Vlogger Grace Helbig currently has over 2.1 million subscribers and growing-  How does she do it? These days everyone loves going to YouTube to find great content, but how do you standout?  More often than not though, people will sometimes just make one or two videos, get frustrated, and then abandon YouTube, to become purely a viewer instead of a creator.  We reached out to some of our favorite vloggers for some advice.

We asked them – “If you had one piece of advice for a beginner vlogger, what would it be?”

As always, we received a ton of great advice, and we can’t wait to share it with you!

So here you have it, the best advice for beginner vloggers from pro vloggers!

Jimmy Diresta

https://www.youtube.com/user/jimmydiresta

“ I often tell beginners to keep consistent and to post videos at regular intervals. Even when no one is watching the audience will build slowly, but it will build.”

Carah Amelie

https://www.youtube.com/user/carahamelie03

“Make videos because you enjoy it and are passionate about it.. And NOT for any other reason. Subscribers will come.. Along with all else. “

Megan MacKay

https://www.youtube.com/user/MeganMacKay

“My advice for vloggers just starting out would be to zero in on making content you’re really proud of. Make content you’d want to watch, because making it is gonna be a lot of work and you’re gonna be spending a lot of time with the material. You might as well be enjoying yourself while you’re doing it. I also think that the most successful YouTubers do what they do because they love the community on YouTube and feel a strong pull to contribute something to it.  If you’re thinking about getting into vlogging purely because you want to be rich or famous, you’re missing out on the coolest part of the job. YouTubers get to connect with people from all over the world and talk about their passions and ideas. Like, are you kidding me?? That’s so cool!! I think that has to be a primary motivator for someone to get onto YouTube, because it’s so integral to the experience – for viewers AND for creators. “

The Bells plus one

Marsai Bell

https://www.youtube.com/user/Marsaib2009/

“If I had one piece of advice for new vloggers/bloggers it would be to be very consistent with whatever outlet you choose to do. If you are a reviewer make sure you have things to review, if you want to Vlog your life… Stop procrastinating and DO IT! Also be yourself and try to upload quality content. Be the best YOU..YOU can be.. On YOUTube! “

The post Vlogger Round-up: Beginner Advice and Tips appeared first on AmpliFound.

I’m not trying to scare you away from using the metric, but I want you to understand how it is calculated so you can make more informed decisions using it.

Why can this metric be misleading?

Google Analytics calculates time on site with this formula: the time of the first hit on the last page minus the first hit on the first page. Sound a little confusing? Don’t worry, this confused me, too – let’s break it down using visuals.

In the visual, a user lands on page 1 and spends 5 minutes there before moving on to page 2. The user spends 5 minutes on page 2, then moves to page 3. The user spends 15 minutes on page 3 before leaving the site (clicking an outbound link, closing the browser, or typing in a new URL).

So the time of the last hit on the last page is at 7:10PM. The time of the first hit on the first page is at 7:00PM. This means the total visit will be recorded as 10 minutes long. But we know that the user spent an additional 15 minutes on the last page.

Why isn’t this counted?

Google Analytics needs something to latch on to. Usually this is a pageview (it can also be an event). Since there is no pageview following the final page, there isn’t anything for Google Analytics to calculate this metric.

Use time on page instead

Time on page will give you an estimate for an individual page. Keep in mind, it has the same problems that time on site has. You can combat this by considering the exit rate of the page.

When the exit rate of the page is low, you should have more confidence in this metric. When the exit rate of the page is high, you should have less confidence in this metric.

Put simply, when users frequently exit from the page, time on page will be unreliable. When visitors generally don’t exit from the page, time on page is more reliable.

Did you find learning more about this metric to be helpful? What other questions do you have about understanding the flow of traffic and amount of time your readers spend on your blog? Let us know in the comments below! Maybe you’ll see your question answered in an upcoming AmpliFound post!

The post Analytics for Bloggers: Why Time On Site is Misleading appeared first on AmpliFound.

According to the Google Knowledge Graph:

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a business metric used to evaluate factors that are crucial to the success of an organization. KPIs differ per organization; business KPIs may be net revenue or a customer loyalty metric, while government might consider unemployment rates (http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/key-performance-indicator).

Here’s how you can identify KPIs for your blog:

Identify your business goal

In order to identify your KPIs, you must first focus on your high-level business goal that you want to accomplish. As a blogger, start by asking yourself this existential question: “For what purpose does my blog exist?”  A couple of examples of answers to this question might be, “to make money from advertising” or “to establish myself as an expert in my field.”  Once you’ve realized why your blog exists, you can define your business goals and dictate your KPIs.

