6 Bad Link-Building Habits You Must Know About and Break Immediately

Presently, link building is more than just about the link. It is about integrating a very strong strategy to get links from a relevant and quality site that drives traffic and sales. This demands following certain rules and most importantly, breaking certain bad habits.

Here are some bad link building habits that you know about and break in order to benefit from it:

1. No Follow Up

Most people do not focus on following up. There are some people who may respond only second or third try. According to a research, it has been proven that around 20 per cent of links were developed due to dedicated following up with webmasters. One of the best ways is to review communication thread for each link built. You must send a good number of follow-up emails.

2. Sole Focus on PageRank

PageRank is widely used by Google for measuring a value of a page. As a link builder, most people aim towards finding pages with a high value (or PageRank) in order to link back to your site. However, the focus should on website overall in spite of the PageRank. You must consider several things while evaluating a website. This should include whether the website is reputable, reputation of authors, good incoming links towards the site, positive web presence and quality of web content.

3. Not Vetting Website Prior to Contact

In the event you send an email to a webmaster who is ready to link, make sure you take a look at the website for the second time. There are times, when despite decent metrics, the writing is poor and the entire website looks paid. The website may also comprise of hacked pages which are no longer indexed by Google. So if you get an affirmative response to link, check the site carefully and disapprove if you find the website inappropriate.

4. No Knowledge about FTC And Google Guidelines

There is a difference between knowing and following FTC and Google guidelines. It is very important that you are aware of them. This will help you get maximum benefits of link building.

5. No Answers to Webmasters’ Queries

It is crucial to know and assess a webmaster's reaction to linking. In case, you find them hesitant, uncomfortable or worried about linking despite everything being 'nofollowed' and 'disclosed', strictly avoid pushing them to do what you want. Strictly avoid lying to them or hiding the truth. Do not pretend nothing bad could happen in the future.

6. Not Optimizing Anchor Text

A very crucial aspect of link building is to control the anchor text. If you don’t know how to optimize your anchor text, then strictly avoid indulging in any link building activity. Using appropriate anchor text will allow your website to get to the top of the search engine results at least 20 faster as compared to when you do not use it.
Breaking the above mentioned bad habits will allow you to get maximum benefits of link building strategy you integrate.

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4 Effective Social Media Steps For Blog Promotion

Creating a social media marketing plan is very effective. However, it is important to make efforts towards making it effective. Here, you must focus on planning each post, reply, like, and comment to make it very effective for your business goals. This may sound a bit complex, but offers excellent results in the long run. All you need to do is take some time from your busy schedule and create a comprehensive social media strategy. Success will follow naturally.

Here are 4 dynamic social media marketing plan steps to follow and ensure successful blog promotion:

Step 1: Share Content

Focus on sharing your content literally everywhere. Start with personalizing your posts and making them informal. Experts recommend paraphrasing the title of the article. You may pick a custom image for your post to make it more relevant to the readership. This helps appeal better to the readers and inspire them to share your content more and expose it to a larger audience. You must also focus on searching for other communities in your niche. The members may find your posts useful and share them further.

Step 2: Share Posts Regularly

You must plan a consistent schedule which will be used to share your posts. Stick to this schedule come what may. There are many social media users who have their feeds full at all times without fail. Hence, there are chances that they will not wait patiently for your posts. In fact, they might just forget about you. Staying dead for over a week may fail to make an impression. Have your posts scheduled and published automatically. The idea is to define your target audience on the social media. Thereafter, you may use various tools such as Facebook Insights. This helps you to determine the precise times of day when your audience is the most active online to be able to schedule social media posts around those times.

Step 3: Improve Interaction Rate

Social media are originally intended for establishing interaction. So look through the various comments and answer as many as you can. In case, you cannot answer all of them, simply apologize. Remember that it is not necessary that all of your posts require having a link to a blog post attached to them. You may achieve a huge number of other objectives with your social media. For instance, you may directly or indirectly ask your audience for feedback. Write something that inspires a lively discussion in the comments. Try using surveys with multiple choice. These are a good idea. People may simply give a single click to pick an answer. This will contribute to the desired results. When it comes to authors of valuable comments, you must mention them in your next post and say that their comments inspired you. This will make them feel appreciated and engaged.

