking to it. You can use this information to glean trends data, and create more such content.
Another very important insight can be seen from the type of websites that are linking to you. For example, if a high quality website has given you a backlink, you should investigate, and find out what and why they liked. You can then stay in touch with them and maintain high quality connections that will ultimately help your website's ranking.
Using Google Analytics for backlink analysis
Google Analytics offers one of the tools you can use to analyze your backlinks. To use this tool, follow these steps.
- Log into your Google Analytics Account, and then click on the website property you want to see backlinks for.
- Look to left sidebar, and there you'll see a Standard Reports section. Click on the Traffic Sources tab, expand the Social section, and then click on Trackbacks.
A trackback is basically a notification for every time a website links to another. It is a record of what page on one website linked to another page on another website. Each trackback in this case will contain the linking URL, and the linked URL. You can also see how many visits were generated as a result of each backlink, so that you can contact that website and arrange for more backlinks to increase your traffic!
- Now, you will see a list of all trackbacks to your website within a specific period of time. You can change this period, and show backlinks from a month ago, or a week ago, and so on. This feature is useful when you want to see how many backlinks you 'scored' during a particular campaign.
Got any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments section below. Also tell us what tools are you using for your backlink profile analysis?
Friday, 14 June 2013
Create a Responsive Drop down Menu in Blogger
The screenshots below are taken using my personal iPhone to give you an idea of how your blog menu would look like in different screen sizes and in landscape and portrait screen mode. The menu auto adjusts itself using CSS3 media queries which we already discussed in first part of this series.
Tip: If you are using Desktop computer then simply increase and decrease your browser window manually using your mouse and observe how menu toggles between two different styles and expands/collapses when clicked.
Tutorial Series
2: Design a Responsive Header, Menu, Sidebar, Post Content area, footer etc...
3: Using Responsive Images in Blogger..
4. Responsive AdSense Ads.. Really?
5. In Progress..
HTML5 and CSS3 is no less than a blessing that has completely eliminated the need of several JavaScript functions. We will thus Design a beautiful Responsive menu in blogger using some extremely easy steps. Lets start coding!
What have we planned?
For this tutorial to work for most of those who are not well versed in web designing, I suggest you remove all your existing menus and use this responsive one instead which will remain fixed at the top of the screen like a sticky menu. It is really easy to add a menu this way. You can then add all your links inside this new menu.
Disable Mobile Template
Note If you have activated mobile view for your blog then you must first disable it by going to:
- Blogger > Template
- click the gear icon
- Select No. Show desktop template on mobile devices.
- Save
Add a Responsive Menu To Blogger
- Go To blogger > Template
- Backup your template
- Click Edit HTML
- Search for these lines or similar. These lines of code exist at the top section of your template
<b:if cond='data:blog.isMobile'>
<meta content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0' name='viewport'/>
<b:else/>
<meta content='width=1100' name='viewport'/>
</b:if>
Replace all the above code with our custom Meta ViewPort code:
<meta content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1' name='viewport'/>
<meta content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' http-equiv='Content-Type'/>
I have also included a UTF-8 character set for using some Special characters instead of images.