Define Your KPIs

Next, identify the metrics that tie to your business goals and allow you to measure the performance of your blog.  These are your KPIs.  For example, if your business goal is to establish yourself as an expert in your field, your KPI is the metric that will help you define the success of that business goal.

An example of a KPI that could be used to measure how well you have established yourself as an expert in your field is “Social Shares of Articles On My Blog.”  You can identify yourself as an expert in your field by measuring how many times articles on your blog have been shared on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.  You may even set a tangible goal such as 50 Social Shares, because Person X is an expert and Person X usually achieves about 50 Social Shares as well.

Identify your Key Metric and Assign a Value to it

Once you’ve defined your KPI, you can tie it to a metric in your analytics.  For example, the “Increase Social Shares of Articles on my Blog” KPI may be directly tied to the “Social Shares” metric that you have defined as a Goal in Google Analytics.  Assign a monetary value to this metric to help you determine how its performance affects your bottom line.

The performance of this metric is the key to giving you the opportunity to brag about your blog and say “My blog is successful, and here’s how I know.”

Report and Filter the Noise

Use your KPIs to guide your reporting on analytics for your blog.  Your clearly defined KPI will help you filter out all the noise created by superfluous data that you have collected in Google Analytics, and focus on the metrics that matter.  Focus on your end goal and work backwards to find out what behaviors people used to reach your end goal.

Iterate and Improve

When you report the performance of your blog, if you focus on your end goal and work backwards, you can then focus in on the potential for improvement in the future.  If you have hit the mark that you’ve defined as your goal, then great job!  Wave your flag and capitalize on your success!  If you discover that have not hit the mark, use this as an opportunity to find out why.  Then, iterate and improve your blog and its content.  The existence of KPIs can be the deciding factor of success for your blog.

The post How to Identify KPIs for Your Blog appeared first on AmpliFound.

There’s been a lot written about this update already, and many industry bloggers are dubbing it “Mobile-ocalypse,” which I. personally, think is just a bit hyperbolic. Simply put, this update is going to help sites that perform well on mobile devices rank higher, and those that don’t potentially rank lower. Nevertheless, I’m going to dish out a few helpful tips any blogger can use to ensure their website is in Google’s good graces when this algorithm shift hits prime time.

Above all, my advice to bloggers is — I’m quoting the great Douglas Adams’ seminal work of science fiction The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy here — DON’T PANIC. Cleaning up aspects of your blog that happen to be mobile-unfriendly doesn’t have to be a life or death situation. Sure, it may seem like there’s a million complex things that can go wrong and an equal number of steps to correct them, but I’m here to help make this a painless procedure. So, let’s take a deep breath and dive right in, shall we?

1.) Take Advantage of Google’s Tools

If you follow blogs that regularly write about the search industry, Google’s decision to supercharge their mobile algorithm shouldn’t come as a surprise. They’ve been slowly rolling out a number of tools and reports, as well as outright saying that they’re thinking mobile first when it comes to major business decisions. And even if you don’t read up on search, there are still a few very simple things you can do to make sure you’re prepared to tackle the shift when it rolls out. Take advantage of the resources below to get a pulse on how your site is currently performing in mobile search before making any serious changes. 

• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool: This is perhaps the most important tool in your arsenal. Entering your URL into this tool either confirms that your site is already mobile friendly (and you’ve dodged a bullet) or it let’s you know that you have some work to do in terms of mobile optimization. If this is the case, Google will actually list out the aspects that you need to correct and give you customized tips based on whatever CMS you use (WordPress, Magento, Blogger, etc.) In addition, this tool can help validate your efforts toward total mobile optimization domination by comparing the test results before and after you make changes.

• Google’s Page Speed Insights: Another huge factor in the battle against mobile unfriendliness, is page speed. Google announced all the way back in 2010 that site speed was to become a factor in their algorithm, but in this atmosphere of mobile domination, that ranking signal’s dial is cranked up to 11. To see if your site has the need for speed, simply type your URL and hit analyze. Google will give your page a score out of 100, list aspects of your site that may be slowing it down, AND details directions on how to fix it.

2.) Isolate Mobile Traffic with Google Analytics

Using data from your analytics suite is a must when making any decision regarding your site. Deciding where to prioritize mobile optimization depends on what percentage of your traffic is attributed to smartphones and tablets. For example, If only 5% of your overall organic traffic comes from mobile devices, then you might be able to focus on more pressing matters for your website, allowing any in depth mobile optimizations to take a temporary backseat.

