Before we start let me tell you this. I would not talk about how to optimize your profile or how to write your job responsibilities to attract recruiters. There are so many great resources talking about this that it won’t make sense to repeat it.

Instead, I will talk about the thing that you may be missing and everything you can do right now. The listed ideas are easy to implement. They even won’t require you to write long descriptions, direct messages., etc. You need the mouse or touchpad, and that’s it.

This resource would work best for you if you would implement the steps while reading the guide. If you are not sure about the effectiveness of the step, you can do your own research. OK, now it’s time for the first step with a small intro.

What is LinkedIn used for and Why LinkedIn growth is Important for me?

Linkedin is primarily used for professional networking, for career development and for sales (B2B mostly).

It is important to take into attention that Linkedin works in two ways:

1. It’s a social network
2. It’s a search engine

I didn’t say something new with the first statement. Let's talk about the second statement. Most search engine general rules apply to LinkedIn. If you ever have been contacted by a recruiter or by a salesperson, chances are that they found you with the search functionality of the platform. You can improve your discoverability on the platform by following the suggestions in this guide.

If you are not convinced that you need to grow on LinkedIn. Think about this. Why do you have a LinkedIn profile in the first place? You can apply for any job with a private CV. If you have a filled Linkedin profile then there’s a reason for this. Having done that you can make it even better.

So now that we divided our guide to two sections, let’s start with the social aspect of Linkedin.

LinkedIn as a Social Network

Connections

Connections are a strong indication of your profile’s strength both for people and for LinkedIn’s algorithm. The LinkedIn algorithm would like your profile if you are well-connected. For example, your profile would appear in more searches if you have a lot of connections.

Make sense, right? Linkedin even hints that with the 500+ badge.

When you pass 500 connections, the connection number for you and for a person with more than 20.000 connections will be the same (500+)

Let’s test that the search algorithm prefers people with more connections.

[image with search result in different country where all results have > 500 followers ]

If your account is small LinkedIn gives a hint about the number of connections after which your account will look decent on the platform.

Guessed the number already? OK, this number is 500. After you’ll have more than 500 connections you would look like an influencer in the eyes of people visiting your profile. The default “Connect” button would be replaced with “Follow”. As a result, Not only your profile would look authoritative but also a lot of people who don’t know you but are interested in you content can follow you. What kind of Content you might ask? We will talk about this in the next paragraphs.

Sending connection requests

I would assume that you already have sent connection requests to people you know. If not its a great way to start. You don’t even need to write a message why you want to connect with them.

Now, let’s connect with strangers… Many people over think this. They write messages that are not effective for many reasons. Worse that that they use templates and forget to change your name.

You need a message when you have a project to offer, you sell something, and obviously since this LinkedIn hire the person.

If you want to just connect with the person you don’t even need to write to write reason of connection reques. Here’s why.

The person would either like to connect with you or not. Hardly, the amazing message would make difference. They would connect with you only if that connection will give them value. Here are some examples why the person would love to connect with you.

1. You have an exceptional career and achievements. Connecting with people like you of course makes sense.
2. You have a great career and you are connected with a lot of people the person knows. You may have attended the same university. When asked the person can tell why they have connected with you.
3. You have a lot of connections. You are networker. We want to have networker friends, right? Why not to have networker connections?
4. You provide values with your posts. When the person would connect with you they can read something new from you.
5. They open to the connections and like you they want to increase their network.

Perhaps, I missed some points. But the goal is not to cover every possible value that people can expect from you want they accept the connection request. Every situation is different so it’s on you to decide.

Because they would look for the value they can check your profile. Guess what? You profile would tell more about you them the message. They might also check you activity and decide if they want to connect with you or not. So you got why you don’t need to introduce yourself.

Request without a message is called a blank connection request. Brlank connection requests work. Of course not all would work. There are easy ways to increase this percent. Here’s how.

Note, some of them look like hacks but they look perfectly natural.

1. Before sending requests make sure that you have enough high quality recent posts on your wall that clearly show what are you posting about. This will increase the chance of content based connetions.

2. Visit the profile of the person and then send the blank connection request. The person would get notifcation that somebody visited their page and send an connection request. That would tell you that the request is not of of the blue and the person sending it actually checked you profile got interested and then send the request.

3. If you want to connect badly enough. Say, you want to connect with an investor. You can start connecting with people in their network. We’ll continue after the graph. Know that a stranger (a person that isn't and wasn't you colleage) would not like to connect with you if they would not be expecting value from your following posts and interactions with other people. Note, if you have a strong network that would also help you. For example, if I connect with a person with a strong network, I would decrease the connection graph distance (say also in a easy way) to many other strong professional. People are more likely to accept connection request if they have mutual connections. More’s better. Niche works here as well. For example, if I see all your connections a designers, then I conclude that you are active member of designer's community.

(insert connection stats and graph here) showing the frequency of 1st level connection 2nd level connections and 3rd level connections.

This graph would help you understand social dynamics. You are less than 3 links away from suprising high amount of people. If you are too in the network graph from the person you want to reach that you have less chances to connect with him. Also, high profile people receive massive amount of connection requests. if you have a lot of mutual connections with them your request would be ranked high in the queue of the requests.

But that is not the verdict. Here’s how you’d work on this topic.

you would find people who potentially would like to connect with you and who are connections with James. Here’s how. You go to Network tab and run a search. Enter an arbitrary keyword. If you are an SEO. The a reasonable keyword would be an SEO. The returned list will bring people who work as SEOs. Now, click on filters. Add a filter 1st level connection with James. Ok now we are looking at the James Connections without even visiting his profile. Not that we could alos do the same by visiting his profile and opening the connection lists but this way James would find out that you have visited your site. But hold one we are here for another reason. So you can investigate the connection list of James and send conenction request to people who you think are great matches with you. So we did a “due diligence” on the James’s connections list and sent several connections requests. Its a right to to go to second level connections!

Modily the filers and now select only the second level connections. Note if you think it’s too early to connect with a lot of James first level connections. You can start with second level connections.

You can even continue to third level connection depending on how many people you want to connect with.

Don’t make this too long if the connected requests are not accepted during a week most probably it’s a not. Even if after a week you don’t have any mutual connection with James you can send the request anyway.

If James does not answer this connection request that’s no problem. You would be following him. If you are interested in growing your network it is better to send connection request than follow because connection request can be accepted.

Now, you can start the plan B. The Plan B is commenting on Janes posts. If you comment regularly she will start notice you. You can become more virtually connected with the person that the stale connections Jane has. Maybe you would connect in LinkedIn. You can send the request again with a message. Or you can DM them in other Medium. You would have a feeling of connection and Jane might remember some of the public conversation she had with you.

Connects instead of follows

Send connection request to the accounts instead of follows. LinkedIn would show the follow button in the search section if a person has more than 500 connections. To connect with them you need to visit their profile click “more” and the follow. Remember that you would follow them and receive updates from them even if they would not accept your request.

If you are searching for connections in the groups the default button there is the message. Again if you want to connect with them you visit their profile and send the connection request from there.

Connect with people from whom you would learn

It is always a good idea to connect or follow people from whom you can learn from. Since LinkedIn growth migh interest everybody who visits the website regularly. Here;s what I’d suggest.

Connect with LinkedIn coaches. First of all there’s higher change that they’ll connect with you. They would understand why you are reaching to them and would be happy to grow their network. You will learn a lot from them just by opening your main thread, by their posts and by following what they are doing.

Content generation

4. Know that Linkedin is a career portal and not pure niche social network. Decision on what to post is yours but better you go deep in niche specific forums or on Twitter instead.

You can write about your niche but I think that it makes sense to write in a way that would interest everybody in your network. If your network is too niche you can create a lot niche specific topics. However, I think that you should strive to have non-niche constrained network. That’s posting only niche specific topics would make your profile not that interesting for people with other professions.

When to place attention good accounts that you follow you would get idea what kind of posts perform best.

Don’t measure success of your posts with likes. Currently, LinkedIn is one of the best scoail networks with the organic reach. The reason there a so few content creator compared to the number of people frequenting the portal.

Even if your post would not get any likes you’ll get decent number impressions. Many people in your network would see your posts. Plus, people who will visit your profile might check your posts as well.

The problem is they don’t know what to post. Resharing posts of other people rarely help. Posting random content as well.

Your profile

Your likes

Be startegic with likes. Look at this screenshot for a moment

This is what a visitor sees when they want to check your posts.

I think that LinkedIn wants to boost the newest posts and that’s why it shows your most recent likes and comments even if you liked a million of things. Until, youse won’t click on the post button they would not see your posts.

What that means for you that you need to be strategic about the likes. For example, I won’t think that liking dog or cat photos in the LinkedIn helps your profile. You can like these pics without pushing the like button anyways. If you care about what people see on your activity feed it’s better to engage with and comment on posts that are related with what you do.

However, if you are commenting a lot then you can like whatever you want. For example look at the Linas Belunias activity feed. Everything you see is the replies to the comments. He gets a lots of comments and replies to every single comment. He can like million of other things before answering to comments. If he leaves answering the comments the last thing of the activity session his profile visitors would see his posts without even filtering the post.

By the way if you get a comment to your posts reply it in any case even if it’s just an emoji. If you reply to every comment to double the engagement. Plus, if the person will get back to you and you reply you would get more than double engagement and possibly would build raport with the people you are communicating with. This is so obvious, still so few people are doing this!

Your comments

If you post only on your profile you’re limiting the chances of your growth. It’s a good idea to comment on other people posts. This way many people would see your comments and some of them would check your profile if they’d like what you say.

Comment on the posts where you think many of the people in your target market are hanging out.

6. Cross the 500 mark if you haven't done so. After 500 LinkedIn will hide the actual number of connections and your account will look like other accounts.

7. SECRETS do not include 1. (way to check follower count) 2. See how interesting people grow their account by recent connections.

Send connection request to alumni of university.

LinkedIn search

We covered about outbound techniques on growing on Linkedin. Increasing connection count and being active when communicating with other people publicly or in DMs is beatiful. But we need to drive traffic to our profile. If you do the right things than your profile will appear in lot more searches inside LinkedIn and it will appear on Google.

To understand how we can increase our chances to be found In Linkedin let’s check how the search works. Let’s say I search for people who do Technical SEO. I put technical SEO in the search box and press enter.

If you want to a lot of visits to your profile you’d like to appear on the first page of the search results right? Let’s analyze why some people overtook others appeared on the first page of the search results.

First of all the search would be dependant on the person. This is true with almost all search engines. There are personalizations in some degree for good reasons. You’d be more interested in people you are closer to you connectionwise or geographically.

In this example there’s not a lot personalization and I am ok with the default area. If I would like to change the contry it’s a filter.

So the people on the first page have techbical SEO in both pages. Note that, Linkedin highlights the technical SEO word in both places by this the platform hints us why it liked these profile and place on the first page.

In order to increase visibility in Linkedin Search it can help a lot if you would use keyword of your recent position in your tagline.

The next Steps

This was the first part of the Guide, follow the blog to get notified when the part 2 of the Linkedin Growth Guide will be released

Martech world is huge. It's hard to know all the products that will help improve marketing efforts in the modern fast progressing internet world without marketing technology stack lists like this.

Websites are the most important real estate on the internet.

That's why this essential list of web development tools will help you make informed decisions about your website's future or your future website.