Step 4: Don't Restrict

Social media is all about sharing and communicating. Hence, it is certainly a wonderful idea to get in touch with other bloggers in your niche. You must also establish correspondence with them on a regular basis, and exchange ideas. Focus on reading their posts. You may find that some of these bloggers have great impressive things to offer. These are worthy of attention. In such case, don't be shy to share such posts with your audience. Other bloggers may find some of your posts interesting and worth sharing. They will share your content with their subscribers and have your blog exposed to a larger audience. This is beneficial for your blog and business.

To Sum Up

Social media ensure some incredibly dynamic tools to draw more number of target audience to your blog. All you need to do is become aware of the hacks to promote your blog in the social media. These are super effective and leave ample opportunity to experiment.

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4 Easy Steps To Build A Guest Posting Strategy That Rocks

Guest posting is one of the most useful strategies to attract target audience to your website. However, one needs to know what exactly it is, how to use it and what to do in order to get desired results. Introducing new unique and effective strategies is very important. Here are 4 easy yet very effective steps to build a guest posting strategy that offers desired results:

Step 1: Locating Viable Targets for Guest Blogging

Prior to starting a guest posting campaign, it is crucial to make sure that your efforts pay off at the end. You must locate viable targets for guest posting. Here, simply focus on blogs and resources that backlinks and work towards boosting the authority of your website. It will also attract traffic and potential clients.

It is important to avoid going around randomly and offering to write for different blogs. You must focus on considering whether they accept posts, what their niche is, and whether they are an authority in their field. Make sure you find blogs that accept guest posts and suit your niche. This can be done in various ways, such as Google search strings, already existing target lists (sorted by niche), comments on the blog, author bios relevant to your niche, and many others.

Step 2: Reach Out

There are times when a guest posts appear once someone reaches out to you and enquires about it. However, this doesn't mean you need to sit in one place and wait for somebody to come. This is lazy! The wait will be longer than you had imagined. This clearly indicates you require reaching out to various bloggers, administrators and webmasters on your own. Getting actively engaged in networking or promoting your own brand is some of the best efforts in the right direction.

Here's how you can actively reach out to the bloggers you have chosen:

Try and interact with the blog. This will help them know about you.
Make sure you clearly define the topic of the blog and the type of content published.
Assess the style of the blog.
You need to brainstorm the ideas and titles for your posts.
Write a guest post.

Step 3: Sales Pitch is Important

You require being honest with yourself. This clearly means once you reach out to a blog and ask them to publish your post, you need them. And the harsh truth is - they can do fairly well without you! So if you are dealing with big shot authority blogs, be prepared to face some serious issues related to sales resistance.

The idea is to approach each blog individually. You must focus on being respectful yet very confident. Emphasise your letters on what your blogger you are talking to requires, not what you need. Last but not the least, keep it very short and snappy.

Step 4: Promote Your Posts

Your job is not done once the post is published. In fact, the real work starts the moment it gets published. All of your efforts should be directed towards squeezing as much out of it as possible. This will help benefit you personally and boost your standing with blogger. Active promotion of posts on social media will help you gain several other social shares and comments.

Here, it is crucial that you draw traffic towards your guest post from:

- Your own blog
- Your social media accounts

You need to promote the post via answering comments. Here, you must focus on doing everything that depicts you as an efficient guest blogger. Guest posting is also considered as one of the major promotion strategy. Experts in the blogging field find it the best way to draw traffic. The more you understand the process and its importance, the more you will be able to derive benefits from it. 

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15 Great WordPress Plugins

If you wish your blog to be found by search engines or to make the content more shareable, it is important that you have the best WordPress plugins. Here is a list of 15 best WordPress plugins that keep your blog healthy and prevents your website from getting hacked, helps everything run smoothly and efficiently, and keep spammers at bay.

