How to boost your Domain Authority? Boost your DA by 5 points in just 2 weeks:

How to boost your Domain Authority? Boost your DA by 5 points in just 2 weeks:

If you ask any digital marketer what is their goal?

 They would say ranking their website to #1 position on google for the most searched keywords related to the website/business.

 

That’s like dream come true Page 1 Postion One. Here for this client, aggregator Just Dial appears at the first rank. That is because I have pause the SEO efforts for this keyword for quiet sometime now.

 Why Did I pause?

 Just prioritising for other websites. When it comes to SEO you have to prioritise which of youe websites you want to focus on.

 If you are the only person working on SEO it may not be possible to continuosly work on all websites.

 This business was giving me limited profit so I thought on focusing on my website www.thedigitalshark.in

 How long it is necessary to do link building?

 Link Building is a continuous process. You can assume that if you stop, it means that the next time you start is from scratch.

Do you lose all your efforts if you pause link building for a while?

The answer to this questions depends on your competitors. If your competitors are continuously involved in link building, then they can outperform you in no time if you pause your link building effort. Even a month would mean losing 1 to 2 points on search engine ranking.

 Now coming back to Domain authority:

 Entire First SERP is a prime real estate, However #1 is extremely valuable.

 If you rank #1 your CTR is going to be 200% higher than your closest runner up #2.

 Is it possible to get to position #1 on Google SERP?

 Yes, there are a lot of road blocks to get there. And you need to be consistent enough in your efforts.

 You cant just think of ranking for only few keywords. You have to think about a whole lot of things and one of them is Domain Authority [DA].

What is a DA?

 DA is one of the metric that was developed by Moz to predict how likely a website can rank higher than its competition.

 DA is measured on a scale of 1-100. The closer you are to 100 the better traffic you will get and you will also have an upperhand on your competitors when it comes to ranking.

 I have a low DA. Can I so SEO?

 Of course you can. Along with your efforts to increase your website content, strategically start looking for other websites having higher DAs. You can request the webmasters of these website to include an article with 2 back links to your website.

 Also when you are writing blogs make the back links sound natural. Like Tips to increase your SEO, and link them back to your blog which talks about this. This way your back links will not be rejected by the Web Masters. You can start with websites with DA > 15 as these websites will allow free guest posting.

 There are few websites that allow paid guest posting. If you feel you are likely to get high amount of traffic from these websites, you can go and post one guest blog on such sites.

 The price may vary from $10 to $65 and $100 for extremly good sites.

Choose wisely when you go for such sites.

 Most of the DAs hover around 40-60 mark. You can only achieve this if you have spent enough time in building authority, good backlink profile. Brand new sites will have a very low DA.

 Quicksprout– A website by Neil Patel who is a digital marketing expert has a DA of 71. It Took Him Eleven years and whole lot of efforts

What should you do to have a great DA Ranking?

 If you want a higher DA Ranking you should maintain a healthy Link Profile.

In easy terms, all your websites’ back links or referring domains make up your link profile.

 Meaning, as mentioned earlier you should focus on getting more and more links from websites with high Domain Authorities.

 There are some link strategies, which lot ot website owners are allured to use to get quick results. These are buying the links. Google Call these “Buying Schemes.” Google heavily penalises websites that use this strategy.

 Below is Google’s Official Link where google has stated which strategies would incurr a penalty.

 

Very Easy websites to use a Back Link Strategy are

1. Quora

  • Ask a question as anonymous and answer the question including Back Links to your website
  • Answer existing questions related to your business and include a back link.
  • Although these are No-Follow links, you can expect some link juice passed through this Back Link.

2. Reddit

  • Be very careful when you are using Reddit as a tool to generate Back Link.
  • Reddit has a strong community and they do not allow any advertising in the discussion section.
  • You should make sure you are writing information and adding value to the discussion in the forum.
  • If you feel that your anchor text would look like a spam used to create a back link, avoid using that and just include an anchor related to the topic of discussion and point it to an existing blog on your website.
  • A back link from Reddit is very valuable as they provide a Do-Follow Back Link.

3. Medium

  • Medium offer No-Follow Back Links.
  • But it is always advisable to import your existing blogs through Medium’s Import Tool.
  • This way you don’t have to write an extra blog and still earn a back link without being penalised for Duplicate Content.