On the other hand, you can also use analytics to find the top visited pages for mobile users and focus on optimizing those first, since they will have the greatest impact. Our friends over at Seer Interactive have created a handy dashboard for Google Analytics that will segment mobile/tablet traffic to your site, displaying it conveniently in a various charts and graphs for your viewing. To download this dashboard, simply click here while logged into your Google Analytics account, and select the view you want to apply it to.

3.) Keep Your CMS Up to Date

There are 3 types of mobile websites: responsive, dynamic serving, and separate URLs. Today, the most common one, which is also Google’s official recommendation, is responsive web design. Essentially, a responsive website serves the same HTML code on the same URL regardless of whatever device a reader is using to view your page. The catch is, a responsive website will render the display differently based on the screen size of the user’s device, ensuring your content looks great on everything from a full size desktop monitor or a laptop, to an Android tablet or iPhone 6, and everything in between.

Luckily, nearly all content management systems (CMS) — such as WordPress, Blogger, Joomla and Drupal — have plenty of templates that are responsive right out of the box. Even these services’ default layouts have committed to being responsive…that is, as long as you make sure you have the latest version of that template installed.

Keeping up and installing any updates, including plugins, is a pivotal step toward ensuring your site is able to be viewed optimally on any screen size or device. Not doing so may increase the likelihood of decreased rankings in Google’s mobile search results.

The good news is, it’s easy to update your site’s templates and the latest version of the CMS core software package. In WordPress, which is by far one of the most popular blogging platforms, simply login to your dashboard and select “Updates” from the menu to see if you have the latest and greatest version, theme, and plugins available.

Now, Go Forth!

Armed with these tips, you’ll have a firm grasp on the basic facets of mobile optimization for your blog. Roll up your sleeves, grab your Google login information, and find a comfortable chair (and your towel), because it’s time to show this mobile search algorithm what you’re made of. And if you have any additional mobile optimization tips, tricks, or questions, feel free to let us know in the comments section. Although I can already tell you, the correct answer to all your mobile concerns, the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, is 42.

The post Don’t Panic: The Blogger’s Guide to Mobile Optimization appeared first on AmpliFound.

As a photographer, I get asked for camera recommendations all the time and, unless someone is trying to break into a niche area like wildlife or sports, my answer is pretty consistent. For the purpose of this article, I am assuming that:

1. You are not trying to break  the bank and
2. This may be your first foray into the world of DSLRs

First off, you have to accept that there is a learning curve and the payoff is worth it. If you don’t want to learn how to use a proper camera, don’t try to cut corners and buy a digital point-and-shoot, just use your phone. Seriously, your smartphone has comparable technology and it has one major advantage; it is always with you. A lot of photography is about capturing moments and your camera phone makes that a lot easier.

Tips for Buying Your First DSLR

Okay, now that we have that established let’s talk about DSLRs. Full disclosure, I am a Nikon man, but when it comes to recommendations I am agnostic. Stick with Nikon or Canon and you won’t go wrong.

It’s Not the Camera… It’s the Lens

The main thing you need to remember is that the camera is not necessarily the investment… The glass (lenses) that you acquire over time are the investment. Camera bodies come and go and the moving parts have a shelf life just like an automobile, but a lens that is well cared for will last you a lifetime. When you buy a camera and start to buy lenses, you are committing to that brand’s lens ecosystem. Lenses are not swappable between brands. The availability of used Nikon and Canon lenses is huge, so I would definitely stick to one of these brands.

For your first DLSR, I would look at used models on Amazon as they will be covered by a basic warranty. As of the time of this publication, you can get great starter models for under $350. For example, the Canon EOS Rebel T5 is listed as low as $320 used with a lens.

Canon EOS Rebel T5

For a little more money you can get increased image quality with the Nikon D3300. It is listed currently at $395 used with a lens.

Nikon D3300

In Your Blog Photography Prime: Why You Want Prime Lenses

The lenses these cameras come with are okay, but what really makes these cameras shine is a nice prime lens. You know those portraits you love with the subject nice and sharp in the foreground and a blurry background? Those were taken with a large aperture prime lens and you can get one at a very reasonable price. The Nikon 35mm 1.8 lens can be bought used for $155. These lenses offer the shallow depth of field I mentioned earlier and the added bonus of performing much much better in low light.

Nikon 35mm 1.8

The combination of your new DSLR and this lens will allow you to create the images you have been drooling over on your favorite foodie blog. The kit lens the DSLR comes with will be okay but a nice prime lens will ease a lot of frustration.

What DOESN’T Matter?