1. Online IDEs and Web Editors

Codeanywhere – A collaboration platform for developers. Enabling them to share their files, folders, or entire development environments to collaborate in real-time.
CodePen – An HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code editor in your browser with instant previews. CodePen is a great tool for experiments and small sample code sharing.
Codio – A cloud coding & content platform for teaching computer science
Divshot – one platform for static web hosting and Bootstrap Builder for single-page apps.
ICEcoder – A browser-based code editor which provides a modern approach to building websites.
JS Bin – JS Bin is a tool that enables you to learn, experiment, and teach using web technologies.
JSFiddle – An online playground for your JavaScript, HTML, CSS. JSFiddle is another popular tool for sample code sharing.

2. Offline IDEs

Visual Studio Code – Provided by Microsoft, this is the tool of choice for many web developers. The application is lightweight and, by default, has only an essential set of features. At the same time, there are plenty of plugins that can advance the functionality in many ways. Every developer has a list of plugins. Once the plugins are set up, the software can become an advanced IDE.

Atom by GitHub – This is another popular lightweight text editor many frontend developers use for big projects. However, Atom has entered sunsetting mode, and Github suggests using other editors.

Sublime – Sublime is a popular text editor and supports many programming languages. It natively supports the frontend development languages by default. Thus, it is a good candidate to be in the toolset of a web developer or Martech developer.

WebStorm – A lightweight yet powerful IDE, perfectly equipped for complex client-side development and server-side development with Node.js.

PhpStorm – Enjoy productive PHP and web development with PhpStorm. Take advantage of deep code understanding, top-notch coding assistance, and support for all major tools and frameworks.

Other Jetbrains editors – WebStorm and PhpStorm are IDEs from Jetbrains made for Javascript and PHP development. JetBrains have IDEs for many other technologies and languages. For example, IntelliJ Idea is a popular IDE for Java backend developers, and Datagrip is an excellent tool for database and backend developers.

Brackets – A modern, open-source text editor that understands web design.

Dreamweaver – Adobe Dreamweaver was very popular in the earlier days of the internet. Many web developers might get nostalgic about it. The all-in-one web authoring toolset helps you build modern sites that adapt to fit any size screen, and you can make them look great with beautiful, high-quality images from the new Adobe Stock. Dreamweaver is provided as a part of Adobe Creative Cloud.

Rapid CSS – Rapid CSS editor makes creating, designing, and editing modern CSS-based websites easy.

Stylizer – helps you style websites in a fraction of the time.

3. Useful Browser Plugins

Now to the fun part. We will analyze the competition in this section. These tools, which are browser extensions, can be essential assets in the Martech HTML developers' arsenal. Since most Martech developers use Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, I will list the extensions only for these two browsers.

Google Chrome

Wappalyzer Technology profiler – Detect web applications and javascript libraries run on websites.

BuiltWith Technology Profiler – Find out what the website you are visiting is built with using this extension. Note that you can check any website by entering the address on the builtwith.com home page.

ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Gradient Generator, and other colorful goodies. Liked a color on a web page? Pick the color with ColorZilla.

EditThis Cookie – A cookie manager. You can add, delete, edit, search, protect and block cookies!

Font Finder – Select a text on a website and get font family, size, color, spacing, and more information.

IE Tab – Display web pages using Internet Explorer within Chrome. Supports ActiveX controls and Sharepoint.

iMacros for Chrome – Automate your web browser. Record and replay repetitious work. You can use this tool to test your web pages.

Postman – A web REST client that allows you to enter and monitor HTTP requests and responses. Build, test, and document your APIs faster.

Tampermonkey – The most popular userscript manager for Google Chrome. You can manage and edit all your userscripts, enable and disable your scripts with a couple of clicks, etc.

Proxy SwitchyOmega – Manage and switch between multiple proxies quickly & easily.

Mozilla Firefox

ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Gradient Generator, and other colorful goodies

FoxyProxy Standard – FoxyProxy is an advanced proxy management tool that completely replaces Firefox's limited proxying capabilities. For a simpler tool and less advanced configuration options, please use FoxyProxy Basic.

Greasemonkey – Customize the way a web page displays or behaves by using small bits of JavaScript.

iMacros for Firefox – Automate Firefox. Record and replay repetitious work. If you love the Firefox web browser but are tired of repetitive tasks like visiting the same sites every day, filling out forms, and remembering passwords, then iMacros for Firefox is the solution you’ve been dreaming of! Web Developers can use this tool for automated test purposes.

User Agent Switcher – The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of a browser.

Web Developer – The Web Developer extension adds various web developer tools to the browser.

3. Testing & Diagnostics Tools

BrowserStack – an amazing cloud of virtual machines running dozens of browsers on as many operating systems.

Fiddler – a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data.

GTmetrix – gives you insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it.

Dotcom-tools’s website speed test - a free website speed test tool where you can instantly test your website from 20+ locations around the world, utilizing real browsers just as an end-user experiences your website.

PageSpeed Insights – PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.

Selenium – Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web browsers across many platforms.

Cypress - A widely popular alternative to Selenium.

TestCafe – Automates QA processes and tests your websites and apps across browsers, operating systems, and devices.

Site scan by Bing Webmaster Tools – Run a quick static code scan on any URL to check for out-of-date libraries, layout issues, and accessibility.

4. Web Optimization Tools

Image Optimization

• TinyPNG – Smart WebP, PNG, and JPEG compression. Can compress a batch of images.
• Image Compressor from WebsitePlanet - Compresses PNG and JPEG files by up to 80% and retains full transparency. Can compress a batch of images.
• Optimizilla – Uses a smart combination of the best optimization and lossy compression algorithms to shrink JPEG, GIF, and PNG images. Can compress a batch of images.
• Squoosh - Resize and compress images in one go.

Search Engine Optimization

• Google Search Console – Check search queries, indexing status, crawling errors, and many other important metrics about your websites.
• Bing Webmaster Tools – Same as Google Search Console (GSC) but for Bing search engine.
• Copyscape – Plagiarism checker. Search for copies of your page on the web.
• Keyword Tool – Keyword research tool for Google, Youtube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, App Store, Play Store, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. Perhaps the biggest selection of the platforms among the keyword research tools.

Conclusion

These are just a few important tools that will help you or your team with website development. There are so many useful tools that it's hard to mention them all. This list mentions some popular and useful website creation and optimization tools. The list is for web developers, Martech developers, SEOs, web designers, online business owners, and it can be helpful for anybody who works with websites. Hopefully, this guide helped you to add at least one tool to your toolbox.

Let's scratch the surface of one of the fundamental topics of search about the search: How does the search indexing of the most popular web search engine work. This will help us make informed decisions during the keyword research and content writing processes.

After studying a lot of subjects, I came to the conclusion that if you want to learn faster and better, it is better to study the fundamentals of a subject. In the current dynamic, fast-paced world, we want to learn what's new and needed to accomplish our daily tasks. It seems to us that studying fundamentals can be a waste of time. However, I think that sometimes we need to slow a bit and study fundamentals so that we can move faster tomorrow..

Google Search

Before web pages appear in the Google search results they need to be

• Crawled
• Indexed

This guide is about the indexing part of the process. A thorough understanding of the indexing process will help you to create web pages that will rank higher in Google search and other search engines.

We will talk only about the indexing process here. You can follow our blog to read a detailed article on how Google crawling works.

Let's start with lexical indexing.

Lexical Indexing

Lexical or easily put textual indexing works with words without analyzing the meaning of the sentences and paragraphs in the article.

In the beginning, web search engines were lexical only search engines. They were looking for the occurrence of the keywords in articles.

This was the time when SEOs were using keyword stuffing mechanisms and ranking articles that weren't providing value or were even written about different topics (If you have seen or known invisible keywords, you will know what I am talking about).

Even though many indexing techniques are used in modern-day search engines, lexical search is an important part of algorithms. That makes sense, right?

Let's see how lexical indexing works.

One Word Indices

When Google indexes a page, it reads all the words inside the page (content + meta attributes). Afterward, it creates word to a page mapping for each unique word of the page.

When we search for one word these simple indexes will be used in the search engine result pages

We can see this if we search for one of the most common words in English. We will get over 20 Billion results for each result in the table. A search for "apple" will bring around 3 Billion results.

Search engine users search for one-word phrases in the following cases:

• They want to find the word definition
• Branded searches. They want to find the website of the brand.
• Navigational searches. We put the part of the web address (the domain name) in the browser's search bar, and Google provides the address in the first position of the first search engine result page. Then the users click on the first result and land on the website. They know the web address, but they are lazy to type the full web address.

If our article has 500 unique words, it will be included in 500 search indices with one-word keys.

Now let's consider two-word indices.

Two Word Indices

Let's start with an example and pick the part of this page's title: "How Google".

We get 12 billion results.

The search for "How Google" provides us the index of all pages that have the words "how" and "Google" in any part of the page (even far away from each other). Of course, the pages where the words "How" and "Google" will rank higher.

This two-word index can be easily constructed from two one-word indices in the following manner.

Pick all pages in the "How" index and "Google" index simultaneously.

Two-word, three-word, and many more indices can be constructed with this technique from the one-word indices. For each n-word index, previously constructed indices will be used, and pages' content does not need to be reread.

To continue the keyword popularity experiment let's search for "How Bing" phrase.

We get around 500 million results.

To return to the popularity of search phrases we can see that the index for "How Google" is around 24 times bigger than the index of "How Bing". This means that the words "How" and "Google" appear on 24x more pages than the phrases "How" and "Bing".

As I said, we can do this process for any n-word search.

Here is the illustration of indices up the 3-word indices

We can have meaningful sentences in the search queries starting from three-word phrases. This is where other kinds of searches kick in to help improve the generated results using only lexical indexes.

Semantical Indexing

Semantical indexing had started when search engines got smarter.

At some moment, Google started to understand the meaning of the sentences and the articles using Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms.

In addition, the Google knowledge graph (we will talk about this later) helped with the relationships between objects.

Semantical Indexing helps Google answer most of our queries. Let's look at some of the techniques of semantic indexing.

Synonym System

One of the first logical ideas for a comprehensive search is to use synonyms as is described in the Meaning of your query section of this guide from Google.

If you use the main keyword in your articles too many times, Google might think that you are intentionally stuffing the keyword, which may hurt your rankings.

For this reason, you might want to use synonyms.

By the way, there is a way you can use to find synonyms for your keywords.

When Google has synonyms for parts of our search query it highlights synonyms on the search engine result page (SERP)

The "Focus keyword synonym" field in the Yoast plugin is to help you to analyze the usage of the synonyms of the main keyword on the page. Here's how.

When you know the synonyms for your primary or focus keyword you can add them to the "Focus keyword synonyms" list of the Yoast plugin which is included in the Modern blogging solution or in a WordPress website if have installed the Yoast plugin.

This will help Yoast in the keyword usage evaluation.

Knowledge Graph

It is worth telling that Google's Knowledge Graph is enough to provide the answer to some queries.

For example, If we search "Who wrote the Harry Potter" the answer ("J.K. Rowling") will be provided directly from the knowledge graph.

The search for "Who directed the Harry Potter" will bring the names of directors of the Harry Potter movies again from the knowledge graph.

On the other hand, if we search for "who directed the last harry potter".

The answer would be "David Yates".

Here you can see how the answers were inferred for these three queries.

As we can see in all of the examples, nodes and edges of the graph representation helped answer the queries.

Hence, Google does not need to look for the index of the query to provide the answer. However, Google will provide the index with the answer provided from the knowledge graph.

Latent Semantic Indexing

The name of this term sounds scary. But the concept is not frightening and is easy to understand.

Note that LSI is just one technology for Semantic indexing developed by Bell Labs. Google doesn't use this technology. Google uses a technology similar to LSI.

