Friday, January 22, 2016

Why Should You Start Building A Facebook Group?

Why Should You Start Building A Facebook Group?

Link to My Blogger Tricks

Why Should You Start Building A Facebook Group?

Posted: 21 Jan 2016 04:47 AM PST

Why build a Facebook Group?
For many individuals and businesses, Facebook has been the go-to place for creating hype and marketing content on social media. And because of its sheer user base and because audience likes to associate with a brand socially before engaging, it is safe to say that Facebook Pages became the de-facto standard for businesses operating in the social playground. But over the past couple years, some businesses have slowed down their Facebook operation thanks to a plummeting organic reach after many Facebook news feed algorithm updates. Facebook Pages are old and bulky. Facebook Groups are now hot in fashion.
This is a two-part post. In the first post, we will discuss why we need Facebook Groups now. And in the second, we will look into ways of building a strong group on Facebook.

Why build a Facebook Group?

Facebook Groups are nothing new. They have been around for many years now, and people have been using them for various purposes. For the most part though, they have only rarely been used to drive organic traffic. But more recently, they have started appearing again and businesses who had given up on Facebook marketing are turning to a new ray of hope once again.

1. Facebook is still relevant

The advent of social apps such as Instagram and Snapchat has meant that quite a lot of people who are mostly only interested in connecting with friends (such as youngsters) are not as active on Facebook. Individuals aside, some businesses have given up on Facebook marketing too because of the hopeless newsfeed algorithm updates. This means that there's a lot less clutter out there, and a lot more competing ground.

Around the end of year 2015, Mark Zuckerberg announced that for the first time in history, Facebook has seen over 1 billion active users in a single day. This means that Facebook has become more relevant than ever, despite the sheer number of users. Facebook marketing isn't going anywhere. And it is time for you to fight for new ground which might otherwise soon be lost.

2. Groups notifications are more effective

The major problem with Facebook marketing used to be the Newsfeed algorithm, which Facebook pages rely upon for organic exposure. For any given page, only a fraction of its followers will see its update, wasting a huge amount of organic reach in its wake. In comparison, Facebook Groups send users a notification when someone posts, thus making more people check it out and more organic traffic to flow.

Users may silence these notifications if your group isn't adding value. So be careful about adding content that is really valuable to your followers.

3. Improved credentials

With an active Facebook group, you have a the ability to drive quality traffic with a single post. And that gives you a very good and powerful value proposition. With a Facebook Page, you're an unknown page owner. But within groups, you share ideas and exchange value with your actively engaged followers. And you can leverage this ability of yours to get solid links for yourself.

4. Free content

Facebook Pages are an amazing marketing resource even though they lack as much organic reach. But maintaining a Facebook Page is a job in itself and you have to spend time creating content. You need a dedicated resource to manage it.

Facebook Groups have the edge here, however, because they are crowd-sourced and practically run themselves. They're relatively low-maintenance and free. All you need to do is keep a check on spam.

Although Facebook Groups are nothing new, they're being rediscovered as a far more useful resource than a Facebook Page, and could potentially prove to be a the new trend for this year in social marketing.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

10 Ways To Stop Google From Changing Your Page Titles

10 Ways To Stop Google From Changing Your Page Titles

Link to My Blogger Tricks

10 Ways To Stop Google From Changing Your Page Titles

Posted: 20 Jan 2016 04:47 AM PST

Stop Google From Changing Page TitlesYou might have seen the annoying habit of Google to rewrite your <Title> tags in Search results. This algorithm has effected publishers from all platforms. All BlogSpot and WordPress blogs have their page titles replaced with different keywords. Sometimes Google could even add your homepage URL to the end of a title tag. Just recently we observed the Home Title of our blog modified completely inside Mobile search results. This really annoyed us and we dig down to make some changes to our blog template to reduce the chances of an automatic title change. Out of many options, 4 of our tested experiments and 6 proposed by Google have remarkably improved our search appearance and really helped in displaying the original page titles in search results that we used for our blog posts.  The SEO configurations below are not limited to Blogger blogs and can be easily applied to any website you are running with slight modifications. Today's post will prove that you are responsible for 70% of the times your Title tags look different in Search results and the remaining 30% of the times, its Google who can be blamed.

Why is Google Changing your Titles in Search Results?

We refer few when it comes to taking authentic SEO tips and Matt Cutts is one of them who is Google's Webspam team head. First view his video below to get a clear idea of how Google picks rich snippets for your blog or website.

