4 Alternatives to Google AdWords

Many think that Google AdWords is the only tool dedicated and available to perform a study such as a keyword search, but it isn't so, today I refute this idea by collecting some alternatives that, although are not equal to Google AdWords, at least encourage us to make good keyword analysis for the SEO of our website.

Going back a bit, for those unfamiliar with the main features and tools of Google AdWords, we can find a very simple interface yet complete in every sense.

- AdWords appearance has changed, however there is a chance of returning to the old design;
- allows you to place a phrase or keyword, a web site and use the categories;
- for a better keywords search, you can apply filters such as location, language and add custom fields (competition, local or global monthly searches, CPC, Ad share, etc.);
- displays keyword ideas in columns with the amount of local and global monthly searches and approximate CPC;
- you can download keyword ideas, search results in a format to open with Excel.

Having recalled and refreshed the memory a little with the characteristics of AdWords, now it is time to learn about other options both free and paid.

Google AdWords Alternatives

Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing may not be the tool that we had first thought of, however it wants to provide the best conditions for studying keywords.

After we register, to access the tool, go to Diagnostics & Tools and click on the second option on the list: Keyword Research.

SEMRush: Other freemium alternative that displays a very complete report of a particular keyword or website. However, it has limitations and if you opt for a PRO recurring plan you need to pay a monthly membership from $69.95 per month.

Ubersuggest: This nice and simple online tool searches keywords suggestion as well as potential titles for an article. Personally, I recommend it 100%.

Keyword Eye: If you are looking to perform a keyword research on a particular region, Keyword Eye will be your help. It also has the option of requesting the display of search volume or AdWords competition and a full report of anchor text, keywords and domain.

At first it offers a free plan with limitations and to enjoy all other benefits, we have to pay $9.99 per month.

How to Add Google Analytics to Blogger

Google Analytics is a platform created with the purpose of helping us to track the number of visits and page views on our blog, which also uses several filters to check exactly from where the visitors are coming via standard or custom reports.

Google Analytics is the leading free tool that has a good relationship with the internet marketing and offers suggestions and improvements or benefits for our website.

As Analytics is part of the variety of Google tools like Blogger, many bloggers still don't know if it is possible to add the tracking code in Blogger. Implementing analytics in Blogger is very quick and easy, so you don't need to be experts or web developers. Here's a small guide for placing the Google Analytics tracking ID on our blog.

Implementing Google Analytics on Blogger

1. Do you have a Google Analytics account? Then it's perfect. If you don't have one, please Register.
2. Within the account, we'll go to Admin and in the Property column, click the menu, then click Create new property, where we enter the information from the website.

3. Click on "Get Tracking ID" and it will provide a box with a code, select and copy the code (CTRL + C).

4. Now let's go to our Blogger account.
5. Look for your blog and click on it, then go to Template > click the Edit HTML button and paste the code previously generated in Analytics before the </head> tag (CTRL + F in order to find it).

And this would be the entire procedure. Within about 24 hours, we shall see the first statistics of our blog in Google Analytics, otherwise check the following:

- Double check that the code has no spaces or characters.
- Doesn't have errors in the configuration
- There are no poor implementation of the filters.
- The Flash plugin is working or javascript is enabled.
- You will have minor issues if you are receiving visits from China (this conflict is not yet solved, according to Google).

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of your Blog

The Alexa Rank in its time may have been pretty important for the SEO, however, these days is already losing its importance due to the changes in the algorithm that Google applies from time to time.

The company displays information about visitors of a website, which in turn, classifies this in a ranking, generating estimated statistics about visitor traffic and links pointing to the website. In a few words, the Alexa Rank does not directly affect SEO, but rather serves as a reference for measuring the traffic type, popularity by country and other metrics.

If you would like to enrich or have a good Alexa Rank of your website, here some ways to do it, with short-term results.

5 Ways to Increase the Alexa Rank

Daily Content: Try to publish at least 2 articles per day and within a month you may start to see some changes in the Alexa ranking.

Install Alexa Rank widgets: Besides notifying about the results of your Alexa ranking, they will also provide an estimate of how many backlinks your website has. There are three types of widgets: button with ranking and links, the other one with the ranking only, and finally, a graph with daily records of visits. Traffic Widgets

Alexa Toolbar: From experience, I would recommend installing the Alexa Toolbar, because once we access the website, Alexa will count this visit and thus, we may get better results in the ranking. Besides this, the toolbar will also provide you more information about the backlinks of a web site, popular pages, reviews, and more.

