What is a Backlink and How to Build One Many people do not understand what is a backlink. The World Wide Web is an enormous place where millions of new pages are added every day. If you are one of the many adding contents on the internet, you have to find a way to stand out. After all, to generate an audience base and followers, your content needs to be accessible and visible. So how can one go about it? One of the techniques that you can use to get more eyeballs is by creating ‘backlinks’. What is a Backlink? Before going into the explanation of backlinks, let’s understand how the concept came into existence. One can find numerous web pages and directories online. Most webpages try to establish a connection with other pages in order to draw audience traffic. In other words, different pages ‘converse’ with each other in order to draw the attention of the audience. This happens when one website provides a link to another website. Hope you understood what is a backlink. Consider this example: A fashion brand XYZ has uploaded an article about fashion trends for Summer 2020. In the article, one will find a lot of information on the kind of apparels that trend during the season. Now, you have a website where you write articles on the latest trends of fashion and recently, you wrote a blog on what colours remain trendy during the summer season. In short, your article is an extension of XYZ’s article. If such is the case, the article on XYZ’s website can provide a link to your blog, suggesting its audiences to head over to your article to know more about trending colours during the summer season. In this scenario, you have a backlink from XYZ’s website. Why are Backlinks Important? As explained above, backlinks help direct traffic to your website from other websites. If you have a backlink from another website, audiences find it easier to discover your webpage and read your content. This means that websites can direct audiences to other websites where they can find more information. In a way, backlinking is a way for websites to recommend other websites. And this is extremely important for visibility. Based on the number and quality of backlinks, Google and other search engines decide whether your page should be shown to other people. This means that higher the backlinks and better the quality, greater the chances for your webpage to rank higher on ‘Search Engine Result Page’ or SERPs. So How Do You Generate Backlinks? Here’s the thing about backlinks. They only work to your advantage if they come from a website with good ‘Domain Authority’. This means that you have to carefully choose the backlinks that connect your website. Some of the ways of getting good backlinks are: Creating Great Content: Any content that you create should add value, remain useful and relevant. Only then other websites will be willing to provide a backlink to your page. Infographics, listicles, video-embedded blogs etc. have a higher chance of getting good quality backlinks Building Backlinks: Reach out to website owners with a proposition of linking your pages to theirs. You can also participate in forums and by leaving a comment, replying to comments, you can create a backlink to your page. Find pages relevant to your field and create content that contributes additional value and information and then ask those pages to provide a link of your page. Fixing Broken Links: There are several broken links on the website (Error: 404 Not found!). You can fix the links and then ask the webpages to connect to your link instead of the broken links. There are several other techniques to get great backlinks for your website. We shall discuss this in more detail in the next article.
Learn YouTube Marketing
The main purpose of Google Ads is that it brings in new customers or leads through search ads, display network ads, and YouTube ads. Quality Score is a factor crucial for running a successful Google ads campaign. There are three main factors determining the Quality score: Ad campaign’s landing pageExpected CTR (Click-through rate)Ad relevance Types of advertising on Google ads: Display adsVideo adsSearch adsApp ads Display ads Display is one of the popular forms of advertising. It is shown as text or banner ads which can show up on Gmail and various websites within the display network. These type of ads are commonly used for remarketing to bring back site visitors who didn’t convert. Search ads The search ads network is the most popular among the other ads. Search network ads show up as a text ad for a given Google search. The search network works by targeting specific keywords that we want to show up for, we bid on them to show up higher in SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Video