We use "Latent Semantic Indexing" and "Semantic indexing" interchanging in this article because "Latent Semantic Indexing" and its abbreviation (LSI) are more popular. The majority of people search for these terms more than for "semantic indexing". I want to rank this article as the popular version of the term. That's why I use the term "Latent Semantic Indexing". This blog is an SEO blog, after all ;)

Semantic Indexing is the process of finding relationships between words and content.

For example, If I talk about "indexing" in my blog post, but the article does not contain words "search", "google", "bing" or other words that will hint the algorithm that my page is about search engine indexing, then the algorithm will be confused and may think that my page is about, database indexing, book indexing or any other type of indexing.

As a result, the algorithm may rank my article for "database indexing" queries.

On the other hand, if my page is about "database indexing" it is an excellent idea for me to have database vendor names like ("MySQL"), database terms like DB, database, etc., in my article.

The words that are related to the primary keyword with Latent Semantic Indexing are called LSI keywords or semantically relevant keywords.

LSI builds relationships between words that aren't synonyms.

This article published on WordStream provides a great explanation of what LSI keywords are and how they differ from synonyms. Here's an excerpt from the article.

For example, a synonym for the word “jacket” would be “coat”. However, LSI keywords for “jacket” would include words like: reversible, winter, feather down, warm, padded, puffer, and so on.

We can use LSI keyword research tools to find LSI keywords or figure them out ourselves.

It's a great idea to make sure that we use LSI keywords in important parts of our articles, namely, in headers, in the first paragraphs right after the subheaders, in image alt attributes, etc.

Note that if we write a thorough article around a subject, naturally, we will include LSI keywords in the text. However, keeping LSI in mind will help us with a great outline, headers and will help us to write articles that rank better.

Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field in machine learning. With NLP, machines try to understand human language.

Google uses NLP to understand both search queries and webpage content.

Using Google's Cloud Natural Language product demo, we can get a glimpse of how text processing works for the content and the search queries.

You can post an example search query or a paragraph from your content and see how the NLP algorithm understands the content.

You can switch between Entities, Sentiment, Syntax (Grammar), and Categories tabs to see how NLP algorithms understand the content.

NLP in search queries

Before touching on the topic of NLP analysis of the search queries, we need to imagine that there is a process that maps search queries to the keys of the index. For example, when we misspell words in the search query, and the index of the misspelled variation is empty, Google will show the index of the corrected query.

The misspelling detection algorithm is an NLP algorithm that works not only on the word level but also on the sentence level. The meaning of the sentence helps figure out the possible correct words that are misspelled.

NLP in content

There are many ways with which NLP helps with indexing the content. One of the most significant features is passage indexing. With passage indexing, Google finds passages in the web pages that answer some queries.

Passage indexing is highly beneficial for users because it tries to find the exact answers to the answered questions. Many times the answers do appear in the Featured Snippets.

If you are looking for a short answer, this might be enough.

You can visit the pages in the search engine result page (SERP) if you look for more than the short answer.

Sometimes, the passage is highlighted by Google in the page selected for the short answer in the Featured Snippet. Note that the passage can be anywhere in the article, and highlighting it will help us find it. Here is an example of an article in the Featured Snippet.

When we click on the article that provides the answer to our search query "featured snippet", the answer will be highlighted in the result page text.

Pages that provide the best answers (according to Google) to the questions about the topic that they cover can appear on what SEOs call 0-position (Win the Featured Snippet).

This is a massive win for a page. This is a fair game because pages that want to provide the best answers for the users get rewarded.

As we have said, there are many ways that NLP is used for content indexing. I think that the usage of NLP in content indexing will continue to grow, which will reward content writers who write the best articles for their users.

Conclusion

We have covered only the surface of the extremely simplified projection of how Google indexing works. The purpose of this article was to help you write optimized articles both for search engines and readers.

Usually, we use reverse keyword research before writing content. We check what people are searching for and what keywords the articles on the first page of Google use.

This article and further understanding of the indexing logic may help us make informed decisions and combine it with the tools and techniques which we already use.

There are many studies on why website speed can make and break websites. You may have heard a lot of them. Here is one of the research results.

A new global study from website optimization company Eggplant found that just under three quarters (73%) of consumers will move to a rival site if the website they are on is too slow to load. - source

Website speed is crucial because it provides a great user experience to users who land on your website and navigate its pages. It would help if you made sure that almost all of the pages of your website are fast and that navigating from one page to another is unnoticeable. Let's list the main reasons why website speed is important.

Why website speed matters

Website speed matters because it helps to avoid these negative effects.

1. Poor User Experience

2. Low search engine rankings

3. High Bounce rate

4. Not crawled or indexed pages

Let's check these points one by one.

1. User Experience

When a page loads quickly, it doesn't waste visitors' time, avoid frustrations, and provides a much better user experience.

Users will likely revisit your website if the user experience is good on the pages. Otherwise, they may revisit your website only if they cannot find other websites solving the same problem.

Slow website speed can affect the trust in your business. Visitors may wonder why you can't afford a fast website.

The first impression is important, but that's not all. When navigation from one page to another page on your website is slow, visitors might be annoyed and leave.

If you have an e-commerce website, slow navigation speed in your checkout funnel will increase the cart abandonment rate.

2. Search Engine Rankings

Google Search wants to provide the best experience to its users. For that reason, Google will prefer fast web pages over slow ones. Google states it clearly.

Because of its slow speed, your web pages can be pushed down by Google in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Both mobile and desktop load speeds need to be optimized.

Hint: think about the mobile speed first because of the mobile-first indexing.

When you have a responsive website, decent speed on mobile will usually mean that you have a decent speed on desktop.

3. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the website after viewing only one page.

Ever visited a page from a search engine and jumped back as fast as you could in the order you prevent the meltdown of your computer? Or maybe you just clicked back because you didn't have the time and nerves to wait some seconds to get your answers. These two cases of bouncebacks send horrible high bounce rate signals to search engines. Chech this explanation on how Google RankBrain measures user satisfaction.

Plus, high bounce rates are bad for your website/business. Take a note that you didn't have a chance to host the visitor, and that visitor may never return.

Even if some visitors tolerate slow <em>above-the-fold</em> loading of the website, they may still bounce back if some elements in the below-the-fold part of your web page load slow. Hence, ideally, page elements load after the initial page load should also be fast.

4. Crawl Budget

If you have a small website you can skip this section

There are over a billion websites and billions of pages on the internet. Google needs to crawl and re-crawl the pages in order to update its indices, rank pages according to their latest content, and for many other reasons (In case you are interested: SERP title and description updates, finding new pages and websites, etc).

When crawling a page, Google loads the page in almost the same way as web browsers do.

That means that crawling a page takes considerable time (page loading time + content reading/analysis time).

Slow web pages will consume more time and computing resources than the faster ones.

Now Imagine how resource-intensive it is to crawl that many pages regularly.

That is one of the reasons that Google assigns a crawl budget to your website.

In short, if the pages of your website are slow, the Google crawler may consume the whole budget before crawling all your pages.

Take a note that crawlers visit your website once in a while. The crawl frequency depends on your website's backlink count and quality (check your website's domain rating or domain authority guide to get an idea about your website's backlink performance), website's popularity, how frequently you update your web pages, and many other factors.

What will non-complete crawling mean for you?

Two disappointing things:

1. The new pages might not be indexed for a while.

2. The content updates on the existing pages might be ignored for a while.

That is why you need to think about the effect of the website's overall speed (The speed of all pages) on the crawl budget.

If your pages are fast, Google will be able to recrawl all of them and, as a bonus, might crawl your website more frequently.

Extra: If you want to learn more about crawling, do it here.

What is Website Speed?

Website speed shows how fast pages of the website load.

Here is a great tool to check a website speed. Note that, unlike other online tools, it measures the speed of your whole website. There are limitations if you have a large website. In this case, you can provide a list of most important URLs.

If you have a website with more than 500 pages and a Screamingfrog license, you can measure the speed of your website using this technique without any limit on the number of the tested pages.

I will now measure the speed of my blog. Here are the results:

As you can see, I need to investigate and fix two pages that have a slow load speed.

Website speed tests like this help to discover problematic pages. Here's how:

If I wouldn't have a website speed testing tool (all pages at once), I would measure the website speed in the following way:

For a blog, I would check the home page's speed, random blog post page's speed, and the speed of other pages like about, contact, etc.

Checking only a sample of pages is not ideal because some blog post pages may have unoptimized visuals, or they may load elements that other pages don't.

Website (overall) speed test helps ensure there are no surprises.

Web page Speed

Page speed measures how quickly the viewable elements of a web page load. In other words, it measures how long it takes before a user can view and interact with a page on the site.

This web page speed definition comes from Google on a blog post of one of their products.

There are a lot of great tools to measure the speed of a page. A great way to start is to use Pagespeed Insights, provided directly by Google. This tool will show the speed test results with a detailed breakdown and suggestions on how to fix the problems.

Pagespeed Insights provides an additional beneficial feature if your website has considerable traffic. Using this feature, you can have an idea of what is the actual website speed for your real users. Here is what it looks like:

For this website, page speed metrics and other metrics associated with the page load user experience (UX) are green, apart from the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric, which has an orange color. That means that the page's INP metric needs improvement.

Note that the data comes only from Chrome users who opted to share their browser usage statistics anonymously with Google.

Internal Navigation Speed

If your website is an e-commerce website or your visitors navigate to many pages in a short amount of time (they are actively browsing inside your website), then this section is for you.

The internal navigation speed is the same as the target page load speed without optimizations. However, with "prefetch" or "preload" optimization, the target page load speed will be considerably reduced. Users will instantly land on an almost loaded page and have a much better user experience.

Internal navigation speed optimization is done by prefetching (reloading) the target page when the user is on the linking page. As a result, when the user clicks on the internal link, the almost loaded linked page replaces the screen, and an instant navigation experience is provided to the user.

Some modern web architecture providers preload only the pages for the internal links that are visible to the user. That means preload is not called for internal links that don't appear on the screen. As a result, unnecessary pages are not loaded, and your visitors' browsers don't do unnecessary work.

How to Fix Website Speed

So far, we have talked about why website speed is essential. However, this guide would be incomplete if we would not talk about remedies. In this section, we will talk about how to fix your website's speed.

In order to have a lightweight website, you need to start with modern web technologies. Modern web technologies like JAMStack, handle many website speed optimization tasks efficiently without actions and hustles from your teams.

Here is one of the reasons why Brian Dean's team moved backlinko.com to JAMStack.

We struggled with Backlinko’s loading speed for years. Due to large, high-res images and illustrations, our page sizes were enormous. And despite optimizing our WordPress theme as much as possible, our load times were still slow.

Brian Dean, Founder of Backlinko.com - source

On the other hand, many inefficiencies are not dependent on the website technology and web hosting quality. Not optimized images, large external files, many external resources, loading resources from slow servers, incorrect implementations, and content bloat are among the inefficiencies you or your team should fix.

What Makes a Website Slow or Fast?

To have a fast website, you need to make sure that:

1. Your website is built on a fast platform.

2. Your website is hosted on fast and premium hosting (ideally on CDN): If you are using modern web architecture or the Modern blogging platform your website is 100% hosted on CDN without a non-CDN hosting provider. As a result, you pay nothing for hosting. You pay a CDN hosting fee only when you have massive traffic.

3. All your pages are optimized: You optimize images within the pages, you don't load too many external scripts and resources, and the file sizes of your resources are small, etc.

4. Your website platform supports cached navigation when navigating from one page of the website to another.

Conclusion

Many articles about website speed focus only on page speed. While web page speed is the cornerstone of website speed, it is only one of the website speed factors.