4. Approach Website Owners having DA >15

  • You can approach other website owners who allow a Guest Post to include your Guest Post in exchange of a Back Link.
  • Normally upto 2 back links are allowed per post.
  • Some Website Owners offer this service for free and others would charge anything from $8 to $100 oer post.
  • Make sure you evaluate their Website using Free SmallSeoTools and check their DA before outting an effort to write an article for them.

5. Join Facebook Groups related to Guest Posting

  • Join All Facebook groups for Guest Posting
  • Make a Note of people allowing free and paid guest posts
  • Submit your article to them and follow up

 

Two Week Plan to Increase to Increase Your DA (Domain Authority)

 

Day 1: Conduct a Link Audit

Conduct a Link Audit and Disvow all the unhealthy links

 Day 2-4: Focus on On Page SEO

  • Meta Title
  • Meta Description
  • Site Speed
  • User Friendly Navigation (Breadcrums, Sitemaps etc)
  • Back Link Opprtunities

Day 5-7

Find Topics for Blogs using BuzzSumo

Start Creating Content for Your Website

Also create content that will be posted as Guest Posts

Day 8-10

Continue Writing Content

Write at least 4 short and 2 long articles

Day 11-14

Use any of the above mentioned Methods to create back links and try to get at least 2 back links every few days.

Done?

Now Don’t just sit and chill.

You cant do this alone. Automate the process. Set out some budget and outsource or appoint your team members to do this for you.

You will see your Domain Authority Increasing over a period of time.

This should fetch you good leads so Don’t Worry your efforts will never go waste.

3 Reasons You Should Never Purchase Facebook Likes

3 Reasons You Should Never Purchase Facebook Likes

3 Reasons why you should never buy Facebook Likes.

Is Buying Facebook likes really worth it?

So many of us have this question about the quality of Facebook likes that are bought. A lot of websites sell Facebook likes. Even I was tempted so many times to buy these likes.

But then I asked a question to myself, what is my objective? What do I expect from my Facebook page? Do I just want to look “Big” or “Popular” or Do I want genuine followers who are interested to buy my products or services and engage with my content.

Often times, a Facebook page with so called “Fake Likes” have low engagement. If you are using a bot to post comments on your Facebook page, sometimes it may post irrelevant comments on the posts. For example if you have uploaded a post for offering condolences to the families of those soldiers who lost their life in a recent Pulwama attack and the bot comments “ Great Job” on the post, it may lead to a PR disaster. People visiting your Facebook page will sense something fishy and your objective of creating awareness of your brand will go for a toss. Obviously, irrelevant and spammy comments are never your objective.

I am listing down reasons why you should not buy likes or fan Followership on Facebook.

3 Reasons you never Buy Likes or Fan Followership on Facebook

  • Purchased Fans will never become your customers
  • Alienates your real customers
  • Low engagement = Low returns

 

Purchased Fans will never become your customers

Buying likes on Facebook is a waste of money. Very often these people neither buy your product or services and neither do they engage with your content.

Most of the times they are not even real people. They are just fake accounts.

If you check their profile, you will see that they haven’t uploaded their real pictures or they don’t share anything about themselves. They won’t browse and share your posts like most humans do.

Facebook marketing or even brand awareness for that matter is done with an intention that your audience will purchase your product some time in future. However if you are engaging with people who are not interested in your product, they are never going to end up buying it.

You cannot expect anything much from these fake likes. It’s a total waste of time and money.

Alienates your real customers

On Going changes to Facebook algorithm and makes your efforts useless. As per research conducted by Social@Ogilvy, organic reach on Facebook has plummeted from 16% in 2012 to 6.5% today.

Also pages with more than 5,00,000 likes can reach only 2% of their fans organically. This means that the more irrelevant likes or followers you have, chances that your content will be shown to real users in very less.

Advertising in Facebook has become more competitive with lot of advertisers bidding for ad space in the news feed.

Low engagement = Low Edge Rank

If users are not engaging with your content, Facebook’s algorithm will assume that your content is not engaging enough and will not show it to more people. If your Facebook fans are not engaging with your content, you will have a low Edge Rank. Edge Rank is a Facebook algorithm that decides which posts should go into the news feed first. If your engagement is low compared to the number of likes you have on the page, your edge rank will be low. This means that very few people will see your content in their News Feed, not even your real customers.