ads Video ads allows us to create a video ad that shows up on YouTube videos. App ads The app ads allow us to advertise across the entire Google network, mostly on popular Google network based applications. Implementing Google Shopping: Having an e-commerce website allows us to advertise products directly on Google through our online store. YouTube Advertising: YouTube ads are created from Google Ads. Any Google ad should contain 3 main segments for an ad to run. 1. Campaign 2. Ad groups 3. Ads So, it is similar with YouTube. We start by creating a new campaign. For video campaigns we can select some goals to begin with or we can go for a custom campaign. Goals available for Video campaigns: SalesLeadsWebsite TrafficProduct & Brand considerationBrand awareness and reach YouTube Video Ad formats : 1. True View ads 2. Non-skippable video ads 3. Bumper ads True View ads: True View In-Stream ads: These ads play during YouTube videos, and they can also play in other places in Google’s display network, like apps or games. True View Discovery ads: Discovery ads are like display ads—in fact, they even used to be called in-display ads. These are the recommended videos that pop up on the YouTube homepage, or as recommended/related videos on the search page. Non-skippable video ads: Non skippable ads can be annoying but they are here to serve a purpose. It should be used only when you want to tell a clear and precise message or promote a product as they run only for 20 seconds. Two types are there in these ads, they are Pre-roll ads which appear before a video plays. Mid-roll ads which appear at the midpoint of 10 minute-or-longer videos. Bumper Ads: Bumper ads are the more tolerable version of non-skippable ads, lasting six seconds at most. They appear at the end of YouTube videos, and are paid for on a CPM(Cost per mille or cost per thousand) basis. Because they’re short, bumper ads are ideal for targeting mobile users. Setting up Campaign: Here, after creating a new campaign we can select Video as campaign type. Then the next process is to set campaign goal and subtype. Naming the campaign and setting up the budget is the next step. Locations and network – This is to setup the right locations for the ad to show and networks where you want your ad to appear. Mention the target audience’s language and name the ad group. Next comes the bid amount, which you can set according to the budget. Audience Targeting options: Demographics: The standard demographic filters available are age, gender identity, parental status, and household income. We are also choose detailed demographics like marital status, education and home ownership. Interests: Affinity audiences It’s similar to interests targeting, but casts a wider net. Affinity audiences include groups like people interested in PC gaming, or people who collect dolls. Custom affinity audiences This builds on affinity audiences, offering more specific targeting. Instead of people who like cooking, custom affinity audiences might help you target people who frequently search for barbecue equipment. Life events People’s purchasing habits and brand preferences change when they reach certain milestones, like graduating from college, getting married, or having a baby. Targeting your audience by life event allows you to hone in on these important moments and market accordingly. In-market audiences Target your YouTube ads to people searching for products like yours. Google determines whether someone’s “in-market” for a product or service based on ad click history, conversions, search history and how often someone’s searching specific terms. Custom intent audiences Target individuals whose search terms indicate they are on the verge of making a purchase. Placement targeting This means choosing to place your ads on unique channels, videos, apps, websites, or placements within websites (such as YouTube channels, and sites on the Display Network.) Topics Target your video ads to reach a range of videos, channels, and sites relevant to topics of your choosing. Keyword targeting Target people based on their search terms. For example, if you sell plant food, you might target people asking Google why their plants aren’t thriving. Device Target specifically by screen (desktop/mobile/smart TVs). Setting video campaign live: Select the YouTube video you’ve uploaded for this campaign.Select your ad format (In-Stream or Discovery).Click Save and Continue. Now the campaign is set and we can track all the metrics in the overview page or google ads home as it has a lot of options to track metrics.
Facebook Ad Campaign – What is it?
The Facebook Ad Campaign can be used to build a brand online using various proven digital marketing technologies.
