In this top to bottom examination of GreenGeeks Facilitating, we will consider every contingency, covering the organization’s natural cognizance, key execution measurements, client assistance, and a broad exhibit of facilitating choices. To see whether GreenGeeks’ green facilitating plans are reasonable for site proprietors, it’s vital to find out about them and survey their reliability and life expectancy. Let’s read below about “Greengeeks Hosting Review”.

Understanding GreenGeeks: Pioneers in Eco-Friendly Hosting

1. The Green Initiative:

GreenGeeks’ founding principle in 2008 was to provide top-notch web hosting while minimizing environmental impact. The company is proud of its reputation as an environmentally conscious web host and purchases renewable energy credits to compensate for the threefold increase in energy consumption of its servers. With regards to finding harmless to the ecosystem facilitating choices, GreenGeeks has secured themselves as a leader because of their unflinching devotion.

2. Renewable Energy Credits:

GreenGeeks aims to reduce data center power consumption in one way: by purchasing wind energy credits. By returning three times as much renewable energy to the system for each unit of power they use, their servers effectively eliminate the hosting industry’s carbon footprint.

GreenGeeks Hosting Services:

1. Shared Hosting:

People, little and medium-sized organizations, and new companies can all find what they need with GreenGeeks’ common facilitating arrangements. Anybody wishing to begin a site might do it moderately with shared facilitating. Limitless information move, SSD stockpiling, free space enrollment, and a web designer are undeniably included of these choices.

2. WordPress Hosting:

Assuming that you are searching for first-class WordPress facilitating, GreenGeeks is the ideal decision. Making a setting that is execution , security-, and redesign enhanced for WordPress locales is one of these points.

3. VPS Hosting:

VPS hosting is a viable option for website owners who want more control and flexibility. You get devoted IP addresses, SSD stockpiling, and server area freedom with GreenGeeks’ adaptable virtual confidential waiter facilitating.

4. Reseller Hosting:

With regards to affiliate facilitating, business visionaries and engineers can trust GreenGeeks. Reseller plans include administrative tools, scalability, and white-label hosting, allowing you to customize the hosting service to your liking.

Performance Benchmarks:

1. Speed and Uptime:

Before you pick a facilitating administration, ensure they have great execution. As far as proficiency and constancy, GreenGeeks is unparalleled. Rapid page loads are made possible by making use of solid-state drives (SSDs), content delivery networks (CDNs), and efficient server designs.

2. Server Locations:

Large numbers of GreenGeeks’ server farms are situated in different regions of the planet, including North America, Europe, and Asia. Site execution and inertness are both upgraded by allowing clients to pick a server area that is geologically near their target group.

3. Scalability:

In addition, scalability GreenGeeks offers scalable hosting solutions that can meet your requirements, regardless of whether you run a small blog or a resource-intensive online business. Customers can simply increase the plan’s capacity when they observe sudden increases in traffic or resource consumption.

Customer Support and User-Friendly Experience:

1. 24/7 Support:

At GreenGeeks, we endeavor to furnish our clients with first class help at whatever point they contact us, be it through telephone, email, or live talk. Clients can arrive at the care staff whenever with different kinds of feedback about their facilitating.

2. User-Friendly Control Panel:

GreenGeeks utilizes cPanel, a popular control board with a standing for being not difficult to utilize. Site upkeep is made more straightforward with the cPanel by incorporating urgent components like program establishment, space the board, and settings.

3. One-Click Applications:

Applications are introduced easily utilizing GreenGeeks’ a single tick installer. A simple to-explore content administration framework (CMS) can do ponders for a site’s exhibition.

GreenGeeks Security Features:

1. Security Infrastructure:

GreenGeeks places a high priority on website security, so we take precautions and establish a solid foundation. To protect sites, facilitating conditions habitually utilize proactive server observing, solid firewalls, and ongoing security examining.