Google gives the following explanation of why it changes your Title tags:

If we've detected that a particular result has one of the above issues (refering to point 1-6 of this tutorial) with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There's a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user's query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.

I guess the above explanation is self understandable and I am sure you might be thinking "How can a robot decide what should be the title of my page?"

I can agree with you for 70% of the times but if you read this tutorial further you will realize that our unwilling SEO mistakes is forcing Google to correct these mistakes in order to provide better search experience to its users.

Following are some possible tips recommended by Google (1-6) and us (6-10) that you must follow in order to write high quality titles to make sure your webpage titles are not modified by search robots.

1. Every Page Must Contain a <title> tag.

I am sure even a newbie publisher would know that but I can still see thousands of pages with no title tag inside the document head. Most people think using <h1> tag is enough but that is not true. Title tag defines your primary title and is a must to use.

2. Titles Should be Descriptive

Like in the video above Matt recommend that instead of writing vague descriptors like Starbucks Homepage they could avoid using homepage and instead utilize a more better keyword like Coffee. If you search Starbucks website today you would see they have now applied this tip:

Incorrect Title:

My Blogger Tricks - Homepage

Correct Title:

My Blogger Tricks

 

3. Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Avoid using repeated keywords or using phrases multiple times. Keyword stuffing is spam and is a serious SEO sin. A title like "Flash Disk, USB Disk, USB, USB Drive" doesn't help the user. Do you really think, someone can fool search engines with such black hat SEO techniques in 2016? Of course such titles deserve to be regenerated automatically by Google itself.

4. Avoid Repeated or Boilerplate Titles

Comma separated information ("boilerplate" titles) are also bad because they contain a lot of uninformative text. Just simply use your brand name as the homepage title or add a meaningful phrase but not comma separated keywords for God sake! If you do so, Google will be forced to rewrite your title tag or even consider you as keyword spammer.

Incorrect Title:

MY Blogger Tricks - Find Templates, Widgets, Plugins, SEO Tips etc.

Correct Titles:

MY Blogger Tricks - Start a blog!

MY Blogger Tricks - Your Guide to Blogging

MY Blogger Tricks - Your Blogging Guru

or simply the brand name itself if it is descriptive:

MY Blogger Tricks

In our case since our blog domain is a tag line itself so we have just used "My Blogger Tricks" with no additional punch line.

5. Brand Your Site Title But Avoid It On Every Page

You can create a homepage title like "Brand: Some 2-3 words Tag line". Show such descriptive title only on homepage but don't add it in every blog post. Adding up your brand name in every webpage also does not makes sense. It hurts readability and forces google to either truncate that long title or regenerate a new concise title for you.

Incorrect Post Title:

10 Ways To Stop Google From Changing Your Page Titles - My Blogger Tricks

Correct Post Title:

10 Ways To Stop Google From Changing Your Page Titles

6. Backlinks Can Help Generate Titles For Private Sites

Even if you have noindexed your site, Google can still access it from your backlinks and generate titles for your blog based on the anchor text. If you don't want to appear in search then use the meta tag to noindex your content and not the robots.txt file.

Our Recommendations

The tips below are some of the solutions that we tried as experiment and it worked just great Alhamdulillah.

7. Title Too Short

Google typically displays the first 55-60 characters of a title tag which includes spaces, commas and everything in between.  But if your title is extremely short (less than 15 ) then Google will concatenate your Homepage title with it or your URL or regenerate a completely new title.

Our Advertise Page has title "ADVERTISE HERE" but google displays it as shown in the screenshot below:

image

Your About/Contact/Sitemap/Advertise pages can surely contain short titles and even if Google adds up your homepage title next to it then it wont be much of the problem but you would really not like Google to start treating your blog posts or articles like this! So make sure your Content pages where you post articles must have a descriptive title with a character count of no more than 60 characters.

Incorrect Post Title - Too Short:

Google Changes Titles

Correct Title:

10 Ways To Stop Google From Changing Your Page Titles

8. Avoid adding Blog Title In Every Page

Here I will share the solution to Tip#5 and will also elaborate it.

In custom Blogger templates most designers due to insufficient SEO technical skills, often add blog title next to every Page on your blog which includes the Posts and Static Pages.

Your main website title can be added in every page only if your Domain name is short and precise i.e One word domain names. But if your domain consists of 2-4 keywords then it is recommend that you avoid adding it on every single page.

Since our domain name consists of 2 keywords i.e. "My Blogger Tricks" which is self explanatory therefore we have not added it to the title tag of posts, which thus stops the post title from looking too long in search results over 60 Characters.