6 simple steps to do on-page optimisation
On-Page optimisation or On-Page SEO On-page optimisation in plain terms is nothing but page and content optimisation. On-Page optimisation for a page is necessary as it takes care of two main factors. One is to enhance a website’s search engine rankings, so that would gain organic traffic. Besides producing engaging and relevant content, other factors in On-Page SEO are optimising headlines, HTML tags, and images. Google Google has its own set of algorithms which identifies what people are searching for. It also checks whether websites are meeting the user needs in the form of content, information, navigation, etc. Google uses a structure called E-A-T, meaning Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness to rate the websites. It is a major factor playing a role in organic search results. Verify the below simple 6 steps are done to have right on-page optimisation done. 1. Title Tag Title tags are HTML tags that exist at the head section of each webpage. It is very significant, as it tells people what information is present on a webpage. It is a clickable link and it should follow a format. It should contain the appropriate primary keyword and a secondary or long-tail keyword. The number of characters is also important as 55-60 characters are ideal. 2. Meta Description Meta descriptions are the description of the page, which tells what the page is about. They are displayed under the title of the page in SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page). Meta descriptions prove helpful in increasing CTR’s (Click Through Rates) as it gives a glance at what content is there on a website. Meta description characters are essential, and an ideal meta description has 150-160 characters. 3. Headlines Giving headlines for a blog post may seem simple, but it makes a difference. Giving the right headline with keywords make people click on it. It entertains them to read your whole blog. Header Tags They are the HTML tags used to identify the headings and subheadings in your content. They differentiate the headings and subheadings from the paragraphs. They are essential as they make the content easier to read for the audience. 4. Image Optimisation Image on-page optimisation is compressing the images, as websites with large image files take time to load. Image alt text is another factor in on-page optimisation. This is to describe images so that search engines will find it easier to understand. It also aids in the image to show up on google image search. 5. Inbound Linking This is an internal linking process within the website. Inbound linking is linking to another blog post or some other webpage within one website. This is to help the visitors understand any content better and aid site navigation. Inbound linking is one of the ranking factors for on-page optimisation. 6. Outbound Linking Outbound links are providing relevant links to some other website from a parent website is essential while doing on-page optimisation. It is to give credit to other good content and also helping the audience with more information. This, in turn, helps link exchange in the future. Including a no-follow link and domain authority of the linking page matters a lot here. Other factors like engaging the users, keyword placing, Content Audit, providing high-quality content without keyword stuffing, having a good readability score, and not involving black hat techniques are very essential for the whole On-Page optimisation to work.
Simple things to improve the readability of content.
How to improve the readability of content Creating content and reaching the target audience is a whole process. It is like joining the dots and reaching the end of a puzzle. Many factors impact the content we write, and one major factor is readability. Readability is how easily a text can be read and understood without difficulty. Here, let’s look at some points to improve the readability of content. Use short sentences Shorter sentences give readers time to understand what we intend to tell them. Longer sentences often confuse people, it takes time to process, and they end up not reading or losing interest in the content. Use short and simple words. Simple words used in content always have an advantage, as they keep the audience glued and engaged. While writing, always try to limit the usage of difficult words. Some people will be able to understand it, but the majority of people prefer a more simple language. With a slight adjustment, a long word can be made short. For example, the words ‘moreover’ and ‘additionally’ can become ‘also’ which conveys the same meaning. Use friendly fonts When conveying a message through content, one should aim to be a delivery person, not an artist. In plain terms, using fancy fonts won’t appeal to the audience, and it further complicates reading. Using fonts like Times New Roman and Arial will do the job instead. Paragraphs and Headings Make sure to write clear paragraphs, stuffing too much information in a paragraph can go wrong. Try to convey the information or message in that paragraph and move onto the next one. Shorter paragraphs with commas and line spacing will work and gives time for people to read it. Proper heading for the content is a must, it will be the starting point to get people’s attention. Then, adding subheadings is equally important, as they can provide the audience with an idea of what the content is, and it makes for easier reading. Add Visuals Visuals play an important role in content marketing. An all-text article or blog can become boring, and adding the right images to support the writing will