There are various alternatives to increase your Facebook follower ship. You can post great content that your users can engage with. You can boost your posts or run campaigns by choosing your objective such as below:

Awareness

  • Brand Awareness
  • Local Awareness
  • Reach

Consideration

  • Traffic
  • Engagement – sub categories: Post Engagement, Event Registrations
  • Lead generation
  • Video views

Conversions

  • Conversions
  • Product Catalogue sales
  • Store Visits
What are the general guidelines that will help google find your page?

What are the general guidelines that will help google find your page?

What are the general guidelines that will help google find your page?

There are several guidelines you should follow for making it easy for google to find you. Only then you will be ranked in the top positions. Please follow the below checklist and check if you are missing on any of these guidelines.

Guideline #1 Anchor Links:

Anchor Links are very important. Make sure that your page can be reached or navigated from other findable link on google. The referring link should include a “text” that is relevant to the target page. Or if it is an image there should be an image attribute describing what the image is about. Google cannot crawl all the links. Ensure that your link uses an <a> tag with an “href” attribute.

Guideline #2 Are sitemaps important in terms of SEO ranking:

It is very important that you upload your sitemap in your google search console. If you are using WordPress you can use Yoast SEO plugin to automatically create an XML sitemap. Click on the SEO tab in the side bar of your WordPress dashboard, select features tab and enable XML sitemaps.

Yoast plugin creates sitemaps for all the various sections on your website. All the individual sitemeps are combined into a sitemap index by Yoast. All you have to do is to submit this sitemap url link Yoast keeps updating this link, as you add, remove or update any content on your website.

Guideline #3 Limit the number of links on any pages.

Do not add too many links on any of your pages. Limit the number of links to a few thousands.

Guideline #4 If modified since Http header:

If modified since header tells Googlebot one of the two things:

  • It responds with a 304 status code only with headers, telling google that the page has not changed since its last visit Or
  • It responds with a 200 status code sending the entire document to google telling that content has been updated since its last visit, so it needs to be downloaded and crawled once again.

For those people who have huge website crawling process will consume a lot of bandwidth and an extra cost. So If modified since http header can save them some resources.

Guideline #5 Use robots.txt

In SEO, the robot.txt file tells the robots which pages it should crawl and which pages it should not crawl. Robots.txt file is also known as Robots Exclusion Protocol or Standard.

If you want google bots to spend its crawling budget effectively on your website you should remove pages that have duplicate content or error pages, hacked pages, pages having infinite spaces or proxies, low quality spam content.

If you help google spend their budget wisely, your most valuable pages can be easily discovered, which means your site visibility will also increase.

Guideline #6 Avoid embedding text inside image

Try to use text instead of images to display information that is important to your users. Especially text like heading, menu items should be written in a text format.  In case you want to use image, use an alt tag that can tell google what the image is about. Page translation does not work on images. Hence use of text embedded on images should be avoided as far as possible.

Guideline #7 Mobile friendly

Make sure your website is responsive and mobile friendly. Use mobile friendly testing tool to test whether all your pages appear properly on all mobile devices. 

Aditi is an expert in digital marketing. She handles SEO activities for her other business- Yog Gokul Yoga. She also actively manages the social media handles. Aditi is also a certified Yoga teacher. Prior to this she has worked with various financial companies as a credit analyst.

9 Powerful Ways To Combine Social Media and Email Marketing

9 Powerful Ways To Combine Social Media and Email Marketing

9 Powerful Ways To Combine Social Media and Email Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a brilliant way to create awareness for your brand, product or service. Email Marketing is very helpful for conversions. On an average, your brand needs to be seen by a person at least 12 times before he or she makes a buying decision.

The only way to do this is to use social media marketing in combination of email marketing.

You should blend them together wisely and follow a cost effective strategy to grow your business.

Please follow the tips below and get started right away!

Tip #1 Mix up Social media along with Email Marketing too Build Trust and Integrity

What your potential customers are looking for is your Brand Integrity. It means they are looking for brands they can trust. You should have a professional attitude with an intention to solve their problem or make their life easier.

Your brand message should be consistent. For example you cannot be funny and informal in your email messages and serious in your Facebook Posts. This type of marketing will result in weak branding and cost you your customers.