In this article, we talked about:

• Why is page speed so important?
• Why do you need to concentrate on the fundamental aspects of your website, like hosting and technology selection?
• Why is navigation speed between the website pages important?
• Why bloating your web pages with a lot of content can harm your web pages even if the initial content load of your page is pretty fast?

]]>https://www.marktecher.com/facebook-ad-targeting/https://www.marktecher.com/facebook-ad-targeting/Wed, 02 Mar 2022 16:33:38 GMT

Let's start by stating that there is no faster way to get traffic than paid ads.

You can run your paid ads on thousands of websites. However, it will be a great idea if you will not ignore search engines and social media websites.

From all social media networks, Facebook deserves to be on your paid ad strategy list because:

1. Facebook has a record number of users.
2. Advertisers get powerful targetting granularity on Facebook.

Let's list the Facebook Ad targeting options.

1. Facebook Pixel

Facebook pixel is a way to retarget people who visited your website. Why is it called a pixel? Simply because you can install a Javascript code plus an invisible 1-pixel image that, when loaded, registers website visits and, if allowed, connects this data with the Facebook account.

I am sure you have noticed this several times. When you visit a website, then right after your visit, you see the company's ad on Facebook. This is a sign that The website uses Facebook pixel, and the company is running ads with pixel targeting.

Facebook pixel targeting is one of the best targeting options.

It should have priority one on the targeting strategy list.

First of all, you can use Facebook pixel targeting to suggest people follow you on Facebook. Here's how.

If you have organic traffic to your website pages you need to suggest your visitors become your followers. The first option you should seriously consider is offering them to sign up for your email newsletter. You can use the Facebook Pixel to target them on Facebook and ask them to follow your page for the new content. People who wouldn't sign up for your newsletter may follow your Facebook page.

By the way, you can target people who have signed up for your email newsletter separately or you can invite them to follow your page by telling them about your Facebook page in the broadcast email/s.

If you don't do this, the chances are high that people who visited some of your pages will not visit your website anymore.

With Facebook Pixel, you can target them whenever you want (within the next 180 days)

Installation and setup of the Facebook pixel is a big topic covered extensively on the internet. You need to check the guide adapted for your web platform.

If you have a custom website with 100% flexibility on design choices or use the modern blogging platform that allows full customization and supports Google Tag Manager, I suggest installing Facebook Pixel with the Google Tag Manager.

Why? Because the Google Tag Manager is a solution where you can add as many analytics extensions as you want. Moreover, you install Google Tag Manager once on your website, and then you can make any changes, add and remove plugins, update them, and anything else without touching your website.

So when looking for installation instructions, please check if you can install analytics plugins with Google Tag Manager.

2. Lookalike audiences

If you have a Facebook pixel, you can also target people who have similar interests as your website visitors. You will use lookalike audiences for this.

You can construct lookalike audiences in relation to your page followers, website visitors (Facebook pixel), and customer lists (email list or another list of customers who gave you consent to contact them).

Facebook pixel would not be efficient if you have captured less than a couple of hundred visits. If you start working on a brand new website, you need to consider other target options until you have enough visitors to create an ad with Facebook pixel targeting.

If your page following is small, you don't have many visitors, or your list of customers is small, lookalike audiences would not work efficiently.

Targeting options that we discussed up until now are great. Let's now continue to the next option.

3. Facebook Groups

If we can target Facebook groups where our target customers hang out, that would be awesome.

I think that you can find people who have a deep interest in the subject with group targeting.

First of all, there are many organic ways to target group members, and you should give them a try before jumping to paid strategy.

With the organic way, you can post helpful content and interact with the group members to get new clients.

However, you need to be careful with promoting your company there. Most groups will state in their policies that promotional material is not allowed. Even if they don't, they or people in the group would not be happy with your posts if you post promotional staff.

You can read this awesome post about targeting people from the Facebook groups. The article uses the Phantombuster for scrapping Facebook users from the group.

Here is how to use Phantombuster to extract contacts from a Facebook group.

If you install the Chrome extension, the session information will be filled in for you.

Now you can hit the Save button.

Afterward, you need to enter the desired Group URL. Here is where to find it. If you go to the group's main page, you will see the group's URL on the address bar. The URL should be something like this: https://www.facebook.com/groups/333990721720303. By the way, this is the URL of the Modern blogging Facebook Group. If you are interested in blogging, you can join the group.

Paste the target group URL and proceed to the next step.

In the next step, the software will suggest you a reasonable limit for the amount of scrapped profiles. This is important because your account might be blocked otherwise. So please follow the instructions here.

For the next step, set the "Mode" value to "Manual" and the "Notifications" value to "In case of Errors" and proceed to the final step.

Click Launch and wait for the results!

Please have patience because this is a heavy operation. Normally, it takes several minutes.

Please note that you are not allowed to use this list in Facebook's Customer List targeting. If you read the terms of the Customer List targeting, you'll see that you can only use lists for them you have consent.

So how would you leverage this list?

Here is how. You can check the additionalData column values. This will give info about the people on the list. This field will mainly show the workplace or the occupation of people. I think that this column shows the same information that is visible when we hover the mouse on the person's profile.

Using this information, you can send a Friend Request to the people whose profiles look interesting to you, direct message them, follow them and start conversations with them.

If you direct message them and they would be interested in your offering, you have a lead. If they accept your friend request and you share anything about your products and services, they might see the posts and become interested.

Note that the scrapping tool didn't give information otherwise unavailable to you. However, it saves a lot of time for you.

But the most scalable thing that you can do with the scrapped list is to come up with the interest that people have in the list and target them with the interest targeting.

3. Interests

Now let us talk about interests in Facebook ad targeting.

Let's get started by targeting followers of popular people and influencers, and businesses. Some famous people, businesses become "interest"s on Facebook.

For example, you can target people who are interested in Neil Patel page and related pages by picking "Neil Patel" in the Interests box.

You can target many companies here. Just go to the ads console and type some of the company names in your niche and see if their name is available as an interest.

You can find abstract notions there. For example, you can target people interested in website builders, online banking, web design, etc.

3. Behaviours

Here are some interesting options for filtering the audience by behavior. For example, you can target Facebook Page admins. They are business owners or ad agency workers.

For B2C physical products, you might target engaged shoppers. These are the people who clicked Shop now button in the past week. Note that only some ads have the "Shop Now" call to action text.

Many times companies use "Learn more" even for B2C shop ads. Check this excellent guide about Facebook ads call-to-action statistics.

4. Demographics

You can also filter your audience by demographics if you want to.

Great options are available here.

For example, if you advertise in the United States of America, you can target the top 5%, 10%, 25% household income earners.

You can target people by professions as is shown below:

Conclusion

We talked a little bit about targeting options on Facebook. You can read the official documentation here. I hope that this guide helped you discover new ways to target potential customers on Facebook.

Domain authority and domain rating are the terms you hear a lot when you have a website. Domain authority is an abstract notion that shows how trusted your website is.

Even though your website shapes the domain authority, it is attached to the domain. If you move your websites to another domain you'll lose the domain authority. If the new domain wasn't used before, you'd start from zero.

Before going into details, let's speak about two widely used metrics to measure domain authority.

Popular domain authority metrics

One of the metrics is Moz's Domain Authority. This metric is abbreviated as DA.

The next popular and nowadays the most popular metric is Ahrefs's Domain Rating (DR).

The main difference between Domain Rating and Domain Authority is that Domain Rating is a proprietary metric developed by Ahrefs, whereas Domain Authority is a proprietary metric developed by Moz.

Both metrics represent a way to measure how trustworthy and authoritative, and popular the domain is.

For example, if a domain is new, its authority and trustworthiness will naturally be close to zero.

If the website hosted on the domain gets a small number of links pointing to its pages, then the domain's authority will be low. Search engines would not put massive trust in a domain whose content is not linked by other websites.

On the other hand, Big names like Facebook, BBC, Wikipedia have massive amount of websites linking to them, and that is because of their high authority and rating, right?

For example, if an excellent article will be published on and on BBC and on a not popular website, The one published on the BBC would, of course, rank higher.

Note that Google does not use these metrics (DR & DA) to rank website pages. These metrics are just estimations that website owners can compare their websites to other websites.

As Ahref's Domain Rating (DR) is more popular in the SEO community, I will talk about it in the rest of the article.

Why should you be worried about DR?

If you are not sure to read further or not, I'll tell you when you have high enough DR then you'll have a lot of business opportunities.

Domain Rating (DR)

In short, domain rating is calculated based on the number of backlinks and from where these backlinks come. Since backlinks are one of the important aspects that Google uses to rank pages, Domain Rating is a very important metric for website owners.

You can read this detailed article on how the DR algorithm works. After reading the article you will not have a lot of questions about DR values and DR changes of your website.

To summarize the algorithm if you don't have time to read it. The Domain rating is calculated like this:

The DRs of the websites that link to all websites will be taken into the calculation. If a website links your website with more than one backlink only one backlink will be calculated.

1. The more backlinks from different domains you will have the better.
2. The higher the domain ratings (DRs) of the websites the better.

But there is one important thing to consider.

If a website links out to too many domains then the links from that website to your website would not be that strong.

For example, Forbes.com has high DR but it links to many domains. Forbes is very popular for guest posting in the business and marketing industry. Many professionals write articles on Forbes to get backlinks to their websites. For that reason, links from Forbes would not be that helpful and as another website that has almost the same DR but links to a few websites.

Based on these variables websites get ratings from 0 to 100. The world&#x27;s top websites would have domain ratings close to 100. Many brand new websites would have a domain rating of 0.

The Domain Rating score (DR score) shown to users is a rounded number with the exception of the DRs from 0 to 5. The DRs from 0 to 5 have one decimal precision because the vast majority of the websites on the internet (over 80%) are within this range.

DR score is a dynamic score. Here are the main reasons it may change.

1. You get backlinks from a domain/website that wasn't linking you before.
2. You lose the last backlink from a domain/website.
3. The DR of domains/websites that link to your website changes.
4. Other websites improve their DRs and you don't. The new distribution of the DR from 0-100 gives you a lower DR score as a result.

Domain Rating is an important metric for link-building campaigns. However, when building links this is not the only metric that needs to be considered. URL rating (UR) is also a crucial metric when implementing a link-building campaign.

URL Rating (UR)

As Domain Rating (DR) is used for the domain to domain backlink profile comparison the URL rating (UR) is used for the page to page comparison.

Links from the High UR pages are preferred over the low UR pages. However, note that millions of new pages are created every month. For new pages, The UR would start from zero. It is natural that you will get links from the new pages.

Conclusion

UR rating and DR rating can help your pages to rank higher in the search engine result pages.

If your pages rank in the first place or at least on the first page of the result pages for some queries the chances will be high that you will get natural links.

Why?

Because many content writers link the first pages that appear on the search result when they search for the sources.

If you want to rank your blog posts higher it is also a wise idea to not use platforms that deliver slow pages because the load speed of your pages is also a vital metric used by search engines to rank pages.

For that reason, you can use the modern blogging platform.

]]>https://www.marktecher.com/modern-web-development/https://www.marktecher.com/modern-web-development/Sun, 27 Feb 2022 22:48:36 GMT

Web development is rapidly changing. Although web technologies were registering rapid adjustments, they were available only to companies with big development budgets. Finally, modern web development has become available to any business. Let's see how it happened.

Web developers joke that whenever they learn new technology, a new one comes to play. Most of these changes were happening on the frontend side which is responsible for the look and feel of the websites and web applications.

The business logic of the web pages was remaining steady.

The web is dominated by WordPress. WordPress architecture comes to form in the early 2000s, and it hasn't changed a lot since then.