To optimize your Blogspot Titles, follow these steps:

1 Go To Blogger > Template

2 Backup your template

3 Click Edit HTML and search for this code or similar to this:

<title>

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<data:blog.pageTitle/>
<b:else/>
<data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/>
</b:if>

</title>

4 Replace the above code with this optimize Title tag code

  <title>
        <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
            <data:blog.pageTitle/>
        <b:else/> 
            <data:blog.pageName/>  
        </b:if>
    </title>

5 Save your template and you are free from worries!

9.  "Next" or "Previous" text displayed In Your Titles

This is yet another SEO mistake done by most bloggers and I will write a complete new post on this issue to help you fix it. The post will be published shortly this week. I will update this point shortly.

10. Stop Google From Changing Your Homepage Title

If one of your pages happens to receive most of the traffic, Google could consider the keywords inside that post and some others to coin up a new name for your website or blog! Google completely changed our home title to "Blogger Widgets" in mobile devices just recently which really annoyed us. Upon searching we explored an easy fix which uses JSON to tell Google "Do not mess with my title!" This fix can be applied only to homepage.

This interesting trick will be shared this week and details will be added in this section. Stay tuned for the updates. I will update this point shortly.

Need Help?

If you have any questions related to any of the points above, please feel free to post your queries in the comment box below. I just hope I could clearly explain all the possible reasons that is causing automatic changes in your page titles that appear in SERPs. All these tips have helped us increase website search traffic by 20% recently and I wish it may equally benefit you as well. Do share your feedback and queries. Peace and blessings buddies! =)

Monday, January 11, 2016

Stop all Internal Links From Opening In New Window

Stop all Internal Links From Opening In New Window

Link to My Blogger Tricks

Stop all Internal Links From Opening In New Window

Posted: 11 Jan 2016 04:47 AM PST

Open links in new window in blogger and wordpressIn 2013 we shared a script snippet that helped you to automatically open all external links in a new browser window. That script received great feedback and we thought to further enhance it. Today's jquery script will prevent internal links containing the attribute target="_blank" from opening in a new tab. It will open all links inside a new window except internal links. This plugin will look for all http and https hyperlinks inside your blog content section which includes the blog post body and comment body. It will then add a target="_blank" attribute to all external links but will remove target="_blank" attribute from all internal links found inside your blog post and comments.

The target attribute inside <a> tag was never meant for internal links at all and therefore it makes no sense to irritate your website visitors by opening blog links inside new tabs thus forcing them to close the previous page in order to read the current page in new tab. The tutorial below includes instructions for both blogspot blogs and wordpress blogs. This script will immensely improve your daily pageviews and will tremendously decrease the overall blog bounce rate thus leading to a better search engine ranking and of course blog revenue.  We have implemented it on mbt and also on our wordpress blog and it is working just great Alhamdulillah.

Open all links In New Tab Except Internal Links

Blogger templates and Wordpress themes have different DOM structures and therefore due to the difference in class and ID name, I will be discussing the installation steps separately for both platforms.

FOR BLOGGER

1 Go To Blogger > Template

2 Backup your template

3 Click Edit HTML

4 Paste the following script just above </head> tag.

<script async='true' src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

<script type='text/javascript'>
//<![CDATA[
//Open External Links in New Window - Plugin by STCnetwork.org
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#Blog1 a[href^=http], #Blog1 a[href^=https]")
  .each(function(){
    if (this.href.indexOf(location.hostname) == -1){
      $(this).attr({ "target":"_blank" })}
    if (this.href.indexOf(location.hostname) != -1){
    if ( $(this).attr('target') == '_blank')  {$(this).attr("target", "");}}
  });});

//]]>
</script>

Note: Remove the yellow highlighted code if you already have added jQuery library inside your template

5 Save your template and all done!

FOR WORDPRESS

Follow these steps for a wordpress blog to open external links in a new window but open internal links inside the same window.

1 Go to your theme settings page or go to Appearance > Editor > header.php

2 Paste the following code just above </head> tag.

<script async='true' src='https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

<script type='text/javascript'>
//<![CDATA[
//Open External Links in New Window - Plugin by STCnetwork.org
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#content a[href^=http], #content a[href^=https]")
.each(function(){
if (this.href.indexOf(location.hostname) == -1){
$(this).attr({ "target":"_blank" })}
if (this.href.indexOf(location.hostname) != -1){
if ( $(this).attr('target') == '_blank') {$(this).attr("target", "");}}
});});

//]]>
</script>

Note: Remove the yellow highlighted code if you already have added jQuery library inside your template

3 Save  Settings and you are all done!

How are Internal and external links Identified?

