Your 50 Common Blogging Questions Answered – Part 10

blogging

Welcome to the final part of this awesome series. We’ve covered enormous ground and will be exploring some more advanced SEO strategies. Many of the later questions I received had to do with link building and boosting your ranks throughout the SERP’s. Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s look advanced fundamentals. Next, if you’re just joining us, it’s important to visit the other parts of this series so you can follow through. I’ve covered such topics like…

  • Setting up your blog
  • Designing your blog
  • WordPress plugins
  • Social media marketing
  • Link Building
  • Ranking factors

Let’s get started and I hope you enjoyed this series. Please leave feedback and questions in the box below.

What tools do you use for doing SEO?

There are a handful of tools available for SEO and you should try them all so you know what works best for you. Over the years, I’ve narrowed mine down to the following…

  • org – To check domain and page authority of a website
  • Check My Links – Great tool to find broken backlinks on a page
  • Majestic SEO – A tool that provides trust and citation flow of a URL
  • Google Analytics – Great for backend statistics (bounce rate, traffic, geographic location, devices, landing pages, etc.)
  • Keyword Planner – Awesome for keyword research
  • Google Webmaster Tools – Indexing websites, penalties update, crawling, links, queries, etc.

What Does Keyword Density Mean?

Following the set keyword density is important in search engine optimization because it will ensure your content is smooth and NOT full of keyword stuffing. It’s recommended you use your targeted keyword at a density of 2%-4% so it flows naturally and makes sense. Many times, to rank higher for keywords, people will stuff their content with keywords, ruining the substance and flow. Following a keyword density of 2%-4% will ensure you keep your content natural and it still makes sense to readers. Because keyword density changes as word count increases, you should utilize some density tools.

I’m currently using SEOPressor because it automatically changes the density as per word count. There is a small fee, but it’s a very effective tool. However, you do have free tools available; for example, Keyword Analyzer will be able to provide you with a breakdown.

What is Link Cloaking?

Once your blog is up and running, you’ll start to promote products and it’s important to understand how link cloaking can help. Cloaking will transform an affiliate link to something more cleaner looking at it directly from your website. For example, when promoting a product, some affiliate links will look like: http://example.com/67hsxy-riz. However, with cloaking, you can transform it to: http://www.yourdomain.com/seo-tool.

Using link cloaking is a great way to hide affiliate links, making them appear as your products and something your website is selling to loyal readers. Many people don’t like knowing you’re selling affiliate products for profit so it’s important to make use of cloaking. Doing a quick search will provide you a list of FREE tools available for cloaking affiliate links so be sure to make use of them.

Should I Submit to Paid Link Directories?

I recently started to use paid link directories because they can be a vital source for link juice. Some have been around for years and are highly moderated. Next, they are relevant to your niche with high domain and page authority. Depending on the directory you target, you can find a paid link opportunity for anywhere from $10.00-$49.99. Finally, many of them allow deep-linking so you’ll be getting link juice to your home page and others. However, when choosing paid linking opportunities, it’s important to pay close attention to…

  • Directory relevancy (category>sub-category)
  • Use OpenSiteExplorer.org to view domain and page authority
  • Visit some other links on the directory to find quality of websites being displayed
  • View traffic flow and even page rank

Click Here To Download John Chow’s New eBook, The Ultimate Online Profit Model!