be a useful plus. The images present can bring a fresh feel to the content. Also, when you are including any facts or numbers, try to present them in Infographics. Infographics and images improve the content structure and make the content more readable. Avoid using Passive voice The readability of the content is affected when you use passive voice. For example, Mark changed the flat tyre (active voice) The flat tyre was changed by Mark (passive voice) The passive voice places the focus on the verb (“changed”) rather than the subject (“Mark”). The subject is important in the content and active voice is bold and direct. Passive voice creates unnecessary long sentences, and it is better to avoid using them. Useful Tools If you are looking to improve, and want to make your content more readable, investing time in some useful tools will do a world of good for your writing. Tools like Hemingway Editor and Grammarly help you with the grammar, your readability score and they point out the errors in writing. Using these apps will surely improve the readability and make your writing crisp and clear. Some other points like using transition words like similarly and but will aid in connecting the sentences and improves the writing flow. Sticking to the point or topic and not deviating from it will also be useful to engage people and improve readability. Including the right keywords and Content readability also influences the search rankings in one way or another. Improving your content readability not only enhances the audience’s reading experience, it also proves helpful to the overall SEO as well. With good practice and these tips, you can take your content to the next level. Some more tips: Stick to commonly used words. Keep it simple. Bear in mind not everyone who’s reading has that Master’s degree you might. Don’t make people look up a dictionary if it’s material meant to promote your business. As a thumb rule, an eighth grader should be able to understand your written content.Say what you want in the shortest way possible. That’s it.Avoid flowery/ornamental adjectives and adverbs. Don’t show off. It’s fine in a thesis, not for promotional material or anything that you’re hoping will increase footfall.Flow into the topic like you would in a conversation with another human being. You don’t just jump from one unrelated thing to another do you, in a conversation? Same rule here. Introduce a subject you want to write about, then follow a logical sequence covering all the points you want mentioned and sum it up or wrap the conversation with a brief concluding summary at the end. Break into different paragraphs just like you would take a pause when you talk. Use headers and subheadings judiciously. Remember some lazy people just read the ‘bold text.’ Write in active voice, never passive.Try to rouse one strong emotion through your writing and/or pictures. It could be joy, humour, pride, a sense of belonging, etc. It’s important to make that emotional connect with your reader to move them into doing what you want them to.Check grammar, spelling, spacing, proper usage of the parts of speech, punctuation. Don’t be that person who writes: “She finds inspiration in cooking her family and dog.”
Innovator’s mindset
INNOVATORS The capacity of human mind is massive with millions of neurons and sensitive parts. According to research the brain has more connections that the entire stars in the galaxy. Hence imagine what could be its capabilities with billion GB memory and fast information transfer within it. It is a supercomputer on its own. However, we haven’t discovered its fullest capacity yet. Even though we use only a part of our brains capacity we can achieve so much. The common question that arises in every individual’s mind is how can we use it well? Well the answer is innovation. Every discovery is an innovation of something that has existed. What makes it innovative is the efficiency and performance of the innovation. Innovation is nothing but building something more efficient and easier than the existing product. Innovation makes us stand out from the crowd. That’s how Steve Jobs and Elon Musk became biggest innovators of our society. Let’s understand this with an example. Imagine a smooth road that recently got blocked by a big boulder. The vehicles going that way were obstructed because of this boulder. Generic people showed generic reaction of complaining and taking a rough route around the boulder. This route was neither smooth nor consumed less fuel. However, nobody thought of a better solution until one day when a man arrived and started to break the rock into bits. People ridiculed him for being dumb trying to break the boulder painstakingly. The others were however continuing the same route that was bumpy and long. After few days he restored the road to its glory and set up a toll booth. He demanded any vehicle passing by to pay toll for the shorter smoother road. So, people now started to pay him which made him an entrepreneur and an innovator. The basic oxygen for innovation is finding a problem and bring the solution. People wanted to talk to each other instantly all over the world but couldn’t find a way other than phones. So Facebook was invented. People wanted to get food at their doorstep rather than waiting at hotels swiggy, Zomato etc came in. People wanted to buy stuffs easily and get it delivered at home, amazon was invented. Just like the man in the story everyone could solve one problem in the society and become innovators in the future. Follow this and you could be on articles and magazines featuring innovators too.
The word passion baffles many.