The script looks for all links inside the post body and comment body. It then removes target attribute from all internal links and adds it in external links only. The location.hostname variable checks if the link is an internal link or external. For external links the condition is set to ==-1 and for internal links the condition is set to !=-1

If you are using my old script, I will recommend that you replace it with this new script which is much more lightweight and SEO friendly..

I hope these new script may put a positive effect on your overall page impressions and help you engage readers more on your site instead of irritating them with popping links in new tabs. Let me know if you need any help. =)

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Font Awesome Shortcodes — Add Icons Easily!

Font Awesome Shortcodes — Add Icons Easily!

Link to My Blogger Tricks

Font Awesome Shortcodes — Add Icons Easily!

Posted: 05 Jan 2016 04:47 AM PST

Font Awesome ShortcodesIntroduction of Shortcodes Plugin for Blogger blogs was our biggest contribution to Blogspot community last year and to make sure we continue providing free support and development to the plugin, we are releasing some new shortcodes to make your content writing hobby even more worthwhile in 2016. Today we are releasing Font Awesome Icons Shortcodes, that will help you add FontAwesome Icons anywhere on your blog with a simple one liner textual code. You can now add FontAwesome vector icons inside Blog posts, sidebar content, sidebar headlines, header description and exclusively inside blogger comments box! The plugin includes the latest dynamically updated github source link to fontawesome library to make sure your blog keeps supporting all new icons and aliases added in the official icons directory. Lets first see its demo in action!

Note: The premium version of this shortcode plugin works with any CMS platform like WordPress, joomla, drupal or any HTML site. Contact us for a quotation.

1. Install Blogger Shortcode Plugin

In order to use FontAwesome shortcode you must first install the shortcode plugin for your blogger blog by following 7 easy steps shared inside the link below:

Skip installing this plugin if you have already added it in your blogspot template

2. How To Add Font Awesome Shortcode?

With this shortcode, you will be able to customize your icons in 8 different ways.

STYLE DEMO SHORTCODE
Flip it:
[icon name="youtube" flip="vertical"/]
Pulse it:
[icon name="spinner" animation="pulse"/]
Rotate it:
[icon name="thumbs-up" rotate="90"/]
Resize it:
[icon name="tag" size="3x"/]
Spin it:
[icon name="cog" animation="spin"/] 
Link it:
<a href="#">[icon name="home"/]</a>
Color it:
[icon name="shopping-cart" color="#65C002"/]
Give Fix Width:
[icon name="users" fix="fw"/]

The third column above shows the syntax on how to write down your Icon Shortcode. You can add it easily in both compose mode or Source/HTML mode of your blogger editor. Lets discuss the attributes in detail:

  1. Type Icon name inside name attribute. Full list of icon names can be found here.
  2. Use size attribute to increase icon sizes relative to their container. Size values supported are lg (33% increase), 2x, 3x, 4x, and 5x.
  3. Use fix to set icons at a fixed width. Useful when different icon widths go off alignment. Especially useful in things like nav lists & list groups. Set value as fw
  4. Use the animation attribute to get any icon to spin, or to have the icon rotate with 8 steps by setting it to pulse.
  5. To arbitrarily rotate icons, use the rotate attribute. Set value to following degree directions 90, 180, 270.
  6. To flip icons vertically or horizontally use flip. Set value to either horizontal or vertical.
  7. To change color of icon use color attribute. You can use web standard color names by simply typing orange, red, blue etc or you can use hexadecimal color codes.
  8. To hyperlink an icon simply enclose the shortcode inside href a tags.

You can also use the icons inside the other shortcodes list that we shared. For example to create a button with facebook, twitter, google-plus icon inside it, we will simply use button shortcode followed by Fontawesome shortcode.

INPUT:

[button size="medium" color="fb"] [icon name="facebook"/] Like [/button]
[button size="medium" color="blue"] [icon name="twitter"/] Follow [/button]
[button size="medium" color="red"] [icon name="google-plus"/] Follow [/button]

OUTPUT:

buttons created using fontawesome shortcode

Wasn't that easy? =)

Need Help?

I hope you find this most demanded FontAwesome shortcode useful for your content writing and blogging hobby. Let me know if you needed any help in understanding any part of the above tutorial. Feel free to leave your precious feedback. Peace and blessings buddies! =)