Integrating Social Media and Email Marketing is not hard. There should be proper communication among the Marketing team. Training should be given about the brand voice and brand standards. There should be a proper mechanism for approvals for emails to be sent and posts to be posted on social media.

Tip #2 Learn from your mistakes while doing Email Marketing to take informed decisions on social media sites.

Although, social media is a powerful tool for marketing, it doesn’t come cheap. Test your campaigns in emails. For example- which title works better, which ads are getting more clicks, A/B testing for Ad banners.

Use whichever copy worked best for you to advertise on social media so that you don’t waste your budget.

Tip #3 Recycle your content

It is very simple to recycle the same content you used on social media and use it for email marketing campaigns. It all boils to having one system in place- internal communication among the teams.

For example- You can package your new product update and share GIFs on twitter. When the update is out you can repackage the same and create an email update to send out to your customers.

Ask your customers on Facebook and Instagram to share their successes stories by either direct message or commenting in the comment box below. You can later re-write the best of the stories and create an email marketing campaign.

Tip #4 Add your social media links and the links to the latest posts to Emails:

If you add your social media links in your email updates, it is likely that you get followers who have subscribed to your newsletter to like and follow your social media pages and posts.

Tip #5 Schedule your social media posts to remind people about your email marketing updates:

You can schedule a post to collect email ids by directing them to your landing pages. Remind the user what is the use for subscribing to your list- such as get a free newsletter weekly or any diet tips and weight loss tips if you are a fitness coach. Give any offers that come to your mind.

Tip #6 Create a link in your bio on Instagram

Adding these links will help the user to reach your users more easily and get them to visit your landing page comfortably.

Always make use of CTA- (Call To Action) available on Facebook or Instagram. This way people can visit landing page with just a simple swipe up.

Tip #7 Run Contests

Running social media contests are pretty cool ways of creating awareness and engaging your customers. For example “Chumbak” always runs contests on Instagram- They launched a contest asking people to upload their Diwali Photos by adding #mykindadiwali and comment what Diwali means to them. They kept 3 surprises for 3 best entries.

Boom now a lot of your follower’s followers will notice your brand and increase your organic reach.

Tip #8 Take full advantage of Social Media Email Alerts

Start joining groups on social media and publish great content. Lot of people sign up for email alerts on well known social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. This way the group members will get an email in their inbox without being signed up for your email list.

If your content is really great, people will end up subscribing to your email list by clicking on the call to action (You can give a link to your landing page).

Tip #9 Upload your Email List to Social Media

You can import list of email ids of people who are already subscribed with you and retarget them by using Twitter (Tailored Audiences), Facebook (Custom Audiences) and LinkedIn (Matched Audiences). This way you can choose to show your Ads to the customers who have already encountered with your brand.

Wrapping Up

Now a days there are more and more ways to reach your audiences than ever before. But all this comes at a price which is not cheap.

Businesses can integrate different marketing channels by integrating them with each other for getting better results.

Aditi is an expert in digital marketing. She handles SEO activities for her other business- Yog Gokul Yoga. She also actively manages the social media handles. Aditi is also a certified Yoga teacher. Prior to this she has worked with various financial companies as a credit analyst.

4 Biggest Social Media Mistakes that you are making

4 Biggest Social Media Mistakes that you are making

Biggest Social Media Mistakes that you are making

Posting content too often:

Everyone will keep telling you the more content you post the more followers you are likely to get. Try not to post more than one post per day.

Avoid Posting Mediocre Content:

If your content is not engaging or something that you would not share with your friends, it is likely that you won’t have enough engagement on social media.

So make sure you create quality content. If you are not sure how to create quality content go to Buzz Sumo and type in your keywords and you will get to see what is the content that is popular for your industry.

Leverage Video Content

The third mistake you might be doing is not leveraging videos. Videos is the future of content. Make sure you create interesting videos and share on social media. You can get upto 2-3 times more engagement on your video content than you just upload photo or a text update.

Not Engaging

The last mistake you should avoid is not engaging. Create content and reply to every comment that appears in there. Social media is about two way communication. So even if someone writes thanks for the content, you can respond by saying thank you for reading.

You will find over time you will get more shares, views and likes than if you didn’t engage with your content.