As a kid we all would have loved to do certain activities such as driving with dad or helping mom. And at school too we would have shown interest in different activities. We would have been good at some or we would have had a natural flare for them. Yet the most common question asked whether it is a child or a grown-up adult in the interview panel is “what is your passion?”. What is this word so common yet so complex to give an answer? It a word that baffles our own mind. It is however the most misunderstood word in the vocabulary called life. Passion is something that you love from every inch of your soul. It sparks something inside of you each time you do it or hear about it. It has a deep emotional connect with you. That’s why a person with passion achieves the crown in his field. Passion can be on anything and not on just sports or studying. It has taken different forms and impact on different people. For instance the passion of a voyager for travel made him find new worlds, the passion of a warrior towards conquest made him conquer many nations, the passion to explore the space made man land on moon and come up with technologies and inventions. Well passion comes naturally like love at first sight and it cannot be attained or acquired. Its simply a fiery feeling that drives us to do more of what we love each day. Like the Thomas Hawkins poem. “There is a road laid out before me I know not where it goes for its path is never shown to me where it ends nobody knows” I wasn’t a topper nor a backbencher but an average student till 8th grade. This really intimidated my parents and they were worried about my future. Just when one day there was a function at my house and nearly 130 guests attended the function. One thing that struck me was that there were completely two classes of humans in the gathering. One part of the people was dressed decently, spoke well and had a good appeal. These people were the tiny part of my village who studied and got into professional lifestyle. The other part were the typical people from village and most of them were farmers. The clear line between the educated and the others made me realise how important education is. Thereafter I focused on my studies and improved well. It helped me get high scores in the board exams and I got the opportunity of studying engineering. There too the flare in me paved way for good grades and skill development making me the first in college. For me passion at that time was studying and getting high scores. Similarly, many of you would have immense joy and talent in certain fields. Find your passion and work hard with determination to conquer your flare.
Why does website need a sitemap?
Importance of a Sitemap What is a sitemap? A sitemap is a file that list all the webpages on your website. Sitemaps can be divided into two categories. Sitemap for crawlers and the sitemap for visitors. Sitemap for visitors (html sitemaps) Sitemap for visitors/html sitemap is a page that allows visitors to see the layout of your pages and posts in one location. Some of these sitemaps include all pages, but you can limit it to just your top level pages. Excerpt from each page can also be included in the visual sitemap, giving your visitors an idea of the content contained on each of the page. An added bonus to a html sitemap is that is allows for all the pages you add to the sitemap to have internal links to each of your pages, making it easier for spiders and crawlers to see associations with your content. Sitemap for crawlers (xml sitemaps) Sitemaps for crawlers/xml sitemap are files created to tell search engines, like Google and Bing, about the pages on your website and how they are organized. Crawlers are able to read these files and crawl your site thoroughly. These sitemaps can contain valuable metadata associated with your site’s pages. Metadata allows the bot to know information like when the page was last updated, how often each page is updated and the importance of the page relative to other pages on your site. Metadata can also be used to give information about specific types of content on your pages, including mobile view, images, and video. These types of sitemaps are intended to be submitted to the search engines through google search engine console or analytics account. These type of sitemaps are limited to 10MB and 50,000urls. If you have a site larger than this, you can break your sitemap up into smaller files and include a sitemap index file with your submission of the sitemap to search engines. Why you need a sitemap? Sitemaps are not required but are highly recommended for all websites. A sitemap allows the crawlers of your site to get to all areas of your website no matter the size. This helps with Search Engine Optimization because it makes it easier for search engines to find all the content on your website. Sitemaps are especially important for new websites, very large sites, or sites with large archives. For new websites, there are very few external links coming into your site, so crawlers may have a hard time finding all of the pages on your site. Having a sitemap for the website will eliminate such problems. Benefits of having a sitemap XML sitemaps help search engines understand what you would like to index on your website and prioritize the crawling process. If your site has a deep directory structure, a sitemap will act like a guide for search engines so they don’t miss valuable content. If it’s a brand new site, adding a sitemap will be a good way to let search robots and the whole world know about it and index it accordingly. Sitemaps help you control indexing of certain pages in Google Search Console. An XML sitemap is your legal helper in confirming your content rights as it mentions the page publication and update time.