With WordPress, the presentation and the business logic are coupled and cannot be separated. Moreover, additional functionality must come in the form of plugins, and part of the plugins are written in PHP.

I will be opinionated here and will tell that PHP shows its age and it is still widely used because of WordPress's popularity.

The other websites that weren't created with WordPress were free in the choice of the business logic technology selections.

I want to tell you here that the visible part of websites is almost always written with the Javascript programming language.

We are talking about the business logic now.

Before modern web development broke through, if a business wasn't using WordPress or other CMSes, they were using their own technology for the business logic and for keeping the data.

Let's assume we have an old-style business logic for our website

The custom business logic is providing data to be presented on the web pages together with 4 main operations: Create, Replace, Update, Delete. This is abbreviated as CRUD.

and other operations depending on the use cases of the website.

So many websites were using the Create, Replace, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations that many developers were getting extremely boring because almost everything they do every day was creating CRUD business logic over and over again.

Headless CMS

A few years ago, a tectonic change happened in the web development industry. In my humble opinion, the best practices that were being used in the internet giants' and big companies' businesses can now be utilized by small companies.

Let's see how one of the early suppliers of the technology Contentful defines the concept.

A headless CMS is any type of back-end content management system where the content repository “body” is separated or decoupled from the presentation layer "head".

Finally, people came up with the solution to replace the daunting tasks of creating CRUD business logic over and over again. On the other side, business owners can save dozens of thousands of dollars by not hiring software engineers to reinvent the wheel.

The headless CMSs become so better over time that you can define any kind of data organization with your CMS. Change it faster, many times without even the help of the technical people.

But perhaps, the greatest point is that it is not something that only software engineers can see and understand. The User-friendly interface (UI) is available to the whole team. Everybody who has access to the user interface can see how the data is organized!

Remember about the modern web development architecture when an architect from old days comes and says you need a team to create a business logic in some X language.

JAMStack

Ok, the industry solved the problem of CRUD application. Now, what about the business logic that is not CRUD. For example, how to handle payments, manage shopping carts, bookings, etc.

That is partially covered with JAMstack. JAMstack got its name because it stacks three technologies: Javascript (For making websites dynamic), API-s (abbreviated from Application Programming interface for business logic), and Markup (for presenting websites).

The API component consists of two parts:

1. Headless CMSs
2. Various business logic provided by companies

We talked about headless CMS-s. Now let's talk about services.

As the presentation of the website got successfully separated from the business logic many companies started to provide services for different actions that would be needed by websites and web applications.

As the JAMstack becomes more widespread the variety of the services grows.

Almost common functionalities that are not CRUD are now implemented by several services.

In many cases, you might be happy with Jamstack service.

Of course, you can always change it with in-house implementation if you want to.

Blogs in modern web development

Perhaps, blogs are the best candidate to be moved to the modern web development world. Blogs breathe on organic traffic from search engines and search engines and users love fast blazingly fast loading websites.

Another big traffic source for blog articles is social media. Do you know that Facebook will show a post with a slow loading target URL to fewer people than the post with a fast loading page? Some people say that this is true for Facebook ads as well. The loading speed and the quality of the page can be considered by other social media platforms.

If you use the modern blogging platform you'll not have to worry about the speed, extensibility, SEO, and user-friendliness of your website. You can give it a try today.

Conclusion

In this short article, we scratched the surface of what is modern web development and how you can use it in your online business. Hopefully, this guide will at least give data points while deciding on the architecture of your web-based business.

Do you guess what we are doing right now?

We are doing a reverse image search. Wait, what? You might say. Reverse image search is the technique when you upload a photo to an image search engine and try to find the source of the image and/or similar images to this image.

There are many ways to do the reverse image search and we used one of the methods. which is to find images similar to the part of the bigger photo.

In this example, we were interested only with the dog and the bubble and nobody else or nothing else and we got what we wanted.

To get some practical knowledge, let's run some experiments.

We will now search for "SEO tips for bloggers". We see the results below.

The most used way of reverse image search is by uploading photos to the search engine.

The less used version is when you enter the link from the website directly.

But why do we discuss reverse image search usage in the image SEO optimization article? Here's the reason. Why not leverage the reverse image search queries to bring traffic to your website with a little initial planning and minimal work on choosing the right images for your articles. After all, at least two highly important platforms for bloggers Google and Pinterest bring visual traffic to websites that do things in the right way.

Here’s how you can use this technique for your advantage:

Choose Unique Images: Instead of using stock photos that are widely circulated, opt for unique images. These could be high-quality original photographs, custom graphics, or infographics. Unique images are more likely to stand out in a reverse image search.

Optimize Image File Names and Alt Text: Before uploading images, make sure their file names are descriptive and include keywords relevant to your blog post. Also, always fill in the alt text with a concise description that includes your main keywords. This helps search engines understand and index your images more effectively.

Monitor Your Images: Use reverse image search to monitor where and how your images are being used online. This can help in identifying websites that are using your images without permission, or it can lead to opportunities for building backlinks to your site.

Encourage Image Sharing: Make it easy for visitors to share your images on social media and other platforms. This increases the visibility of your images and can drive more traffic back to your site.

By implementing these strategies, you can significantly boost your image SEO and draw more traffic to your blog. Remember, images are a powerful tool in the digital world, and when used wisely, they can greatly enhance your online presence.

I will list the top 10 websites in the world in 2022 according to Alexa rank. Note that the data comes from traffic estimation tools. Different traffic estimations tools show slightly differing graphs. Data for the traffic sources are taken from Similarweb.

The purpose is to analyze the traffic of the leaders and give insights on what are the main source channels for the websites. Let's get started.

1. Google

Google gets 94% traffic from direct visits. It is not a surprise. We can change our thought patterns and think about Google as a platform like social media where you can have your content if you choose to. The major difference is that you can put content for your followers on social media easily, but with Google, you need SEO work to place your content in front of people. In this case, they aren't necessarily your followers, but they are interested people from all over the world.

2. Youtube

Youtube receives around 80% of traffic from direct visits. Approximately 15% comes from searches. SEO is an essential for Youtube creators. Youtube is the world's second-largest search engine. Video creators must SEO optimize their videos and their channel to get more traffic from inside Youtube. If they do, this will also give traffic from Google. We can conclude that most of the 15% search volume comes directly to videos. Let's see how this happens.

This example is an interesting one. If you click on the first result, you'll land on a website where the Youtube video is embedded. Embedding your video on your website is an excellent "off-page" optimization method. This helps your videos to rank on Google.

Let's do another search.

For this search term, the first result on the search results page is a direct link to the video on Youtube.

If we go to The "All" tab (the default search results page), we can see another video is ranking on the first page. You can watch the video directly on Google. In this case, it is not the whole video but the part of the video. Google thinks that this part of the video gives the short answer to the user's question. I want to add that this video has used a Youtube SEO Trick. They used Youtube chapters.

So we have seen how crucial is search engine optimization if you want to create both textual and video content.

3. Baidu

I see Search engines, search engines everywhere. We see that China's most popular search engine is in third place.

I can't understand much about Baidu because it is literally in Chinese.

Other languages are also indexed in Baidu. Your content might be ranked on Baidu as well you you SEO optimize it for all search engines. One thing that I can tell about Baidu from my experience is that Baidu loves modern websites! I've seen that websites created with modern web technologies and blog posts written with the modern blogging platform are ranking higher in Baidu results pretty quickly.

4. Facebook

The most popular social media platform is on the 4th page.

It is not a surprise that over 80% of traffic to Facebook is direct. It is worth mentioning that over 10% of the traffic comes from search engines. We see that a lot of times brand search brings the Facebook page of the brand on the first page of Google or other search engines.

We can also see that many times popular Facebook pages and groups are being ranked on the first pages of Google for their focus keywords.

As I remember correctly Facebook was in 6th place last year. After seeing that it is losing a lot of traffic to Youtube, Facebook announced that it will focus on video. I think that video, game streaming, and other video-related features helped Facebook land in fourth place. Now Facebook wants to add short videos to compete against TikTok. Most probably you know how Facebook works and I am not going to talk about it.

I just want to add if you caught yourself using the search function of Facebook then you might think about SEO on Facebook.

You can think about SEO when you name your Facebook Page or group.

I found and joined many groups by Facebook search. Others do it as well. So it makes sense to think about what keyword your target customers will use when they will search communities and service providers of their interest.

Last but not least, keywords in your Facebook posts will help you to bring some traffic from inside Facebook search right to your posts.

All in all, SEO is not to be forgotten for Facebook as well.

5. QQ.com

A quick search gives us information that QQ is a Chinese instant messaging app. The service is provided by Tencent. QQ.com is the email service provided by the company.

When we visit the website, we get a page like this.

We can conclude from the landing page that it is a log-in-only platform. In other words, it is similar to Gmail rather than the mail + portal platform Yahoo! However, when we look up the traffic, we see that qq.com receives around 25% of the traffic from search.

Huh, surprising. Let's see how.

We will use a basic toolset that SEO professionals use. We list all the pages of the qq.com website that are indexed in Google. This is done with a simple "site:qq.com" query.

We translate the results from Chinese to English and here we have the first page.

We got this. QQ has a lot of blogs and websites on its subdomains. Here's one of them that was ranking high.

Nice website!

We unleashed the main search traffic source of the company.

This technique is used by many companies. If you can host user-generated websites on subdomains of your domain name, you'll put your domain name in front of many people. Your domain will get links and your domain rating (DR) will grow. As your domain's rating (DR) will grow it will be a magnet for more user-generated content on your website. We have an article on our website on what is a DR and why you need to care about it. Find on our websites Read it if you are interested!

6. Amazon

Shopping time! How do you use Amazon? Do you sometimes use the search inside Amazon? You guessed it ;) Amazon is the biggest search engine for products in the world. Amazon competes with Google in this regard. Amazon does not like it when people search for physical products on Google. Let's see how successful is Amazon on this.

According to the "Amazon Advertising Report" from online selling platform Jungle Scout, 74% of U.S. consumers begin their product searches on the Amazon.com site.

Check more about Amazon vs Google competition on product search

As a product search engine and as a favorite shopping destination for many shoppers Amazon is doing pretty well with direct traffic. Amazon also has one of the most widespread affiliate marketing offerings on the internet. That brings considerable referral traffic to the website.

Amazon's SEO credits and amazons sellers' hard work on Amazon SEO brings around 25% of the overall traffic.

That's a pretty good number indeed.

We are in 6th place and SEM (Search engine marketing) shows a strong presence.

7. Taobao

Taobao is Alibaba owned B2C shopping platform. It is similar to eBay. Taobao's mall - Tmall.com has a lot of high-quality brand shops and ranks in 12th place according to Alexa's rankings.

There's interesting about Taobao's traffic. Unlike Amazon, the referral traffic is bigger than the search traffic. Search traffic gets the 10% of the overall traffic.

As Taobao has a product search engine obviously product listings must be optimized for Taobao SEO. However, if you are not selling products on Taobao you'll not be interested in this.

8. Yahoo!

Best known for its portal, search engine, and email service, Yahoo is in 8th place. Yahoo's search engine is now powered by Bing.

The search traffic that Yahoo receives is around 10%. Interestingly, Yahoo keeps the search box on top of all investigated portal pages. This may nudge users to make the subsequent searches on Yahoo! How many users will do it only employees of Yahoo! can know it.

9. Wikipedia

It should not be surprising that the world's open encyclopedia is in the top 10. Guess from where Wikipedia gets the most traffic? Right, from search engines. Over 85% of the traffic comes from search engines.

