Saturday, 29 June 2013

How To Get People To Buy Stuff from Your Blog

How To Get People To Buy Stuff from Your Blog
If your blog relies on advertising to earn money, chances are you haven't quit your day job. While advertising can bring in some money, the average blog earns enough to pay the hosting bill and little else. The blogs that do earn big money from advertising are the ones with massive traffic, multiple million unique visitors per day.

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

stop using zemantaRecently 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.

zemanta nofollow option

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!



Rich Income Ways blog LaunchIts 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:


  1. Students

  2. Housewives

  3. Jobless

  4. 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:


  1. Yusra Adil: Our New content Writer

  2. Ahmed Nasir: Our Senior Web Developer


Our existing employees include:


  1. Qasim Zaib - Senior Content Writer & My emergency Plug!

  2. Nida Zaidi -  Senior Content Writer & Marketer

  3. 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

Google answers common reconsideration request questions
As Google continually tries to rid the web of spam and improve a user's search experience, many webmasters ultimately feel the brunt of the changes being made, and a lot of backlink-related issues arise at that point. Many people then rush off to submitting their reconsideration requests because they assume they've been penalized for no reason at all. To help webmasters save their time and avoid any inconveniences, Google has answered some FAQs regarding some of the most common backlink and reconsideration request-related problems problems faced by webmasters.



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

Adsense Scorecard optimization tipsAfter an interesting Hangout with AdSense Folks on 18th June at Google+, Susan Wojcicki announced about an interesting new feature called Publisher Scorecard that has been added to all AdSense accounts and the scorecard summary chart can be seen under the Home Tab. Scorecard is a tool that gives greater insights to Publishers to compare how well their Ad settings, Website load time and content is performing compared to other Publishers using AdSense as the contextual Ad network. It displays a summary of three important categories which includes Revenue Optimization, Site Health and Google+ button Integration. Each category is scored on a scale of 1-5 blue dots that indicate your performance rank or level. In today's tutorial we will learn every basic detail of this great scoring tool and will learn how to optimize our websites and blogs to increase the overall AdSense earning. Lets jump straight to this fun ride and make better money with AdSense!

What are the Scorecard Categories?

Adsense 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:
 
(a) Using Recommended Ad formats
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:
Adsense best Ad Locations
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.
 
 
(b) Enabling both Text and Image Ads on this formats.
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:
 

text and image ads in adsense
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 scorecard Excellent! No need to make any changes to this category.
improvements needed - scorecard Improvements suggested. You are advised to make some further improvements to this item.
needs improvement - scorecard 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
increase in blue dots - scorecard This category�s score has increased by one or more blue dots up to four blue dots.
decrease in blue dots - scorecard This category�s score has drop down by one or more blue dots down to three blue dots.
item score improvement This item�s score has gone up from �Needs improvement� to �Improvements suggested�.
item score gone down 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

top10 Popular Nigerian Bloggers Blogging is popular business in Nigeria, especially now that a lot of people have come to realize the great potential it holds for them. Bloggers now take the business of blogging as a fulltime business, and they are making a lot of money just like their counterparts in the rest parts of the world. With an estimated population size of 160 Million people and over 60 million internet users, you can rest assured that bloggers in Nigeria enjoy good traffic to their sites.

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

Don Caprio - Nigerian popular bloggerDon Caprio is one of the top 10 popular bloggers in Nigeria � 2013. He is the owner of DonCaprio which has become a trade name in the Nigerian blogging industry. Don Caprio is a leading blogger as well a web designer who has helped to reposition so many poorly designed blogs in Nigeria. Don Caprio�s blog currently has a Google PR3, Alexa 18,183; Domain authority of 47, Subscriber base of over 10,000 and several thousands of daily pageviews. This blog is so loved by the youths in Nigeria because of the useful information it provides in blogging, coding, tech and blogging tips. Don is worth his onions and surely deserves his rating.

 


UPDATE: The listing below was removed to avoid misinformation.
 Chiamaka Okoye is the brain behind the success of jobberman, the number 1 job website in Nigeria. Okoye is a proficient blogger with great blogging knowledge, accuracy of facts and integrity. She has been able to move this blog to an enviable height. Currently, jobberman enjoys Google PR � 5, Alexa rank � 7,650; Domain authority of 48, Traffic - Over 3.6M page views and over 500,000 Unique visits monthly, Subscriber base - Over 750,000 Subscribers.
The blog has content that covers career advice and tips for Job-seekers, recruiting tips for Employers, trends across industries and news on scholarships for Nigerians. Her Blog was ranked 1st in the Nigerian Bloggers' award in 2012 as best Business/Career Blog both by Judges' choice and popular vote. It is waxing stronger even in 2013. This is a great feat by a female blogger, no doubt.

2. Loy Okezie

Loy Okezie - Famous Nigerian Blogger 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 - Popular blogger nigeria 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 - popular blogger Nigeria 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 - Rich Nigerian Blogger 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 - Top Nigerian blogger
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 - Nigerian Blog owner 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 - Popular blog in Nigeria 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.
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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



Check Backlinks with Google Analytics

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.



What can you do with backlink analysis?




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.



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.



Time period





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?