Request a review: To calculate the Alexa ranking of a website, not only the amount of daily and monthly visits will make a site popular, but the number of reviews or opinions made with stars will also play a role in the ranking. Ask your readers to do a review or purchase Alexa opinions about your website.

Number of backlinks: As I said before, the number of visits and reviews about a website used to calculate the Alexa rank, and the total number of quality backlinks, may increase the likelihood of achieving a higher ranking for your website.

On-Page SEO Tips for Blogger

We know that SEO Off Page refers to the search engine optimization techniques that can be done outside of your website, such as link wheels, reviews, social bookmarking, social media (references and followers), sidebar links, among other techniques. However, without a proper on-page seo optimization, all would sum up to a non-optimized webpage without quality, which will not reach the traffic expected to have. This is mostly because search engines (especially Google) pay much attention to the alt and title tags (for images), meta tags, internal links, robots and so on, in order to display the content of your web page to the user who made a specific query in the search.

To never fall in this depression of search engine optimization, you can choose a good and reliable blog platform like Blogger. If you are working only on Blogger, here are some on-page optimization tips that might help you to become successful in the blogging world and increase the daily traffic to your blog.

Basic On-Page SEO Tips For Blogger

Optimization of the robots.txt file: besides alerting Google search engine, this file also helps us to prevent certain pages being indexed by Google in order to protect our blog against duplicate content issues.

Title optimization: In the default blogger template, post titles are not optimized properly for the search engines. To solve this, we need to touch some code in the design and optimize both page and post titles.

Image optimization: Whether your blog is about pictures or images as general topics, by simply adding a keyword related to articles, compressing the image and putting the title="" and alt="' tags, we would be optimizing SEO On-Page a little bit more.

Internal links: Internal links within posts on our blog will not only increase page views but will also help us to be well ranked in search engines.

Blog's loading time: When you start with a blog either new or old, it's important to offer a user experience filled with a fast loading time. Search engines give higher priority to a faster blog than to a slow or saturated one.

Using Google Webmaster Tools: After making sure that your blog is 100% SEO, this amazing Google tool will provide you support with both fast indexing and broken links, HTML improvements, page errors and many other specific suggestions for your website.

Got any other ideas or thoughts about natural and positive techniques to improve the On Page SEO on a web page?

Express them in a comment!

Adding a Meta Description to Blogger

An important part of a good SEO is the implementation of meta tags, which are commonly located in the header of our website, that are being, in the same time, invisible to users visiting the site. Well, to be more succinct, these tags have only one purpose: to include information about the page such as author name, date, key word, description, title, among others.

However, here we will only mention one, which is the meta description in Blogger. This description will appear as a fragment in the search results and as a description when sharing on Google+, Facebook and other social networks. A clear and precise description increases the chances of getting more clicks or visits.
As we will work only on the Blogger platform, here I will leave a little guide to easily add a meta description.

Meta Description in Blogger

The first thing we will do is going to our Blogger dashboard and from there, go to Settings > Search preferences > Meta Tags > Description and click on Edit.

Then check the box "Yes" to enable search description. Finally, click the "Save Changes" button.

Adding Meta Description To individual Posts

Now we will focus on adding the meta description to individual pages. Simply edit the page or post, look for the Search Description setting, and there we enter the text and save by clicking the Done button.

And that's it. However it is best to test if it works and we will do so with the MetaChecker online tool, where we only have to introduce the url of a post or page, click Analyze and then it will show the results, including a complete analysis of keywords, on-page seo , meta tags, URLs, current server status and a rating bar that goes from Horror to Excellent.

If none of the meta descriptions appear (rarely fails), we can do the process manually, but it requires us to touch a bit of code. In this case, go to Template > Edit HTML and insert before <b:skin><![CDATA[ the following code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription != &quot;&quot;'>
  <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='description'/>
</b:if>

Of course, we will use again the previously mentioned tool to ensure that the description is placed correctly and if all goes well, our blog would be ready to face a good SEO.

Page peel effect using jQuery

Page Peel is a popular page flip effect that when your cursor is passing over it, will show "what's behind" as if it would be a book. There are many ways to do this, many of them use flash files which makes it less customizable, however, the one that we will see in this post is made with jQuery.

Usually, the content that is "behind", is an image for subscribing to feed, but you can put any image and link to any page.

Demo

You can see an example in this demo blog.