Why robots.txt is so important for search engines?
Robots.txt is a text file used by websites used to communicate with the web crawlers and other web robots. The standard specifies how to inform the web crawlers about which pages of the website should be crawled and which part of the websites should not be crawled. Most of the search engines recognise and obey robots.txt requests. . Basic format: User-agent: [user-agent name] Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled] Importance of robots.txt Google can usually find and index all of the important pages on your site. And they will not index pages that are not important or duplicate versions of other pages. However, there are 3 main reasons that you’d want to use a robots.txt file. Block Non-Public Pages: Sometimes you have pages on your site that you don’t want it to be indexed. For example, you might have a staging version of a page. Or a login page. These pages need to exist. But you don’t want random people landing on them. This is a case where you’d use robots.txt to block these pages from search engine crawlers and bots. Maximize Crawl Budget: If you’re having a tough time getting all of your pages indexed, you might have a crawl budget problem. By blocking unimportant pages with robots.txt, Googlebot can spend more of your crawl budget on the pages that actually matter. Prevent Indexing of Resources: Using meta directives can work just as well as robots.txt for preventing pages from getting indexed. However, meta directives don’t work well for multimedia resources, like PDFs and images. Best Practices to create a robots.txt file Since it is a text file, you can create a robots.txt file using a notepad. The format for creating robots.txt file will be the same in every case. User-agent: X Disallow: Y User-agent is the specific bot and everything that comes after “disallow” are pages or sections that you want to block. For example: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /images This rule would tell Googlebot not to index the image folder of your website. You can also use an asterisk (*) to speak to any and all bots that stop by your website. For example: User-agent: * Disallow: /images The “*” tells all spiders to NOT crawl your images folder. Search engine has two main jobs, crawling the webpages to discover the content and indexing the content for the purpose of serving the content to users whenever they are searching for the information. To crawl sites, search engines follow links to get from one site to another — ultimately, crawling across many billions of links and websites. This crawling behavior is sometimes known as spidering. After arriving at a website but before spidering it, the search crawler will look for a robots.txt file. If it finds one, the crawler will read that file first before continuing through the page. Because the robots.txt file contains information about how the search engine should crawl, the information found there will instruct further crawler action on this particular site. If the robots.txt file does notcontain any directives that disallow a user-agent’s activity (or if the site doesn’t have a robots.txt file), it will proceed to crawl other information on the site. Things to remember There are certain factors one should always remember before adding robots.txt file. In order to be found, a robots.txt file must be placed in a website’s top-level directory. Robots.txt is case sensitive: the file must be named “robots.txt”. Some robots may choose to ignore your robots.txt file. This is especially common with fraud crawlers like malware robots or email address scrapers. To make robots.txt file publicly available, add /robots.txt to the end of any root domain to see that website’s directives. This means that anyone can see what pages you do or don’t want to be crawled, so don’t use them to hide private user information. Each subdomain on a root domain uses separate robots.txt files. This means that both blog.example.com and example.com should have their own robots.txt files (blog.example.com/robots.txt and example.com/robots.txt). It’s generally a best practice to indicate the location of any sitemaps associated with this domain at the bottom of the robots.txt file. Common language (terms) of robots.txt User agent: The specific web crawler to which you’re giving crawl instructions Disallow: This is the command used to tell a user-agent not to crawl particular URL. Only one “Disallow:” line is allowed for each URL. Allow: This function is only applicable for googlebot, the command to tell googlebot it can access a page or subfolder even though its parent page or subfolder may be disallowed. Crawl-delay: How many seconds a crawler should wait before loading and crawling page content? Note that Googlebot does not acknowledge this command, but crawl rate can be set in Google Search Console. Sitemap: Used to call out the location of any XML sitemaps associated with this URL. Note this command is only supported by Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Social Media Impact on Google Search Results
Social Media Impact on Google Search Results is huge. Content that ranks well on Google often also has a lot of shares, retweets, and likes.