10. Bilibili

The last on the list is a Chinese popular video sharing and streaming portal. It gets over 10% of traffic from search engines. As is expected for video portals, direct traffic percentage is high.

Here is what it looks like.

Conclusion

We see the world's leading websites get most of their traffic from direct visits. This is expected.

The second-largest traffic source for almost all websites was search traffic. The exception was in the case of Taobao. Other forms of traffic were inferior to search traffic. I guess that should be reinforcement on how important is the search traffic.

And let me remind you that search traffic is usually warm traffic. That means that visits that come from search engines are more likely to convert.

Finding keywords for SEO is an important part of the blog post writing process. It will help you to get more traffic for your articles. As we will see, the keyword research process will also give some great ideas on constructing the content.

When we write an article, we have a focus keyword in our mind, right?

Even if we don't do it from the SEO perspective, we have a keyword without realizing it.

When we say we will write an article about something, that is the keyword you have in our mind.

That keyword can be a noun, or it can be a sentence.

Before writing the article with the original keyword, it is a good idea to do keyword research. This should not take a lot of time. Moreover, it can even help us with the outline of the article, and it can give us new ideas.

There can be hundreds of ways and variations to do keyword research. This is just one way.

Let's start the process.

Let's say I have a "google indexing" keyword idea in my mind, and we want to do keyword research before writing the article about it.

We will use Ahrefs' Free Keyword Generator for this.

The search provides the following results:

If we scroll down, we will find the following results related to the topic we want to write about.

Here KD column shows the keyword difficulty for the keyword.

Keyword difficulty is a metric that measures how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. Ahref's keyword difficulty takes values from 0 to 100. Keywords with zero value are the easiest to rank for.

Ahref's Free Keyword Generator does not provide keyword difficulty for all the keyword ideas. But there is a way to guess it by looking on the first page of the Google search results. You can check how popular the top web pages are, how good the content is, how fresh the pages are, how relevant the content is, etc.

The next column shows the estimate of the monthly search volume. Which estimates how many times people searched this term within a month. The number is the annual average value.

The last column shows when the stats for the keyword were updated.

And last but not least, you can select the question tabs and look for the questions related to keywords that people ask about the topic.

We can also search for a longer keyword. For example, we can search for "google indexing how" instead of "google indexing".

Here are the results

• google indexing how long
• google indexing how important are
• google indexing how it works

Ok, now we got some of the keywords we want to rank for.

But we aren't done yet.

Before we proceed to the next step, you might be wondering.

Hey, but the search volume of the keywords was low. Why do we want to continue to write content for the keywords?

If you write a blog post on a new website, many SEOs suggest aiming at low search volume keywords.

This is true because you want to rank your page on the first page as quickly as possible to get organic traffic from searches.

When you increase your website's authority, you can aim for keywords with higher search volumes.

Read the detailed explanation on why you need to start small with new websites.

Checking the keywords of the competing pages

Now that we have investigated keyword ideas similar to our initial keyword and got the idea about monthly traffic and the difficulty of each of them, we can continue with the competitor research.

If we have the Ahrefs paid plan, we could use the Ahrefs Context Explorer.

However, we can do it for free using Ubersuggest's Traffic Analyzer.

Ok, let's pick a competitor whom we can overrun.

Let's do a Google search for the term "google indexing how it works"

Now we need to investigate the first pages of Google.

We see that the leading results are pages from Google.

When we open them we see that they are documents that shortly describe how indexing works in Google Search.

We don't need to panic here because:

• People will look at information from other sources as well.
• Google resources provide narrow and beginner information.

If we could provide more detailed information for advanced users, our web page might deserve to appear on the first page of the search results.

Now let's pick the competitor that we can compete with.

It is reasonable that we will not consider pages from Google, Ahrefs, Moz, and from other authoritative websites in the SEO niche.

At the time of the writing, a page that is not an authority in the SEO industry ranks in 7th place with the content written in 2016.

Note that we see different search results depending on the country and many other factors.

The page's content is generic and does not cover indexing in detail. We can target this page.

We copy the URL of the page and paste it on the Ubersuggest&#x27;s Traffic Analyzer.

And here are the results.

We can expand some keywords to see the traffic estimate for the first SERP (search engine result page).

When writing the article, we will try to cover the topics related to the keywords this page ranks.

Conclusion

This technique is just one way of doing keyword research. It works well for new websites. You don't even need any paid SEO tool for this.

The techniques and tools used in keyword research create many possibilities, but it is important to understand how search engine indexing works. That will help you with the keyword research.

For that reason, you can check how Google Indexing works.

When starting a blog, it is important to pick a correct platform to facilitate the blog's growth. Otherwise, we will lose many possibilities if we choose to not go with modern blogging.

Note, When you read this guide and implement all the steps, you will have a new modern blog up and running.

Download your copy of a modern blogging solution and follow the steps. If you don't have time to do the steps or you feel lazy today, you can order us to set it up for you.

Blogs are among the best traffic sources for bringing organic traffic to your business. Unfortunately, many businesses and bloggers don't pay close attention to many fundamental features of the blogging platform when they start a blog. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for blogs. That's why the blogging platform should be search engine optimization friendly (SEO-friendly). Moreover, starting from 2018, the load time has become a differentiating factor for Google to downgrade the slow performing websites in the search result pages.

This and other changes in the technology world brought a new movement that allows businesses to build blazingly fast, secure, easy to use, search engine friendly, and flexible.

Using this blogging solution, you will have all the benefits of modern web trends. Also, You will get many SEO and other tools to help you write excellent content.

The best part is that you will get it FREE and can have your blog up and running after a few minutes!

Last but not least, you own the source code and all the data. The platform is so flexible that you can integrate it with an e-commerce shop, turn it into a news website, or make whatever changes you want.

The solution is built with a modern and popular Javascript framework called React. If you want to add features to your blog that we don't support, you can easily hire a great React developer who can implement it for you. However, at first, you can ask in our community Facebook group if the feature is supported or is going to be supported in the next versions. Maybe peers in the group have implemented the feature and are willing to share it with you and the community?

Installation

Sanity Content management system setup

Go to the sanity folder and run sanity init

Answer "Y" to the first question "The current folder contains a configured Sanity studio. Would you like to reconfigure it?"

On the next prompt "Select project to use" choose "Create new project" 1.3 Enter your project name. Choose a name that would be similar to your domain name

Answer "Y" to the next question about the choice between private and public datasets ("Use the default dataset configuration?"). Don't worry only the data that you publish would be available to the public and you want this!

Congrats! Your project is now created locally and in Sanity.

2. Run sanity start

2.1 The Sanity project would be launched on the local machine. The command line would tell the address of the service. It should be http://localhost:3333

Copy the address http://localhost:3333 and paste it on the address line of your browser.

Login/Sign-up with Google/Github or with your E-mail credentials.

Done! You can now create your content. Don't worry about the name of the project we will change it in the next step and you will see the new name next time.

The first blog post

Now, we will create the first blog post.

Click on the "Post" Under the "Content" Menu

Click the Pencil icon on the opened submenu

Alternatively, you can create a blog post or any other document with the "Create new document" button

And select the document type that you want to create. We are creating a blog post that's why we need to click on a "Post"

Enter the title of the blog post.

Now, it's time to generate the slug for the article. In case you don't know, the slug is the part of the page URL that will be available on the internet.

Let's say that your website is hosted on https://www.mycoolwebsite.com and you named the slug of your blog post as my-first-post then your blog post would be available on https://www.mycoolwebsite.com/my-first-post

There are technical and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rules for the slugs. Considering all of them, we want to avoid all symbols apart from letters, numbers, and hyphens ('-'). Also, please try to use only lowercase letters for the slugs.

To make slug naming easy and error-free, a Generate button is provided to you, which generates a slug from the title text.

After you have entered the title, click on the "Generate" button, and the slug will be generated for you.

An SEO Note: If the title is to long you can shorten it. Short slugs are preffered.

An SEO hack: If you are using the current year in the title please consider skipping it from the slug. The reason is that in the ideal case we don't want to change the slug. We will discuss the theory behind this in this article. So when you will update the article for the coming year and will update the year you would need to touch the slug.

This blogging solution comes with prebuilt SEO rule checkers. Which makes it harder to make mistakes and inefficiencies before or using SEO tools. Blogging on this platform will be beneficial for SEO specialists as well. Knowing the rules is one thing, but having automatic validation of the content in the content management system (CMS) is an awesome bonus and a time saver. Here you can find all SEO tools and checks which comes with this modern blogging platform.

Now, we need to specify the Author.

We can't proceed here because we need to create an author element. Let's skip it for now.

We keep the Categories section empty because we don't have any categories yet.

You can click on the calendar to change the "Published date" of the article. The article's publish date is initialized with the document creation date. In case you create and publish the article on the same day you might not need to change it.

Adding photos to the blog post

The main image would be the hero image of the article. It will also be the thumbnail image of the blog post on the home page and on the other pages that refer to this page. That is why this image is required.

You can upload a photo, or use the Select... button.

With the Select button, you can import an image directly from Unsplash which is a website with royalty-free photos, or you can select from the photos that you have uploaded before.

Then comes the "Alt text", "Caption", and "Author/Source info" fields.

The "Alt text" field is important for SEO. The value here will be used as the alt tag of the image. Great text description can make your page discoverable when people do image searches in search engines. Here you can find the SEO strategies and tactics to make your pages discoverable through images.

The Alt text will not be visible on the page. If you want to describe the image for the visitors right below the image you need to use the caption. This is great for the user experience (UX).

The "Author/Source info" field is for mentioning the author name and/or the copyright holder website.

It is time to write the blog post!

The "Body" text box should contain the text of your article.

It can also contain photos and embedded Youtube videos and many more elements.

You would have subheadings in the text if the text is long. To use subheadings highlight the text click on the dropdown box that has the "Normal" text on it and change it to H2.

H2 means heading on the second level (subtitle) in the Hypertext Markup language (HTML). If you want to have nested subheadings use H3, H4 in the mentioned order.

Note that the page should have only one H1 (level 1) heading and that is the title of the blog that is the first input of the document.

Correct structure of the heading is important for user experience and for SEO.

The "Quote" option should be used for the quotes. It will apply a special style to the selected text.

Like this quote

You can use Bold, Italic styles for the parts of the text

Using the next buttons, you can add numbered and bulleted lists.

The next two buttons are for external and internal hyperlinks.

When you highlight a text you can convert it to a hyperlink by clicking one of these buttons.

For the external links, you need to enter the target website's full URL in the opened dialog box, e.g., https://www.google.com.

For the internal links, you can select any other page or post that you have previously created.

We don't have any other pages or posts now so we skip this option for now.

On the right corner, you'll find a plus sign.

By clicking on this sign you can add as many photos, Youtube videos, and other elements to the text as you wish.

For Youtube videos, you need to open the video on Youtube and copy/paste the video's address from the browser's address bar.

You will see the preview of the video on the editor to be assured that you have used the correct video.

That is all about the body element.

How to attract our visitors to click on the blog post

Let's say that a visitor opened the main page of our blog or s/he read a blog post from you and is suggested the next related article in the read next section. Is the title enough for the user to decide if s/he want to read the article?

That is the reason why we have an excerpt as a mandatory field.

The excerpt field is the short description of the article.

It will be visible on the cards on the main page and the category pages of the blog.

As we have mentioned before the excerpt must attract users to the article.

Note that This is written for the visitors who already know a couple of things about you or your blog. They read this while they are on your blog. So adapt the message accordingly.

How to get traffic from search engines

SEO fields contain the most important fields for SEO.