2. Secure Account Isolation:

Every hosting account on GreenGeeks is isolated and runs in its own private virtual machine thanks to the safe account isolation feature. This partition makes the facilitating climate more secure by forestalling security defects in a single record from influencing different records.

3. Free SSL Certificates:

A free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt is included with each of the hosting packages offered by GreenGeeks. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption safeguards sensitive data while it is being transmitted between a website and its visitors, fostering confidence throughout the process.

Environmental Impact and GreenGeeks Commitment:

1. Carbon Footprint Reduction:

To counterbalance its ecological effect, GreenGeeks goes above or more. With an end goal to relieve a dangerous atmospheric devation, the business is buying wind energy credits. This objective is in accordance with the developing consciousness of the significance of biological obligation inside the web facilitating area.

2. Energy-Efficient Data Centers:

GreenGeeks’ data centers are renowned for their outstanding energy efficiency due to cutting-edge cooling systems and optimized architecture. Both the facilitating supplier and the climate benefit from these strategies since they increment manageability, work on functional effectiveness, and save costs.

Pricing Structure and Plans:

1. Transparent Pricing:

Around here at GreenGeeks, you can see the elements and costs of all of our facilitating plans one next to the other. The affordable plans can be used for a variety of things, including shared, WordPress, virtual private server (VPS), and reseller hosting. The plan that best meets the requirements of each customer is up to them.

2. Money-Back Guarantee:

Clients can evaluate GreenGeeks’ facilitating administration sans risk for 30 days with their unconditional promise. At the point when it’s generally advantageous for them, clients can assess GreenGeeks’ elements, usefulness, and backing.

GreenGeeks Hosting for Sustainability:

1. Hosting with a Purpose:

In addition to receiving dependable hosting services, choosing GreenGeeks demonstrates your concern for the environment. In the event that you’re a site proprietor who thinks often about the planet, you ought to take a gander at GreenGeeks, an eco-accommodating facilitating supplier.

2. Corporate Social Responsibility:

CSR, or corporate social responsibility, is of the utmost importance to GreenGeeks. The organization is driving the facilitating business in its shift to additional manageable and harmless to the ecosystem rehearses through its interests in sustainable power and commitment to a green picture.

Conclusion: Greengeeks Hosting Review

Among the many facilitating organizations out there, GreenGeeks stands apart for its relentless commitment to ecological manageability and strong facilitating arrangements. As an ever increasing number of individuals across the world acknowledge that it is so essential to live in an earth cognizant way, GreenGeeks gives a dependable option in contrast to conventional web facilitating administrations that are known to be unsafe to the planet.

You can have your site with GreenGeeks but take care of the climate since they put execution, client support, and green drives first. I  hope you like reading “Greengeeks Hosting Review”.

The post Greengeeks Hosting Review appeared first on Blogging Venture.

If  you have not read them yet, go read them now must have plugins for your blog and the essential settings on your blog

And today also I am going to share 7 must have elements your blog should never miss.

So, here they go:

1. A Clean Header:

First thing first; when somebody comes to your blog the first thing they see is the header.

So, have a header that is clean and clear, it should contain your blog name, if possible a professional logo.

But again for starters, you might not have that right away. So, instead of a logo, you can use a professional font like “Bebas Neue (this is a clean and bold font and has been used by many and one of my favorites) for your blog title.

Have the navigation menu clean and easy to play around.

2. About Section:

Your readers want to know about you more than you think.

They want to know why they should listen to you. What makes you an expert in your field?

Importantly everyone loves to know about the person (yes! you guessed it right, “You”.) behind the awesome stuff they have just found.

When I land on a blog for the first time and read something awesome, the very next thing I do is look for more details about the author.

So, list down your skills, experiences, interests, where you are from, what do you currently do, your achievements and if you like to be transparent, be a bit open to your readers and tell them your plans, tell them how the blog is working out for you so far.

3. Your Photo:

I have seen many blogs that don’t have a single image of the author and that makes me feel like the author is not confident enough with his work, maybe that is why he is hiding behind the computer screen; that should not be you.