5. Now Search for </b:skin>. Click the black arrow to expand the code.
6. Paste the following Styles just above </b:skin>
/*-----Responsive Drop Down Menu by MBT ----*/
body {
margin: 0px;
}
#menu{
background: #50B7DC;
color: #FFF;
height: 40px;
border-bottom: 2px solid #DDD;
box-shadow: 1px 2px 9px #B1B1B1;
border-top: 2px solid #DDD;
}
#menu ul,#menu li{margin:0 auto;padding:0 0;list-style:none}
#menu ul{height:45px;width:1024px}
#menu li{float:left;display:inline;position:relative;font:bold 0.9em Arial;text-shadow: 1px 2px 4px #838383;}
#menu a{display: block;
line-height: 40px;
padding: 0 14px;
text-decoration: none;
color: #FFF;}
#menu li a:hover{
color: #E4E4E4;
-webkit-transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
-moz-transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
-ms-transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
-o-transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
background: #5FC6EB;
}
#menu input{display:none;margin:0 0;padding:0 0;width:80px;height:30px;opacity:0;cursor:pointer}
#menu label{font:bold 30px Arial;display:none;width:35px;height:36px;line-height:36px;text-align:center}
#menu label span{font-size:16px;position:absolute;left:35px}
#menu ul.menus{
height: auto;
overflow: hidden;
width: 170px;
background: #50B7DC;
position: absolute;
z-index: 99;
display: none;
}
#menu ul.menus li{display: block;
width: 100%;
font:normal 0.8em Arial;
text-transform: none;
text-shadow: none;
border-bottom: 1px dashed #31AFDB;}
#menu ul.menus a{
color: #FFF;
line-height: 35px;
}
#menu li:hover ul.menus{display:block}#menu ul.menus a:hover{
background: #5FC6EB;
color: #FFF;
-webkit-transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
-moz-transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
-ms-transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
-o-transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
transition: all .1s ease-in-out;
}@media screen and (max-width: 800px){
#menu{position:relative}
#menu ul{background:#111;position:absolute;top:100%;right:0;left:0;z-index:3;height:auto;display:none}
#menu ul.menus{width:100%;position:static;padding-left:20px}
#menu li{display:block;float:none;width:auto; font:normal 0.8em Arial;}
#menu input,#menu label{position:absolute;top:0;left:0;display:block}
#menu input{z-index:4}
#menu input:checked + label{color:white}
#menu input:checked ~ ul{display:block}}
Customization:
- To change the menu background edit:#50B7DC
- To change the background color on hover edit: #5FC6EB
7. Now search for <body> Just below it paste the follow code which will create the menu structure:
<nav id='menu'>
<input type='checkbox'/>
<label>≡<span>My Blogger Tricks</span></label>
<ul>
<li><a href='/'>Home</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>About</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Drop Down <font size='1'>▼</font></a>
<ul class='menus'>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 1</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 2</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 3</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 4</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 5</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 6</a></li></ul>
</li>
<li><a href='#'>Contact</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Drop Down <font size='1'>▼</font></a>
<ul class='menus'>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 1</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 2</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 3</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href='#'>Advertise</a></li>
</ul>
</nav>
Customization:
- Replace the text My Blogger Tricks with your blog title.
- To add spaces between words use the unicode  
- I am sure you know how to create new tabs but to create a tab for a drop down list use the following format:
Paste the following code below <ul> or above </ul> to create a drop down list:
<li><a href='#'>Drop Down <font size='1'>▼</font></a>
<ul class='menus'>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 1</a></li>
<li><a href='#'>Tab 2</a></li></ul>
</li>
The above menu will create only one drop down list and not multi-level drop down lists because it makes no sense to complicate the design layout for mobile devices. Keeping it simple is best.
8. finally save your template and you are all done!
Now play with your browser window and adjust its size manually to see it working just perfectly! :)
Need help?
In the above example, the Main Menu is automatically set to display:none when the screen size width is below or equal to 800px . I used checkboxes to introduces the toggle effect. So as soon as the screen size reaches 800px or further decreases, the CSS media queries detects it and automatically set the mode of the box to checked and apply the styles. This is an interesting technique that we utilized here which eliminated the need for JQuery toggle function.
I have used only two major break points and that is width:1024px for Desktop computer Screens and 800px for devices which include Tablets, ipads and smart phones. So the entire concept is made extremely easy. I am sure those who understood the above tutorial will find it really interesting to customize it further and add further elements to the menu like a responsive search box at right corner or a RSS Icon etc.
Please let me know if you want any help here. I hope this technique would further help developers to create more interesting blogger templates and contribute further to the blogosphere community. I would love to hear your feedback on this. Please let us know of your precious views so that we could improve it further if needed. Peace and blessings buddies :)
Thursday, 13 June 2013
Connect Twitter To Feedburner Directly without using App!
A few years ago, Google FeedBurner had a Socialize option that let people share their blog posts (RSS) directly on Twitter. But this service was depreciated, and people started using third-party apps such as twitterfeed instead. While these apps work fine, they leave you somewhat dependant upon them. Now though, it seems Google is throwing a new line out for Bloggers who'd like to share their RSS feeds to Twitter directly, because the Socialize option is coming back! This indeed marks another step forward for Google/Twitter Integration. Now, you can share your blog posts (RSS feeds) to Twitter without any third-party apps!