That's not all, here you can check SEO improvement hints that come from the Yoast engine. Yes, this blogging solution comes with preconfigured Yoast plugin.

When you add the main keyword of the blog post in the "Focus keyword" field you'll get real-time reporting from Yoast about the on-page SEO optimization of the blog post.

If you click on the Readability tab you will get this.

In Addition, you can add synonyms of the focus keyword to make the reporting even stronger. Here you can check why you should use synonyms and how to use them.

Now let's talk about the SEO fields

Meta Title is the text of the link on the search engine result pages

Meta Description is the description that is rendered below the meta title in the search engine result pages

Meta titles and meta descriptions are used by search engines to understand the topic of the web page.

Not only.

As you can see from the screenshot, good meta titles and meta descriptions can bring more visitors from the search engines.

it is not guaranteed that Google or other search engines will use your meta title and meta description in the search engine result pages, but chances are high. The chances are even higher if you will use good meta titles and meta descriptions.

Be it for search engines or be it for the users make sure that you clearly describe the page in these fields.

Also, you can do some magic in the meta description to entice users to click on the search result of your page.

Remember that in contrast to the excerpt meta description is not written for visitors who are already on your blog. It is written for anybody who might discover your blog through a search.

OK! Our first blog post is ready. There are a couple of errors that we will fix shortly after.

The first page

Now you can create a page.

Apart from blog pages, our blog would have pages that are common for websites. For example, Contact us, Impressum, Privacy policy, About us are perfect examples of pages that you would like to add to your blog.

The main difference between blog pages and blog posts is that a blog post has a main blog photo, information about the author, and any other features that a blog post would have, while blog pages don have any of them and are designed for any kind of pages.

When you publish a blog post is automatically shown in the blog posts list. The pages on the other hand need to be explicitly linked from navigation menus, and content or they may act like landing pages and have no internal links pointing to them.

The process of page creation is almost the same as for the post that we have created in the previous step.

The first author

The same fields need to be provided when you create a page for an author.

In addition to the fields that we have seen, here we have the "Social Media Links" section. When we add an URL for one or many supported social media websites, the link to the social media profile will be available after the biography of the author.

Full URLs must be provided. For Facebook, it would be 'https://www.facebook.com/<yourprofileorpage>/'.

Please go ahead and fill the required fields for the first author.

We need to publish the first author in order to be able to finish the first blog post.

When all required fields are filled. The Publish button on the bottom right corner of the editors changes the colour from grey to green.

It is time to push the button and publish the page about our first author!

The first category

Now let's create a category.

You wouldn't find many new fields here compared to the other types of pages that we have created previously.

Before creating the page let's understand what is a category.

We have categories in order to have pages that would group related articles.

For example, if our blog is about internet marketing we could have two categories: SEO and Social media Marketing.

We could have more. But let's keep it simple.

Let's say our blog is available on the https://www.marketingblog.com address. When we open this address we see all the articles.

All SEO articles would be on the https://www.marketingblog.com/seo page and all Social media Marketing pages would be on https://www.marketingblog.com/smm pages. Here the "seo" and the "smm" are the slugs of the SEO and Social Media Marketing pages respectively.

You can change the field in the "Article types" field in some cases. You can set the Article types of the category to the "News articles".

The News articles flag would be helpful if your blog has news sections. For example, if you have a section in your blog when you provide daily news on some topic.

It will optimize all posts under the news category as news articles for search engines.

For example, the articles would rank in the Google News section.

The blog's global appearance settings

The last step before publishing our first blog post is to configure our blog appearance and other important settings. You need to add only one entry here.

a. The title is the name of the website.

It will be visible on the main page's header section and on the footer of every page before the copyright text.

b. The description is the subtitle of the page that will be visible on the main page of the website/blog under the title.

c. Logo would be visible on top of the pages and will be used as favicon on the tabs. We suggest using at minimum 600-pixel x 600-pixel size for the logo.

d. Cover image will be used as a background image for the pages headers.

e. Header background color defines the background color that will replace the cover photo when the cover photo is missing.

Please use the following color fields if you would like to change the default colors of the various text elements and the backgrounds.

f. Social Media Links will contain your business's pages. Please fill in the social media accounts that you have for your business. If you don't have business pages or if this is your personal blog use your personal accounts instead. When an URL for a social media profile is provided you'll see the social media's icon on the top right corner of your pages.

Here's how the above-mentioned fields will be shown on the blog's home page.

Here's how the above-mentioned fields will be shown on the blog post pages.

Here's how the footer elements are rendered

g. The Language field tells search engines the language of your website. By default, English is selected. Make sure to change this if your blog is not in English.

h. W have seen in the photos how the header navigation links and the footer navigation links are visible on the pages. We add these links by adding URLs or page references to the header navigation bar and footer navigation bars respectively.

As you can see from the photo, you can add either an external or internal URL or a Reference to a page.

Use the Reference to a Document option to add a reference to one of the blog posts, pages, authors, and category pages.

Anchor text will be the visible text in the navigation bar. By opening the reference dropdown you can easily select the target page from the list.

External URLs are URLs to the pages in other websites. They need to start with https:// or http:// prefix

Internal URLs are links inside your website that cannot be selected through the Reference to a Document option. For example, if you have added a static landing page that is not a document on Sanity you need to use the Internal URL option. For example, given that your blog's address is https://www.marketingblog.com/ if you want to link the https://www.marketingblog.com/custom-landing-page-for-black-friday page you just need to put /custom-landing-page-for-black-friday in the URL field.

i. The Highlighted Navigation Item can contain only one reference or URL. The item placed here would be separated from the rest of the header navigation items and will be moved to the right bottom corner of the header section.

Publishing the first blog post

Almost done! Now let's fix the errors in our first blog post.

Open the blog post

Add the author in the Author field

Add the category in the Categories fields

Make sure that all required fields are filled and there is no field highlighted in red.

Click the green Publish button below the article.

Yes! We created a blog and we have the first blog post.

Now, we need to publish the schemas so that we can fetch the data from our frontend and build HTML pages based on the data that comes from the Sanity content management system.

Making the blog's content available for editors and for the web browsers

Now we have the structure and the data only on our machine.

Run sanity deploy in the command line

Now, Sanity would ask you to name deployment.

A short and descriptive name is essential.

You can use the same name as your domain name. This is important because this will formulate the address of your Sanity deployment on the internet. Note that the name should be unique. If somebody else took the name you can try a slightly changed name.

For example, if your domain name is marketingblog.com then I would suggest naming the deployment marketingblog. If you do this your CMS will be deployed on https://marketingblog.sanity.studio.

Upon successful completion, Sanity will print the address of your deployment.

You can edit your blog from any browser and any device now.

We need to deploy GraphQL schema for our sanity project. You don't need to know what is it.

Just copy this text to your command line sanity graphql deploy

You will be asked a question it is not important. Answer 'n'

That's it, We have finished with the content management deployment.

Now we can edit the content from any device and from anywhere.

You can add team members and they'll also be able to edit the pages now.

Deploying the blog

Now, let's deploy the front end of our website.

When we publish articles by pressing publish button they are Published to Sanity CMS.

We will deploy the website separately.

This is the beauty of modern web systems.

The content is not attached to any of our websites.

This gives so much freedom!

For example, the data from the content management can be used by our website and by our mobile applications.

Heck, we can deploy many websites with the same data!

For example, we can keep the old version of the website, deploy a new website with a new design or technology and switch to the new one if we are happy with it.

We know that A/B tests need time.

Since the content lives in one place, we could leave two websites for a long period of time, update both when we publish new content and see with the B variant performs better.

We get extensive flexibility by separating content from the presentation!

Publishing

Locate the Dashboard button on the top of the Sanity control panel and click on it.

Don't press the deploy button yet. Because we need to tell our website's address so the deployment job would know where to publish our website.

Don't worry it is just a text change that we will do a little bit later.

Leave this tab open and open a new tab or a window in your browser.

How can we have a website without hosting, right?

Let's get it for free, forever.

You will ask what's the catch here.

The catch here is that you will need to pay a small amount only if you will have huge traffic.

Most blogs would hardly reach that limit. In case they do, they could easily earn more than the amount per month.

Open https://www.netlify.com on the new tab.

Click the "Sign up" button on the top right corner.

Your best option for registering here would be with Email.

Click on Email and sign up.

Now go to the Sites tab.

There are two ways to deploy the website.

Quick or Longer and recommended.

If you are in rush to see results follow the quick deployment process from the next step.

You can replace it with long term deployment later.

If you want the long term deployment right away, jump to step 14.

Publishing with few clicks

Click Add a new site.

Select Import an existing project.

Click on Github.

In case you don't know Github is a website where people host files, mainly software source code.

In comparison to Dropbox, Google Drive and similar services Github is built around a version control system (called Git). That means that every file change, addition, deletion is registered. Therefore you have the whole history of the file transformations and you can go back to any previous versions of the repository. This is only a small example of what you get when you have a version management system that tracks your files.

You will need to log in to Github now.

Most probably you don't have a Github account so you need to sign up first.

That is as easy as signing up for any service on the internet.

Now we need to create a Github repository.

Enter a name for the repository. Probably the best name would be the domain name. You can change it later if you will change the domain name.

Apart from setting the name, we need to change the visibility of the repository from Public to Private.

As it is written in the case if you choose the Public option, anyone on the internet can see the files in the repository. This is risky if you are not doing it purposefully. Even worse, if by mistake you upload a secret key in the repository then hackers will find it...

So make sure to select the Private option

After clicking the "Create repository" button you will see this page

You'll see the following window

Scroll down to the Repository Access section.

Select the newly created repository from the list.

You will find the repository on the next page of the Netlify console.

Click on the newly created repository.

On the next and the final page

Scroll to the bottom of the page

Fill the fields.

Select the team.

There should be only one team.

Fill in the following values in the "Build settings" view of the "Continuous Delivery" section

Base directory: "frontend".

Build command: npm run build

Publish directory: "frontend/public"

This is what it will look like:

Click "Deploy Site".

Here we go! We have installed the deployment for our website.

Netlify generates a random and unique domain for your new deployment.

In this case, it is https://competent-mcclintock-5ea56e.netlify.app/

You will see that the site deployment has failed. This is expected because we don't have any files.

We need to drag and drop the files so that the deployment will be successful.

However, before dragging and dropping the files we need to add a couple of changes.

If you don't do these changes we would not be able to deploy a new version of the website from the Sanity dashboard as is shown below.

The following section will tell how to enable the one-click deployment on the Sanity dashboard.

To setup Dashboard for deployment

Here's how to set up automatic deployment of the website from Netlify.

We need to open the desktopConfig.js file

Here's what it looks like:

title: 'Live deployment',
apiId: 'changeMe',
buildHookId: 'changeMe',
name: 'changeMe',
url: 'changeMe

We need to change all the texts that have changeMe inside quotes.

After the changes, it should look like.

title: 'Live deployment',
apiId: '<The Id from the Netlify>',
buildHookId: '<The build Id from the Netlify>',
name: 'My new blog',
url: 'https://www.mynewblog.com'

Now, here is how we will get the IDs from Netlify

apiId

Login Into Netlify https://app.netlify.com/

Select the blog from the list of websites. You should have only one blog/website at this moment

Click on the "Site settings" button

Now we can copy the API ID from the Site Information table.

We will replace the apiID: 'changeMe' line with apiID: '<pasted ID>'

buildHookId

While on Netlify's "Site settings" page of the Netlify, click on the "Build & deploy" button as is shown below.

On the opened page scroll down to the "Build hooks" section.