How to Add the Page Curl Effect on Blogger

1. Log in to your Blogger dashsboard, select your blog > then go to Template > Edit HTML

2. Click anywhere inside the code area and search for the below tag by pressing the CTRL + F keys:

</head>

3. Just before </head> copy and paste this script:

<script src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'/>

<script>
//<![CDATA[
$(document).ready(function(){
$("#pageflip").hover(function() {
$("#pageflip img , .msg_block").stop()
.animate({
width: '307px',
height: '319px'
}, 500);
} , function() {
$("#pageflip img").stop()
.animate({
width: '50px',
height: '52px'
}, 220);
$(".msg_block").stop()
.animate({
width: '50px',
height: '50px'
}, 200);
});
});
//]]>
</script>

4. Then before ]]></b:skin> (CTRL + F to find it - if necessary, click on the left arrow) paste these styles:

/* Page Flip
----------------------------------------------- */
#pageflip {
position: relative;
right: 0;
top: 0px; /* Change to 30px if you have the navbar (navigation bar) */
float: right;
z-index:9;
}
#pageflip img {
width: 50px;
height: 52px;
z-index: 99;
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 0;
-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;
}
#pageflip .msg_block {
width: 50px;
height: 50px;
overflow: hidden;
position: absolute;
right: 0;
top: 0;
background: url(http://oi44.tinypic.com/2hheno6.jpg) no-repeat right top;
}
#pageflipMirror {
position: static;
right: 0;
top: 0;
float: right;
}

5. Finally, paste after <body> tag or if you can't find it, after this code:

<body expr:class='&quot;loading&quot; + data:blog.mobileClass'>

The following code:

<div id='pageflip'>
<a href='http://name-of_your_blog.blogspot.com/atom.xml'>
<img src='http://oi40.tinypic.com/10fqnav.jpg' style='width: 50px; height: 52px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden;'/></a>
<div class='msg_block' style='width: 50px; height: 50px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden; '/>
</div>

- In blue you will see a URL - this is the URL of the image that, in this case, is an invitation to subscribe to the feed. You can change it later to another (should be of the same size).
- You need to replace the url in red with the address of your blog, that will be the link to the blog's feed when the user clicks on the image behind, but you can put any URL in case you want to link to another page.

6. And that's it. To save the changes, click the Save template button.
Remember that this Page Peel effect uses jQuery, so you should only have one version of it, and if you use Scriptaculous or Mootools, you should apply some changes.

Customize the scroll bar (scrollbar) with JScrollPane

JScrollPane is a jQuery script that allows you to change the blog' scroll bar, ie the browser scrollbar.
Although we can use CSS to change it, the problem is that is not standardized, because with CSS we can make it work only in Chrome and Safari; and in the case of Internet Explorer it also has its own code but obviously it only works in that browser (I don't know which versions). So what we will do then is to give a new look to the scrollbar but by using jQuery, so the change will be visible in all browsers.

Demo

You can see an example in this test blog where the scroll bar has a different shape and color.

How to change the scrollbar on Blogger

1. Go to Template > Edit HTML and before </head> paste this code:

<script src='//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'/>

<style>
.jspContainer {overflow: hidden;position: relative;}.jspPane {position: absolute;}
.jspVerticalBar {position: absolute;top: 0;right: 0;width: 16px;height: 100%;background: #ccc;}
.jspHorizontalBar {position: absolute;bottom: 0;left: 0;width: 100%;height: 16px;background: #ccc;}
.jspVerticalBar *,.jspHorizontalBar * {margin: 0;padding: 0;}
.jspCap {display: none;}.jspHorizontalBar .jspCap {float: left;}

.jspTrack {
background: #fff; /* background color of the bar */
position: relative;
}
.jspDrag {
background: #CC0000; /* Color of the scrollbar */
position: relative;
top: 0;
left: 0;
cursor: pointer;
}
.jspHorizontalBar .jspTrack,
.jspHorizontalBar .jspDrag {
float: left;
height: 100%;
}
.jspArrow {
background: #888; /* The color of the scrollbar limits */
text-indent: -20000px;
display: block;
cursor: pointer;
}
.jspArrow.jspDisabled {
cursor: default;
background: #333; /* Color of the limits when the srollbar is reaching them */
}
.jspVerticalBar .jspArrow {
height: 16px;
}
.jspHorizontalBar .jspArrow {
width: 16px;
float: left;
height: 100%;
}
.jspVerticalBar .jspArrow:focus {outline: none;}.jspCorner {background: #eeeef4;float: left;height: 100%;}* html .jspCorner {margin: 0 -3px 0 0;}
html, body {
height: 100%;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
#blog-container {
height: 100%;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
overflow: auto;
}
</style>
<script>
//<![CDATA[
/*! Copyright (c) 2013 Brandon Aaron (http://brandonaaron.net)
* Licensed under the MIT License (LICENSE.txt).
* Version: 3.1.3
*/