Remove third-party apps from Twitter
First of all, to avoid any redundancy, you have to first remove any auto-scheduling apps for Twitter. To do this, log into your Twitter account, and click on the gear icon on the top-right corner. Then click Settings. Now, from the left sidebar, click on the Apps tab.
Here, you will see all the Apps that you're using with your Twitter account. Next to each app is a Revoke Access button, which essentially deletes the app. Delete any scheduling apps you're using to auto-share your blog posts to Twitter, such as twitterfeed.
Share updates using Socialize
Sharing your updates on Twitter is now easier than ever. To use Socialize, follow these steps;
- Log into your FeedBurner account, and select the feed you want to share on Twitter.
- Click on the Publicize tab
- Click on Socialize from the left sidebar
- Click on Add a Twitter Account
- Authorize the app for your Twitter account, and you're all done!
Now, whenever you publish a new blog post, your FeedBurner will be automatically updated, and once that happens, the update will be immediately echoed on your Twitter account.
Got any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments below. Also tell us how you're sharing your blog updates on social medias like Twitter and Facebook. Cheers :)
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Google Highlights Common Smart Phone SEO Mistakes
The Mobile web is growing at a pretty rapid pace, and is becoming more and more significant, especially in terms of search traffic, because more and more people are now using their smartphones to Google things up. Since smartphones have become so powerful these days, there's no reason why they shouldn't experience the full richness of the web. Engaging smartphone users by doing mobile SEO is one way to increase your traffic. And in the near future, Google intends to penalize sites in search results that are misconfigured for mobile. Here are some of the mistakes people make in mobile SEO, and how to avoid them.
Faulty redirects
Mostly, webmasters have separate smartphone versions of webpages in addition to their desktop counterparts. When a smartphone user lands on a desktop page, he is usually redirected to the corresponding mobile version. But sometimes, these redirections might not go as planned, as described by the following scenarios.
- When no mobile version of a page is available, the user might be getting redirected to the homepage. This means the user has to do a lot of work, and isn't generally happy about it.
- Suppose you have a website where you can search and/or sort data, as is the case with product listings. Now, the URL parameters (e.g. www.example.com/search.php?product=13) for the desktop version might not be parsed properly, or at all by the mobile version, which means that smartphone users will not be able to search the content.
- You might have set up redirection checks for some mobile platforms, but not all. For example, you might have checked for Android and iOS, but missed out on BB, WP, Ubuntu etc.
Check out your website thoroughly, and see if none of these problems are occurring. If they are, then most probably, there was no equivalent mobile version of the desktop content. The best solution would be to just return the desktop version of your pages to smartphones, instead of redirecting them.
Smartphone-only errors
Sometimes, users are able to open a page on a desktop, but they get a 404 error when accessing the same page on a smartphone. Again, there can be various reasons.
- The page a user is looking for on mobile might not actually exist as a mobile version.
- If you recognize a user is visiting a desktop page from a mobile device and you have an equivalent smartphone-friendly page at a different URL, redirect them to that URL instead of serving a 404.
While these are only some of the mistakes, it is important to put yourself into the shoes of an ordinary smartphone user, and see the flaws in your website from that perspective. Hope you understand the problems associated with mobile SEO. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Cheers :)
Floating Social Media Widget With Mouse Hover Effect
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Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Common Link Disavow Mistakes You need to Avoid
In a blog post a while ago about removing bad links to your site, we discussed about the impact that low quality backlinks can have on your website, and how you should remove them to avoid Penguin penalties. But these links aren't always in your control, which is why Google came up with the Link Disavow tool. It is a great tool that can be used to inform Google to disregard some inbound links completely. But a lot of people keep on making mistakes with the Disavow tool. Here are some of the most common ones, and ways to avoid them.
Recommended: 5 Things to remember before Disavowing Links
Wrong file format/content
You have to submit a file to Google that contains all the URLs you want to disavow links from. This file should only be a plain text (.txt) file. No other file format (.doc, .xls) is supported. It can only be a simple text file with a .txt extension.