You probably noticed that I didn’t spend any time talking about specs and megapixels. They really don’t matter. A decent DSLR, a nice lens, and practice is all you need to create amazing images.

Have you taken your blog’s photography to the next level? Are there any DSLR and lens-buying tips you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

The post Best Cameras For Bloggers appeared first on AmpliFound.

So what is a content audit? A content audit is a process for creating an inventory of  pages on your site and evaluating the content on them  to determine if editing, revision, or additional copywriting is needed. It’s also helpful with prioritizing pages that can be optimized with keywords, meta data and internal linking in order to help increase traffic to the page, conversions and search engine visibility.

When we talk about optimizing a page, a content audit can be completed to optimize the following entities for specific blog posts or pages on your site to help improve search performance of these pages for targeted keywords.

I find one of the easiest ways to get started on a content audit is to start with an Excel template that will showcase the various  posts or pages that you will be  revamping. Using Excel makes it easier to uniformly update the content yourself or for sending over to your site developers for easy instruction and execution. So, start by opening up Excel and adding the following columns:

Now that you’ve created your excel document, we will go over a few free, easy to use tools that will help you organize where to begin with improving the content on your site or looking at specific blog post that you can further enrich with targeted keywords to help get them ranking.  If you’re looking to perform a full content audit on all of your site’s pages (as long as it’s not an overwhelming amount of them), the best way to get started is to simply pull your sitemap and place all pages listed in it, into the Excel document for you to get started with revamping content.

First, you’re going to want to spend some time determining which keywords your site is ranking for already and which pages are ranking for which keywords.

Keywords

Again, whether your blog has been around for a long time or you’re just starting out, focusing on researching keywords and trending terms is incredibly helpful. Not only can narrowing your focus help you to create content that people want, but it also ensures that your content is optimized to show up in Google searches when your audience searches for specific topics.  To see what keywords your site is ranking for or  to determine opportunities for new keywords you may want to rank for, you can use SEMrush, a tool that can give you a number of keyword insights. .

•  With a free SEMrush account, you’re limited to the amount of data you can see, but if you have enough content on your site, you can gather great insights into the type of keywords you’re ranking for.
• If your site is newer, SEMrush might not have much available data for you, take a look at other blogs that fall in the realm of the same type of content you want to write about and see what terms they are ranking for. From there you can determine the best keywords to help you fully optimize underperforming posts.
• If you’re looking at revamping certain sections of your blog or specific content topics, you can use this easy tool to search for keywords related to the section and determine if any pages of yours are ranking for terms. If they aren’t, then you should definitely include them in your content audit.

After seeing which keywords your site is already ranking for, you’re going to want to take a look at which blog post or pages are performing best with reader engagement. Which posts seem to be gathering the most social shares, links, or mentions from other bloggers or the most page sessions? Which posts don’t seem to be doing anything, or aren’t fully optimized for the topic of discussion? Here are a few different tools you can check out to start pinning down which posts are underperforming and leave room for improvement.

Backlinks

Determine which posts on your site are being shared by other bloggers or other sites linking to your post from their site.  Some free tools you can use are:

• Opensiteexplorer.com – Either put in the URL of your site (Example: www.amplifound.com) or the URL of a specific landing page (Example: http://amplifound.com/seo/links-matter-seo/)

Social Shares

To pull social shares across all the different social channels you can use tools like:

• Sharedcount.com – simply input the URL of the post you are analyzing to pull up if you have any shares. This tool will look at shares across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google +1, Linkedin and Stumbleupon.

• Sharetally.co is another suggested tool that dives into even more social channels and shows you the various ways people are engaging with your content.

Visits to Site or Certain Pages

If you have Google Analytics set up for your blog, you’ll be able to find out how many visits each of your posts are  getting based on organic searches or searches based on what your audience is searching for by using specific keywords.  This will help give you good insight as to which pages are naturally gaining traffic (if you aren’t running any campaigns or doing linkbuilding techniques) and which pages are slacking on visits and views from your audience.  You can learn more about how to use Google Analytics for measuring the engagement of your content in this  post.

The Audit

Keywords:

Once you’ve pinpointed which pages on your site are underperforming, make sure you save the URL of that page in your Excel document.  Try to take a high level approach by looking at overall sessions to the page, social shares, as well as keywords the pages might not be ranking for, but could be.