1. W3 Total Cache

This amazing WordPress plugin is designed in a way to increase the speed of page load on WordPress sites. It boosts overall experience of visitors. The plugin also allows for increasing server performance via minimizing download times.

2. BackupBuddy

is the easiest and most beginner friendly WordPress backup and migration plugin. It allows you to quickly setup automatic backup schedule for your website. You can store your backups in the cloud and sleep easily, knowing all your content is backed up. See how to keep your WordPress content safe with BackupBuddy.

3. Wordfence

This is one of the best basic security plugin for WordPress. It adds an additional layer of protection via locking out those who try to hack their way into website. They may even block IP addresses of bots in an attempt to access your site. You may customize email alerts that can be sent to you in the event anything suspicious goes on. The company will offer a premium version instantly to provide you with access to support in the event you require it.

4. WPForms

This is renowned as the most beginner friendly contact form plugin made for WordPress. It is a kind of drag & drop online form builder. It facilitates one to easily create email subscription forms, contact forms, order forms, payment, forms, and several other types of online forms with a few clicks online. The pro version offers advanced features.

5. Anti-spam

The plugin exactly does what it claims. It is an anti-spam and stop regular spam comments in their tracks. This is done sans using captcha, asking queries or annoying readers who are really interested to leave a comment.

6. Jetpack

The plugin offers a whole suite of dynamic features for WordPress website. One can benefit from enhanced website performance, enhanced security, plenty of content tools, and visitor engagement features. Social Sharing, spam-free comments, post by email, related posts, and many other features are a part of Jetpack.

7. Edit Flow

This plugin provides a highly efficient editorial workflow management system specially designed for WordPress. It facilitates you to have a look at your editorial calendar. Other benefits include efficient management of authors, assignment posts, leave editorial comments, and lots more. Users can also create their own custom post status and plan strategy for content strategy within the WordPress dashboard.

8. Akismet

The plugin is very efficient in filtering out any comments on your blog that appear to be spam. Akismet automatically checks comments against the Akismet Web service. All comments will also have a history for users to view. This shows which specific comments were flagged or cleared by the plugin. Additionally, those comments were marked as spam or unmarked via a moderator that will be highlighted in the history.

9. WP Optimize

WP Optimize is a free plugin that keeps a blog running smoothly via optimizing database tables. Other options include getting rid of old post revisions, and cleaning all of the unapproved comments. Things thrown in the trash. The plugin helps a website run faster not allowing additional data build up and sit on a website.

10. Soliloquy

This is known as the best responsive WordPress slider available on the market. Most of the slider plugins tend to slow down websites that may hurt the SEO efforts. On the other hand, a soliloquy is the fastest slider plugin that loads your sliders at lightening fast speed. It comes power packed with features. Presently, users can enjoy a free version that can be tried on immediately.

11. Google XML Sitemaps

This is a must-have WordPress plugin. It works towards the automatic generation of an XML sitemap for your website. An XML sitemap will help search engines better index your blog. Web crawlers can easily see the structure of your site and retrieve the results in an efficient manner. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo will be notified every time you create a post about your new content.

12. iThemes Security

This plugin facilitates you to fix common holes in the WordPress site from potential automated attacks. Many WordPress administrators are usually not aware of these holes or vulnerabilities. iThemes Security can help with this. Owing to unknown vulnerabilities arising from various other installed plugins, your website can become an easy target for attacks. The plugin identifies and protects these holes in a website.

13. Comment Redirect

This is a free WordPress plugin that helps you to introduce yourself in an attractive way the very first time a new reader comments on your blog. You can also welcome them in an impressive way to your community. The best part is that this plugin allows you to do this automatically.

14. Sucuri

A Sucuri can be used for monitoring the security of websites. These days, website can get hacked or attacked through malicious denial of different service attacks. Hence, it is always better to be prepared than sorry. This plugin for WordPress provides users with website security scanner,  real time alerts, and malware removal service.