Your text file should only contain a list of URLs you want to disavow, separated by line breaks. So each line must contain only one URL. A line starting with a pound (#) sign is a comment, and is ignored by Google. You can also specify a URL by typing domain: followed by the URL of the page. Here's a sample text file;
# Contacted owner of spamdomain1.com on 7/1/2012 to
# ask for link removal but got no response
domain:spamdomain1.com
# Owner of spamdomain2.com removed most links, but missed these
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentA.html
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentB.html
http://www.spamdomain2.com/contentC.html
If your file fails to match the specified format, or if you have weird symbols and/or wrong syntax in the file, then it will be rejected, and the links will not be disavowed.
Domain disavowal
If you have a really bad backlink profile, say from a spammy forum, then it would be better to just root out the tree, rather than cutting off the individual branches. You might miss out on some URLs when trying to include each and every page linking to you from a single root domain.
To disavow a whole domain, append the domain: keyword before the URL of the domain. For example, domain:spamsite1.com. Do not use domain disavowal for individual page URLs.
Also, make sure that you get the syntax right. After the domain: don't start the URL with an http://, or even a www. Simply start with the domain name, for example, domain:spamsite1.com.
Comments
A lot of people tend to explain the situation they're in the form of comments in the text files they submit. That is really not necessary. No body will read those lines, so they'll just go to waste. You should write all those lines in your reconsideration request. When writing so many comment lines, there's a chance you might miss out a # sign, in which case the file will be considered as a 'bad' file.
Was this article helpful to you? How many of these mistakes were you making? Got any further questions? Please feel free to ask us in the comments below. We'll try to help. All the best :)
Monday, 10 June 2013
What's the Difference Between Moz Page Authority and Domain Authority?
Ever since the Yahoo Site Explorer shut down in 2011, internet marketers have been looking for a backlink analysis tool, which they found in the Moz Open Site Explorer. We've already seen how the trend is already sifting more towards Moz Domain Authority from Google's PageRank. Indeed, most SEO experts now also report on statistics from the Open Site Explorer (OSE), such as Domain Authority, Page Authority etc. So what are these metrics anyway, and what do they signify? More importantly, why should you start using OSE if you don't use it already? Let's take a closer look.
Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer (OSE) is a search engine that crawls, indexes, and keeps track of the backlinks to every website. It has trillions of URLs in its index, and each update aims at not only improving the speed and efficiency of the algorithm, but also to retain higher quality backlinks in the index while at the same time eliminating the lowest quality links, so that the index can be kept manageable as well as valuable at the same time.
OSE can be used to evaluate backlink data for upto four websites at the same time. For any single site, you can check the following metrics
- Domain Authority
- Page Authority
- Linking Root Domains
- Total Links
- Facebook Shares
- Facebook Likes
- Tweets
- +1s
(Note: You can check the link metrics for free on OSE. But for the social metrics, you have to become a Moz member)
One thing I like about OSE is that, for every backlink, you get to see the exact location of that link, and the title and Anchor text of that link. It will also tell you when a backlink is a nofollow link. That way, you can see where your links are coming from, where to get broken links or links without anchor text corrected, and so on. Furthermore, you can also see the Page Authority and Domain Authority for each of the incoming links to your site, so you can analyse trends and rate your most important backlinks.
Page Authority vs Domain Authority
Page Authority and Domain Authority are two of the most important metrics reported by the Open Site Explorer. Both are measured on a logarithmic scale of 0-100, which means that it'll be easier to go from 10 to 20, than to go from 80 to 90. These metrics are updated once or twice every month, a lot of SEO experts are using these metrics in their reports.
Domain Authority is a measure of how well a whole website will perform in search results. It is the probability of how well any arbitrarily picked webpage from a site will rank in SERPs. It is calculated based on a number of metrics, such as total links, linking root domains, MozTrust and MozRank etc, among other 40 signals. Although it can be used to monitor the strength of your site over time, a better usage would be to compare your site with other competitors, since OSE gets updated so frequently, and Moz takes more than 40 signals into account while computing the Domain Authority. So a score of 40 today isn't the same as a score of 40 an year ago, or an year from now - it changes!
Page Authority, on the other hand, measures the strength of an individual webpage. It is also calculated on the basis of MozRank and MozTrust, since they vary from page to page as well. The DA stays the same throughout the website (like Google PageRank), whereas the PA for each page varies.
So, what do you think about thee metrics? Do you employ them when evaluating your site? Or do you still prefer Google PageRank and Alexa Rank over them? Leave your responses in the comments section below. Cheers :)
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