(function (factory) {
if ( typeof define === 'function' && define.amd ) {
define(['jquery'], factory);
} else if (typeof exports === 'object') {
module.exports = factory;
} else {
// Browser globals
factory(jQuery);
}
}(function ($) {

var toFix = ['wheel', 'mousewheel', 'DOMMouseScroll', 'MozMousePixelScroll'];
var toBind = 'onwheel' in document || document.documentMode >= 9 ? ['wheel'] : ['mousewheel', 'DomMouseScroll', 'MozMousePixelScroll'];
var lowestDelta, lowestDeltaXY;

if ( $.event.fixHooks ) {
for ( var i = toFix.length; i; ) {
$.event.fixHooks[ toFix[--i] ] = $.event.mouseHooks;
}
}

$.event.special.mousewheel = {
setup: function() {
if ( this.addEventListener ) {
for ( var i = toBind.length; i; ) {
this.addEventListener( toBind[--i], handler, false );
}
} else {
this.onmousewheel = handler;
}
},

teardown: function() {
if ( this.removeEventListener ) {
for ( var i = toBind.length; i; ) {
this.removeEventListener( toBind[--i], handler, false );
}
} else {
this.onmousewheel = null;
}
}
};

$.fn.extend({
mousewheel: function(fn) {
return fn ? this.bind("mousewheel", fn) : this.trigger("mousewheel");
},

unmousewheel: function(fn) {
return this.unbind("mousewheel", fn);
}
});

function handler(event) {
var orgEvent = event || window.event,
args = [].slice.call(arguments, 1),
delta = 0,
deltaX = 0,
deltaY = 0,
absDelta = 0,
absDeltaXY = 0,
fn;
event = $.event.fix(orgEvent);
event.type = "mousewheel";
if ( orgEvent.wheelDelta ) { delta = orgEvent.wheelDelta; }
if ( orgEvent.detail ) { delta = orgEvent.detail * -1; }
if ( orgEvent.deltaY ) {
deltaY = orgEvent.deltaY * -1;
delta = deltaY;
}
if ( orgEvent.deltaX ) {
deltaX = orgEvent.deltaX;
delta = deltaX * -1;
}
if ( orgEvent.wheelDeltaY !== undefined ) { deltaY = orgEvent.wheelDeltaY; }
if ( orgEvent.wheelDeltaX !== undefined ) { deltaX = orgEvent.wheelDeltaX * -1; }
absDelta = Math.abs(delta);
if ( !lowestDelta || absDelta < lowestDelta ) { lowestDelta = absDelta; }
absDeltaXY = Math.max(Math.abs(deltaY), Math.abs(deltaX));
if ( !lowestDeltaXY || absDeltaXY < lowestDeltaXY ) { lowestDeltaXY = absDeltaXY; }
fn = delta > 0 ? 'floor' : 'ceil';
delta = Math[fn](delta / lowestDelta);
deltaX = Math[fn](deltaX / lowestDeltaXY);
deltaY = Math[fn](deltaY / lowestDeltaXY);
args.unshift(event, delta, deltaX, deltaY);
return ($.event.dispatch || $.event.handle).apply(this, args);
}
}));

/*
* jScrollPane - v2.0.0beta5 - 2010-09-18
* http://jscrollpane.kelvinluck.com/
* Copyright (c) 2010 Kelvin Luck
* Dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses.
*/
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//]]>
</script>

<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.scroll-pane').jScrollPane({showArrows: true});
});
</script>

2. Then locate this tag:

<body>

Or this line:

<body expr:class='&quot;loading&quot; + data:blog.mobileClass'>

Under any of these two add this:

<div class='scroll-pane' id='blog-container'>

3. Finally search for the </body> and above it paste this:

</div>

Save the changes and that's all. In green you will see where you can change the scrollbar colors and its different areas, or add other styles, such as shadows, rounded corners, etc..
If you want the top and bottom limits to not appear (as in the example) then remove what is in red.

Remember that the script uses jQuery, so if you already have it, then don't put the script again (the first line of code). If you are using Scriptaculous or Mootools, then you should make some slight changes in order to make it work.

Maybe the code might appear long but better add the scripts directly in the template, so the scripts will always be available and load faster. Regardless of all of this the end result is quite aesthetic, don't you think?