From here, begin filling in your content audit Excel sheet, starting with the keywords you’re targeting for that specific page or any keywords that relate to the topic at hand. Add your top keywords you want to target into the column next to the URL, this could be anywhere from 1 keyword to 10. Stick with focusing on keywords that might have lower search volume as this means they are less competitive to rank for, or any “long tail keywords.” Long tail keywords tend to be longer phrases people use to search with in Google. You can get examples of popular long term keywords by playing around with Google Suggest and other free keyword tools.

Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to target to that specific page, you can use Google’s keyword planner to get search volume, or Google’s data set for the average number of times a keyword is search for.

Content and Meta Data Optimization

Next, take a look at any current title tags, meta descriptions.

If pages are missing these entities, that’s a sign that those pages could definitely use a revamp and thorough examination of keywords for optimization.  If each of your pages already have unique title tags and meta data, make sure that they include one of the main keywords you are targeting for that page.

After you’ve gone through and made sure all meta data includes proper keywords, it’s time to take a look at on-page content. This can be any of the header elements, like H1’s or H2’s and so on, as well as the specific content for that blog post.

Start pinpointing certain sentences within paragraphs where you can adjust words to incorporate your keyword or incorporate long tail phrases that still target the keyword you’re after. Don’t get too carried away and resort to keyword stuffing however. Just include keywords where they logically fit and flow with your content, making it an enjoyable reading experience that just “happens” to be crawled by search engines for your keywords.  As a best practice, try to inject the content with variations of your keywords more than once within the content. If you’re trying to rank for “best chocolate cake recipe” and every paragraph starts with “the best chocolate cake recipe”…  you’re doing it wrong. Adding too many of one type of keyword could actually do more to harm your blog than help it.

Auditing for low content

This brings us to another problem your content audit can address: having too little content on your blog. As you may know, or may have heard, Google runs on algorithms that work to  ensure that content and websites are being created with their audiences in mind. Google hates sites that strictly create content just to kiss their butt in hopes of ranking higher within the SERPs, but they also despise sites that have no useful content whatsoever.  You can read more about Google’s algorithm’s  history over on Moz.

So, if you’re going to start a blog, and it’s about all the best chocolate cake recipes you’ve made, make sure to provide interesting, unique, fun and engaging content that will  get readers to  interact, rather than just posting the five ingredients needed for every single type of chocolate cake you’ve made. Tell a story about why you chose the recipe, how you made it your own, what it was like to bake the cake, and most importantly, get descriptive with how delicious it tasted!

While going through this portion of the content audit, include each paragraph or sentence you are editing or optimizing in your Excel document, so that you can keep a full inventory of all the changes. Be sure to highlight any of the changes you’re making by listing the location of the sentence or paragraph, as well as using a different font color to highlight the newly added content or keywords within the text.

Keep in mind the following when editing your pages for low content or optimizing to target keywords:

• Revamp pages that have low content
• Revamp older post that may be short
• Search in Google for any content of yours that may be duplicated on other sites.
  •  You can do this by copying the text and placing it into Google search box, this will check if any other sites might be stealing your text without your permission.

Pulling Inspiration from your Content Audit

Now that you’ve inventoried keywords your pages rank for and those that you want to target for specific pages, you can take a step back and check to see if there were any keywords you pulled that were left out. (Don’t forget to make sure you’re including these keywords in your title tags, meta descriptions, H1’s and on page content, too!)

With these additional keywords or long tail phrases, that may have not had a place in current content on your site, you can start to gather inspiration for new content for your blog. You can also see if currently ranking keywords need their own new landing page that will  provide more useful information as opposed to the page they might be already ranking for.

Determine if these pages can be targeted in a more descriptive and user friendly landing page or if they can help you uncover more topics of interest that your audience wants to read about.

For more ideas on content inspiration related to keywords, check out our post on “3 Tactics to Uncover What Your Readers Really Want.”

The post How to conduct a content audit for your blog appeared first on AmpliFound.

Audio or Video

Equipment & Software

1. Microphone – Whether audio or video, you’ll need a microphone.  The easiest one to start out with is your computer’s built-in mic.  These can often work well enough for your first podcast.  If you want to step up production value a bit more, look for a desktop condenser microphone like the Blue Yeti USB microphone which runs about $50.
2. Recording Software – There are certainly many expensive, high end software packages out there but often you can just use what’s built into your computer to get the job done.  On a mac, Apple’s GarageBand is unbeatable.  For a PC (and other operating systems), Audacity is a great open-sourced solution.  If you’re working with video that you need to edit, Apple’s iMovie or Windows Movie Maker are great beginner solutions.
3. Mixer – Most beginners won’t need a mixer setup however once your podcast gains some popularity a mixer will help you integrate multiple audio sources into your recordings.  This is especially useful if you have more than one host or speaker you need to record.  A mixer can also come in handy if you want to integrate sound clips or effects into your podcast on-the-fly as you’re recording
4. Pop Filter – To step up your sound quality even more, a pop filter can be used on your microphone to combat those explosive “p” type syllables and words.  Pop filters are fairly cheap and should run around $25 on Amazon.