15. Contact Form 7

The plugin will help with creating multiple contact forms. These forms can also be managed with the help of this plugin. There is absolutely no requirement for any extra coding while using Contact Form 7 plugin. User can easily customize the form and mail contents through the settings. The plugin also supports CAPTCHA, Ajax-powered submitting, and Akismet filtering to get help with spam.

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10 Great Off-Page SEO Techniques – How to Boost Traffic to a Website

Search Engine Optimization is one of the best and proven techniques used to boost traffic to a website. This happens via application of various strategies to obtain a high-rank placement in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). These may include a lot of things, including Bing, Google, Yahoo and many others. The process of SEO can be categorized into two techniques to improve the position of website in SERP. This is known as ON-Page SEO and OFF-Page SEO.

Off-page SEO is a process that facilitates a website attain popularity on the World Wide Web and attract more visibility from the target audience. Off-page SEO techniques can help improve the position website in SERP.

Here's a list of top 10 best and trending off-page SEO techniques:

1. Social Media Engagement

This one of the major off-page SEO technique. If you are serious about making your business, blog or website popular, simply engage with people on different social media platforms. The presence of social media is very helpful in growing a business. This is also very effective in attracting more back links.

2. Blog Marketing

Posting comments regularly on other blogs within relevant niche as yours helps with adding a link in the comments section directly. Thereafter, these links can be crawled by search engines, allowing them to point towards your website.

3. Social Bookmarking Sites

These social bookmarking websites are one of the best platforms for promoting your website. Bookmarking blog post or webpage on various popular social bookmarking websites will help you gain high traffic to your webpage or blog.

4. Forum Marketing

It really pays to find forums online that is closely associated to your website niche. Thereafter, you can get involved within that specific community. It is crucial that you give reply to all of the threads. All queries of people need to be answered well. Also try offering advice. This facilitates to build up  your overall reputation as you are getting associate to an expert within that specific niche. Most off page SEO experts recommend using “Do-Follow” Forums. This helps you to include a link to your website within your signature. It facilitates the search engines to crawl your website.

5. Blog Directory Submission

Directory Submission is a widely accepted process of building quality backlinks. You must select an effective directory and a proper category. Remember that it takes a good amount of time to deliver results. The best part is that these results stand out over a longer period of time.

6. Link Baiting

Link baiting is quite a popular way of promoting any site. Here, in case you produce a very popular and impressive post for your website, other people may find it interesting and want to link to it too. If you have copied or published content from a different website, it is crucial to place their website link as a reference. This is a give and take process. You should do it for others and allow others to do it for you. The process enhances your overall link popularity.

7. Video Marketing

This is similar to photo sharing and very effective. Hence, if you have any videos that you have already used on your website, then it is wise to submit them to various websites such as Vimeo, YouTube, etc. This is one of the best ways to allow people to locate your content in different ways.

8. Local Listings

This depends on a specific site’s niche. You may realize that listings available in local directories are very useful for attracting potential clients to your site. A website promoting your local business is very useful as compared to going global and facing tough competition. So list your website locally. This will help your search engines view your site easily and fetch the content. The entire process helps with reaching a targeted audience. You may consider submitting your website to various websites such as Maps, Google Local, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, and many more.

9. Social Shopping Network

This makes for a great strategy if your running an e-commerce website. It helps you advertise and branding all of your products for free. You simply require submitting these to various online shopping networks. Try submitting your products and services to websites such as Yahoo Online Shopping, Google Product Search, MSN Online Shopping, and various other major social shopping network sites. This improves the chances of target audience finding the products that you wish to sell.

10. Image Submission

This is about sharing pictures on all popular image submission websites. Prior to submitting images, it is crucial to optimize these with the appropriate URL and title tags. You must also check for a proper title, description and tags prior to actually submitting your images.

Following the above listed off-page techniques will help you boost your website's popularity.

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