Click on "Add build hook"

Create a book hook name it "Sanity Production"

Select "master" for the branch

Click "Save"

When you have all the steps correctly now you would be able to deploy the changes from Sanity (Without opening the Netlify console).

Uploading files to the Github repository

Now we open https://github.com.

We select the newly created repository. We can search for it by name if we use an existing Github account and we have many repositories.

Click on the repository and you will see this page.

As is highlighted on the above image click on the "uploading an existing file" link.

Let's now drop the files.

We need to drop the frontend and sanity folders and commit the changes as is shown below.

Now we can open https://app.netlify.com/ and go to the "Deploys" page to double-check the deployment would be successful.

The build will take a couple of minutes.

We can refresh the screen and wait for the green "Published" label

If we'll see Green published in the topmost deployment line then the deployment is successful. We can click on it to go to the deployment details.

And we can go to the Site overview page and open the deployed website.

Viola! The website is successfully dee website

Bonus: Adding a custom domain

The randomly generated domain is good for a demo but we need to get a custom domain or use a domain that we already own.

We need to click on the second step to configure the domain.

Here you enter the domain name that you already own or a domain name you think is available and you want to buy.

Let's add a domain name that we already own.

In step 2, we just click "Continue".

In step 3, copy the four name server entries and add them to name server lists in your domain registrar.

For example, if you use Namecheap as a registrar you can you need to select "Custom DNS" as a nameserver option and paste the 4 nameserver addresses that you have copied a step before.

Now you need to wait a bit. Domain name propagation can take time. But for many domain name providers including Namecheap, this usually happens instantly and you can see the custom domain is already applied to your website on the Netlify dashboard. You can check it by visiting the website with the custom domain address.

The HTTPS protocol should be enabled automatically. If not click on "Step 3" as is shown in the screenshot below.

Scroll down and Provision a certificate.

That's it! If everything in the process went smoothly then you should have the custom domain set up on your website with SSL encryption. Your website can now be accessed with HTTPS protocol and with the custom domain name.

Bonus: Setting up the local environment for development

This is needed only if you want to adjust the front end, add features, etc. This portion needs to be shared with the developers if you will hire them to develop new custom features for you.

Open the "frontend" folder and select .env.TEMPLATE file.

Copy it to .env file.

Note that since this file starts with a dot it is a hidden file and you might not see it. Please search for "How to see hidden files" for your operating system.

We need to add a value for the SANITY_PROJECT_ID in the copied .env file. This will tell our frontend the location of our content management system.

To get the value for SANITY_PROJECT_ID open https://www.sanity.io/manage/.

Click on your project. There should be only one project.

You will see it under the PROJECT ID text.

Copy and paste the value after SANITY_PROJECT_ID=. The value should be

SANITY_PROJECT_ID=<the 8-letter id without surrounding quotes>

Don't pay attention to GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_MEASUREMENT_ID for now.

When configured, this flag will help us to get analytics data from Google Analytics. We will configure it later in the next section.

For that open the command line on the current folder

Setup Gatsby environment by following this guide https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/tutorial/part-0/ 11.5

After this, we can launch the local development version of the frontend with the following command

gatsby develop

That will run the frontend on our local machine. The URL of the frontend will be printed on the command line.

it should be http://localhost:8000

That's it. You can make changes and see the changes in real-time.

If the command wasn't successful, then you probably forgot to deploy the GraphQL schema of your Sanity project with the sanity graphql deploy command. Check back the "Making the blog's content available for editors and for the web browsers" section.

You can find other useful Gatbsy commands here.

When you want to publish changes online you need to commit changes to a git repository and push it. The new changes will be automatically built and applied to your website.

This way you can change the styling of your blog or add new features.

Bonus: Setting up Google Analytics

Go to https://accounts.google.com/

Sign up and log in

Locale the cog icon on the bottom left corner and on the opened Menu

Select "Data Streams".

Select the website from the opened menu. If the website is not added add it like it is described here.

Click on the web entity from the list and copy the value under the "MEASUREMENT ID" text and paste to replace the value next to the GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_MEASUREMENT_ID=

Conclusion

We set up a blog. We can now add new blog posts edit the existing blog posts and publish them to the internet whenever we like to. The CMS is user-friendly and it will make sure that we are publishing content that is SEO friendly. On the other hand, our website is fast, aesthetically pleasing, and is optimized for mobile devices. So users and searches engines would love our website. What is needed from us is awesome content.

Happy blogging!

In this article, I am going to speak about Image SEO optimization. I cannot cover everything about this extensive topic. We intend to bring traffic from the Google image search and other image search engines into our blog.

First of all, images, photos, and videos make blog posts appealing. The modern blogging platform requires at least one image. It will be shown between the Title and the blog post's text.

Images can represent photos, screenshots, illustrations, and gifs (short animations). Posts can also contain Youtube videos.

Photos and videos make blog posts lively. In addition to the image on the top of the blog post, try to put images and videos in between the paragraphs of the text. The number should be proportional to the length of the text. People get tired of reading a long stack of text. Images help you to keep visitors attention on the web page.

There's another point on having many photos and videos throughout articles. Many visitors scroll the web pages to see if they want to read it or not. If you have no visuals (images, photos, videos) in your article, users might leave your site without reading it, but when some of the visuals catch their attention, they might read the text around the photo. If that will get them interested, they might go to the top and read the whole article.

When you create blog posts with the modern blogging solution, you must enter an alt attribute.

The alt is an abbreviation for the word alternative. Web browsers use the alt attribute to show an alternative text when the specified photo is not found.

Thanks to technology and webmasters, we rarely see the missing photos these days. However, the definition shows that the alt attribute should describe the image with words.

Since the alt attribute is an excellent source of the image description, search engines started to look for it to understand the photos. Hence, it is one of the important factors to rank your images for the desired keywords.

That is why you need to use the alt attribute for SEO. The modern blogging platform requires the alt attribute because it's an SEO-focused platform.

Now, a question arises. Is the alt attribute the only attribute that search engines look for to understand the image?

The answer is no.

Search engines run image recognition algorithms on the images. They correctly understand what is depicted in the images most of the time.

In addition, search engines look at paragraphs around the image to extract to understand the context in which the image is used.

We see that the alt attribute, the text around the image, and the photo itself describe the image.

It's hard to deceive the search engine and optimize images for the wrong keywords, but we can rank our images in the search engine when we clearly and correctly explain an image using related keywords for which we want to rank.

Before going to the details, let's talk about the categories of the images

Illustrations

An example of this is "Content marketing"

We see illustrations and infographics on the "first page" of the image search results page.

It is important to note that many of the top images for the query have the "Content Marketing" title inside the illustration. Although Google, Pinterest, and other image search engines to some degree can understand the context of the related illustrations with image recognition algorithms and rank them for the search term "content marketing", it is a clever idea to have the keyword on the image.

Including the focus keyword is helpful for search engines and users. For example, if there is a graph or infographics about the content marketing with a "Content Marketing" text on it, the chances are high that users will click on it. Hence it will give you more traffic if your rankings are good enough.

Let's pick another example: "Yoga exercises".

There are some photos in the search results, but illustrations dominate.

By the way, we are doing search intent research in parallel. It can help a lot on to plan the content effectively.

Illustrations are usually designed by you, your team or ordered from freelancers.

The design may involve a lot of work. You might choose to go with royalty-free photos when your blog is small and you are not in the position where you want to put a lot of effort and still risk not getting "paid" for the effort quickly, but here's one more thing to consider.

You can design the illustrations for many sizes and social media platforms. At a minimum, you can have three dimensions.

1. The original size for the blogpost and many major social media platforms - 1200 x 628 or any other landspace size
2. Instagram - 1000 x 1000
3. Pinterest - 1000 x 1500

You can post to Facebook and Instagram with one publish. Additionally, in the case of infographics, you can create long-form Pinterest infographics.

So from the SEO perspective, we got some hints on when you need to use these images and how to design them.

Stock and royalty-free photos

Let us put Stock photos and royalty-free photos in one category. A simple web search will give all about the two kinds of photos. Since we are serious about SEO, we use web search for answers, right? 😉 I think that the most important thing not to overlook is the licensing. There are many licenses of royalty-free images that require attribution. Be careful not to be caught on this.

From the SEO perspective, these photos are publicly available for all content producers. If you look at the download numbers of great photos on Unsplash you can get an idea of how many times the same photo could be used in publicly available projects.

You need to consider that other websites possibly use the same photos you use.

Here's an example. Two websites are selling the same stock photo and they get a similar "score" so they are neighbours in the image search results.

Should you use these photos for your blog? Sure!

Of course, if you have own photos on the topic in decent quality, it is preferable to use them.

Now let's see how we can boost these photos. Of course, if you have a better alt tag, it will help you. It is a good idea to clearly describe what's in the photo.

Own photos

If you have great photos please feel free to use them. They are unique which is a great ranking factor for search engines. Also, it is hard to find a stock photo that is 100% close to the photo idea that you want to have.

Also, be it a photo on a website, on social media, or footage on a video, chances are high that people would instantly recognize stock photos and footage. This can reduce the perceived value of the content no matter how great is the stock photo or the video. You need to take this into attention because optimizing for user experience is a crucial part of internet marketing and it is many times can be taken into account by search algorithms

As in all cases, when you are using your photos don't forget to write a great alt text.

Conclusion

This article has covered the bare basics of image SEO optimization. Hopefully, this will give a few details on choosing visuals for the blog before publishing the content. Of course, you can optimize the blog later. However, it is best to have an SEO-optimized blog post right from the beginning.

I am going to tell you why I think that every website owner should think about SEO and why they need to build a strong foundation for SEO on their websites

I started my career as a software engineer. For me, it was cool because I could create things myself only by having a computer and make it available to people only by having access to the internet (there is no need for expensive manufacturing like for physical products and complicated or expensive sales channels, logistics, etc.)

The first thing I made and marketed was a free tool for software engineers. I created an SEO-optimized landing page for it using modern web technologies and launched it. Of course, I did a promotion on the industry-centric websites, and I got a traffic spike that faded after some time. Yes, It’s not surprising that the product launch promotion campaign’s organic traffic does fade when the hype is gone. The same is true for an ad with a limited budget, the traffic fades when the whole budget is spent.

One of the organic traffic mechanisms that I thought would work without a hassle was Github. If you don’t know about it. It's a marketplace for free software. Contrary to my expectations, the traffic from the platform was almost non-existent. So I was joking that you could put your secret software source codes on Github. Without marketing, hardly will anybody discover it. This is a joke, don't try this at home.

It was a free tool, I didn’t have any plans to monetize it from the beginning and I left it there.

So I forgot about it.

One day, 3 months, or 6 months later. I decided to check Google Analytics and what I saw was unexpected. I saw consistent traffic from Google. This is all in the case that I didn’t do anything for the website during this period.

That was the point that I realized how important it is to have an SEO-optimized website.

Once you have the SEO right, the website will start to work for you.

When I checked the number of installations, I saw a reasonably high conversion rate.

Yes, the traffic from search engines is warm traffic, and that’s another huge benefit of it.

So I came to the conclusion that if you know how to have a proper SEO then you will have constant traffic and conversions.

But there’s one big disadvantage in SEO. SEO is a slow game. That means that every improvement takes effect after a while.

The time is longer for the new websites. So if you want to launch a digital campaign for your product, you can’t just sit and wait for results. There come other forms of digital marketing.

So I immersed myself in the topics of SEO and digital marketing and used the knowledge to build several digital products.

Having created a lot of websites and digital assets, I decided to share my learnings and tools I use with you, which will hopefully help you to get more traffic, and if you haven’t one - create one and generate traffic.

Follow the blog for more posts about digital marketing.