Script

Creating your Podcast

Make your Audio a Podcast

Rinse & Repeat

The post BlogCast: Setting Up Your Own Podcast appeared first on AmpliFound.

Below you’ll find the following guides to migrate your site to a new platform:

• Background on Site Migration & Its Effects
• Best Practices Prior to Migration
• Best Practices During & After Migration
• Overall Migration Timeline
• Next Steps: Outside of the Migration

Background on Site Migration & Its Effects

A site migration can affect a site in both positive and negative ways. An overview of these effects is listed below:

Potential Negative Effects from a Migration:

• Loss in rankings, resulting in:
  • Decreased visits and conversions

Why can this occur?

Often, the majority of these affects do not occur from the change in CMS, but from changes to content or structure required by the shift to the new CMS. The amount of changes needed to the existing structure & content will determine the amount of negative effects that occur.

• Ultimately, the more changes that are made when the content is ported over will cause confusion to search engines.
  • For example, if once the site is migrated, the search engines cannot find the same content that once appeared in a certain location on the site; they will demote the rankings of that content.
  • Additionally if the internal navigation of the site is adjusted, the search engines may not pass as much value to certain pages, again leading to demoted rankings.
• Often, these effects are temporary. It takes search engines weeks or months to fully crawl a new site. Once a new site is fully crawled, rankings can potentially rebound. Don’t panic if you see your blog’s rankings drop!
• If you plan to change the URLs of current content to a new location, it is vital that the original content is 301 redirected to its new URL, to clearly indicate to Google where the content now lives.

Potential Positive Effects from a Migration:

Switching to a new platform often means a more up-to-date CMS with advantages including:

• Increased flexibility to add title, h1 and meta descriptions
• Increased flexibility to create new pages and add new content
• The ability to make these optimizations lead to increased rankings, resulting in:
  • Increased visits and conversions

Why can this occur?

Your current platform may be limiting in its features and site owners often switch platforms for new features, or more flexibility.

• This flexibility can lead to faster optimizations and faster benefits in search visibility.

So, how can I reduce the potential negative effects?

Try and maintain the content and structure of the existing site as much as possible, in particular:

• Maintain the same URL structure
• Maintain the same title, h1 and meta descriptions (if any exist)
• Maintain the same internal navigation (if it the site is already being properly crawled)

Best Practices Prior to Migration

Benchmark All Major Metrics

Please see below for a list of metrics we recommend benchmarking prior to the migration. Having a status on these metrics prior to the migration will help you to assess the progress of the site after the migration by having “before” and “after” data to compare.

Indexed Pages & Crawl Errors

• Use Google Webmaster Tools to track the number of pages currently indexed by Google.
• Also, use this tool to see how many crawl errors the site currently experiences prior to the migration (this will help you to assess of the number of crawl errors once the site is launched should be an area of concern).

404 Pages

• Use Webmaster Tools to determine the current total number of 404 pages appearing on the site. This will allow you to assess if the migration is leading to an increase in 404 pages.
Site Authority Metrics
• Record your sites domain authority and page rank prior to migration.

Backlinks, Linking Root Domains and Site Networks
• Use Google Webmaster Tools, as well as tools like OpenSiteExplorer or AHrefs, to determine the number of backlinks currently pointing to your site from other sites.
• Record the number of linking root domains (read: other sites) and site networks currently linking to your site.

Keyword Rankings

• Spot-check and record the keyword rankings of your priority terms just before migration.

Traffic, Conversions and Conversion Rates

• Using Google Analytics, record and reference the amount of traffic to your site on a monthly and yearly basis, as well as the number of conversions and conversion rates, prior to the migration.

Duplicate Pages

• Record the number of duplicate pages currently on your site. (This will help to assess if the migration leads to an increase in duplicate content that we’ll need to address.)

Setup Re-Design on a Beta or Development Site

• Depending on the flexibility of the platform you choose, the most ideal situation is to have a beta or development version of the site setup prior to the launch.
• This is highly recommended and allows you to troubleshoot and test the new site before it’s launched. (Reference)
• If a beta or development site is created, it is extremely important that it is not indexed in Google. If both the old site and beta site are indexed in search engines, they will appear as duplicate content and can cause a drop in rankings.

Best Practices During & After Migration

Submit New/Optimized Sitemap to Search Engines

• It is important to submit a new sitemap to search engines at the same time the new site is launched.
• The sitemap serves to indicate to search engines any changes made to the site and also indicates to the search engines the best path to crawling the site.

Monitor Site Performance Weekly

Once the site is migrated, monitor the performance of the metrics that you benchmarked prior to the migration, they are as mentioned:

• Indexed Pages & Crawl Errors
• 404 Pages
• Site Authority Metrics
• Backlinks, Linking Root Domains and Site Networks
• Keyword Rankings
• Traffic, Conversions and Conversion Rates
• Duplicate Pages

Conduct an Architecture Audit of Your Blog

Once your site is migrated, we recommend reviewing it for the following issues (some of the items reviewed in the audit overlap with benchmarked metrics):

Duplicate Pages & Duplicate/Missing H1s, Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
• Review the amount of duplicate content and eliminate the duplicate pages, or have them redirect to the correct page.
• Search for any missing tags and update them to include your key terms.

Redirects
• Review all redirected pages to ensure they’re redirecting to the correct locations and that they’re all 301 directs. (302s are frowned upon by Google so avoid them wherever possible.)

404 Pages
• Use Google Webmaster Tools again to find any 404 pages that exist on the new site and have the 301 redirected to their correct location and/or swap out any internal links to 404 pages to their correct new location.

Crawl Errors
• Review the site for any crawl errors and ensure these are corrected.

Internal Navigation & Linking
• Review the internal navigation structure of the site to ensure the structure is passing the strongest amount of link value possible through the site

Google Analytics Code
• Check to make sure the Google Analytics code is included on all pages of the migrated site to ensure no tracking is lost during the switch to the new platform.

Content
• Review the site to make sure no content was lost during the site migration.

Robots.txt
• When a search engine crawler comes to your site, it will look for the robots.txt file. This file tells search engines which web pages of your site should be indexed or which should be ignored.
• Review your Robots.txt file to ensure that it is optimized to tell search engines to crawl only the most relevant pages and to ensure it carries over any settings you may have had prior to the migration.

With the guides above, you can carry your site to a new platform smoothly, while still taking advantage of all the features your new platform has to offer!

The post Migrating Your Blog to a New Platform: A Comprehensive Guide appeared first on AmpliFound.

It’s a no brainer that web users don’t like slow websites. A slow loading website can lead to a higher bounce rates, as well as lower pageviews on your site. A study done by KISSmetrics shows that 47% of web users expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and a 1 second delay decreases user satisfaction by 16%. Go ahead and test your website page load speed using GTmetrix. If you find that your website is taking a while to load, this blog post will help you bring that page load time down a bit with some easy-to-implement tips.

Without further ado, here are some tips to help you speed up your blog:

1) Decrease the number of post displayed on your site

Most blog platforms will default to showing 10 or so blog posts when a user arrives on the site. This affects page load times as your website needs to load each post (and all of their images). Simply decreasing the number of posts that are displayed on the main page can help you bring down your page load times.

2) Javascript location

Without digging too deep into coding and things that only a web designer would understand, you can decrease page load time by simply moving all custom javascript to the bottom of your blog.

3) Hosting Solution

Your web host plays a part in how your website performs. Simply choosing the right host can make huge improvements to your page load time. Here are a few things to look for with your current host that should help you decide if you’re with the right provider:

• Bandwidth – Imagine a highway with two lanes, you can only fit so many cars on the highway before there is a traffic jam. You’re fighting with everyone else to get to your exit but it’s taking a while because everyone else is trying to do the same thing. When it comes to bandwidth, make sure you have a lot of space (4 lane highway) and that you’re not sharing it with anyone else. This way, you can get to your exit without any delays.
• Up time – Your website is no good if the servers are down. You need to make sure that your hosting provider is reliable. The best way to make sure of this is to check to see if they offer guaranteed up time. This will guarantee that your servers are up at least 99.99% of the time.
• Dedicated or Shared server – Referring back to the bandwidth section above, are you sharing the highway with anyone else or is this your own private highway? Your best bet for delivering the quickest results is to have a dedicated highway to yourself.

4) Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a server setup that takes all of your static files (Images, CSS, Javascript, ect) and serves them to your users from servers that are closest to them. This is the most efficient way to deliver your media files to your users and will ultimately help decrease load times. All of the big blogs are doing it, why aren’t you?

5) Optimize Images

Images take up a lot of space and can take a while to load depending on the size and format. Luckily, there are tools that you can use to bring your images inline with best practices. Yahoo! has a cool tool called Smush.it that you can use to help optimize your images. If you’re on WordPress, there’s a plugin called WP Smush.it that does that same thing but within your platform.

5.5) Optimizing images even further

Say you have 10 images throughout your entire page. These 10 images have to load at the same time even if a user doesn’t see them. There’s a plugin for WordPress called jQuery Image Lazy Load and it will only load your images if your user scroll to that section. This saves your servers a bit of effort and will ultimately help lower load times.

6) Post Revisions

How many times do you revise a post before publishing it? You probably answered “a few times.” WordPress saves all of those revisions therefore taking up extra space that you could have used for something else. There’s a WordPress plugin called Revision Control and it will help you control the amount of revisions that are saved by your WordPress blog.

7) Pingbacks & Trackbacks

Pingbacks and trackbacks are a lot of work for your WordPress site. This is unnecessary and simply turning it off can help you decrease page load times. If you are unfamiliar with what pingbacks and trackbacks are, you can find more information about them using the links below.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/comments/trackbacks/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/comments/pingbacks/

Conclusion

These are just a few simple tips to help you reduce the amount of time it takes your website to load. Implement a few (or all) of these recommendations and test your load time. Make sure to note your bounce rate and sessions before and after to see how an improved page load time impact your overall site performance.

The post How to Speed Up Your Blog appeared first on AmpliFound.

Today, we’re going to look at Google Analytics to help us make promotion decisions. If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics (GA), then stop what you’re doing right now! Before you continue here, read about what GA is and why it’s important, and then set it up on your blog – it’s easy and free, and it’s incredibly valuable and useful.

If you just set up GA on your blog for the first time, you may want to wait a few weeks or a month so that it can collect data. If you’ve already got GA set up, let’s dive right in.

Log into GA and click on your site’s analytics. The first thing you’ll see is the Audience Overview.

This gives you a good snapshot of website traffic, but we’re going to get a bit more detailed today. So, in the left-hand navigation, click on “Acquisition” and then on “Channels.”

This report gives you a simple breakdown as to where your website traffic is coming from:

But what do these channels mean? Let’s break it down.

• Organic Search is traffic that comes from the search engines – mostly Google.
• Direct means that a user came to your site directly, either by typing your URL into their browser bar, or from a desktop or browser bookmark.
• Referral is a link from any other blog or website. If another blogger likes your post and links to it in their blog, it’ll show up as a referral in GA.
• Social includes any visit that comes from social media (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google+, Pinterest, etc.)
• Other means anything that doesn’t fit neatly into one of the other buckets – usually RSS feeds.
• Email is any visit that comes from an email, whether it’s an email newsletter you send, a user subscribing to your site via email, or just someone emailing one of your blog links to someone else.

Today, we’re going to focus on just two of these channels – Referrals and Social.

(And for more information about what those metrics mean (sessions, users, bounce rate, etc., check out our post from earlier this month.) — Metrics to Measure Engagement

Referrals

From the Channels report, click on “Referrals” and then make sure that, at the top of the report, you’ve clicked on “Source.” You’ll see a list of websites that have sent visitors to your site:

(Referrers blurred for anonymity)

Now, you’ve got a list of websites and blogs that have referred traffic to your blog (a “session” in GA is a visit to your website). You can click through to visit the referring sites themselves and find out more information about them. Since they’ve already linked to your blog at least once, you can reach out to them for link exchanges or partnerships – the sky’s the limit!

Social Media

Click back to the original Channels report, and now click on “Social.” Make sure you’ve selected “social network” at the top of the report:

As you can see, Pinterest and Reddit are the social media sites that have brought the most traffic to this blog. Twitter and Facebook have brought significantly less. This could mean one of two things:

1. More time/effort is spent promoting the blog on Pinterest and Reddit than on Facebook and Twitter
2. Or, equal time is spent promoting on all these social media sites, but Facebook and Twitter aren’t performing as well.

Regardless of what the reason is, you can now make some decisions. You can try to spend more time promoting your blog on Facebook and Twitter to see if they start to bring in more visits. Or, if you’re already spending a lot of time on those channels, you may want to back off of them and spend more effort on those that are already bringing in a lot of traffic.

By just looking at these simple reports in Google Analytics, you can tell which marketing efforts have been successful and which could either use more effort, or just aren’t worth it.

Do you use GA to help with your blog promotion?

The post Use Google Analytics Acquisition Data to Help Promote Your Blog appeared first on AmpliFound.