When someone is reading your posts they should be able to put a face to the words.

By putting your photo on the blog, you’ll be giving your readers one more reason to trust you.

4. Social Media Links:

Show your readers that you are real and you would love to connect with them. Give them a way to have a glimpse of your social life and a way to stay in touch with you, outside the blog.

By sharing your social media profiles you will be giving your readers a sense of authenticity. And that is something you cannot ignore if you want to be successful with your blogging career.

If possible keep your social media handles the same on all the platforms. That way it would be easier for your followers to find you.

5. Social Share Buttons:

When you put so much of your time into creating a blog post, you sure want many people to see it, read it. You want to get the most out of it, right?

But how will that happen if people can’t share what they read?

Of course, you can invest a lot of money into promoting your post and might as well get a decent amount of readers, but by not allowing the readers (that you have acquired through self-sharing, and paid advertising) to share that content with their friends and followers you are simply limiting your organic reach.

Nowadays search engines are getting very smarter, they only show the content that is highly likely to be liked and will be useful to the users. In other words, if your content is being liked and shared often, then, it can give your blog a boost in the search engines as well.

Social signals are now included as an algorithm-ranking factor in search engines.

So, if you don’t mind some free traffic, then set up the social share buttons for all the blog posts without any excuse.

You can try a social share plugin like Mashshare if you’re on a self-hosted WordPress blog.

6. Contact Info:

As you know blogging is all about connecting with people, so make it easy for your readers to get in touch with you in case they want to share something with you in private. Or for any potential customer who might want to offer you a job. Or maybe some other influence who would want to interview you; you never know.

So, have a contact page with a simple contact form on your blog instead of embedding your email address, as it might get scrapped and your inbox might get spammed.

7. A Search Bar:

You might not find this useful initially but in the long run, having a simple search bar will improve the user experience.

You are sure going to write many posts on your blog… right? so, say, one or two years later when you have a strong readership, your returning readers might want to re-read some of your old posts they liked, then it will be easier for them to just type in the keywords on the search bar and find the posts they are looking for.

Even if a new reader comes to your blog looking for some solution, he would most likely look for a search bar where he can simply type in the topic he needs help with and it will show him the filtered results; given you have written something on his queried topic.

Now, if you don’t have a search bar installed, someone might come and navigate through each page and if he is certain he would find a solution on your blog and also he has ample time to spend, he might stick till to the last page but if he is in a hurry, after searching through few pages he would get bored and just leave to some other blog.

Final Words:

If you want your blog to be a success, you must have to see it through your reader’s eyes.

When you start a blog, it is very important that you make sure, your audience is having a nice experience on your site.

So, invest some time to set up the must-have elements that we talked about today.

If you liked what you read today or have any other must-haves in your mind that you think I should have added here, please share it in the comment. I would love to hear them.

See you soon.

The post 7 Elements Your Blog Should Never Miss in 2024 appeared first on Blogging Venture.

When we say search engine our minds straight away think of Google. And it’s obvious to think of Google when we say search engine coz Google alone holds 92.37% of Search Engine Market Share Worldwide as of November 2018 (Source).

And for India, it is 96.23%. So, my suggestion is to forget about the other search engines, just optimize your blog/website for Google, that will be more than enough.

That being said, I am not encouraging you to try some black hat techniques or anything. Google is constantly perfecting its algorithm every day; so, it would be foolish of you to think that you can keep fooling Google for a long time.

Sooner or later you’ll get caught and that will hurt your blog a lot.

So, optimize your blog/website the traditional way and focus on helping your audience by sharing great content rather than trying to manipulate them for a few extra bucks.

Like I said SEO has evolved drastically in the past few years; in the year 2011 adding your target keywords too many times in your content could put your blog in the first page of the SERP and now doing so would completely vanish your blog from the SERP itself.

You see the picture.

And in 2018 also we have seen many ups and downs in the SERP. This was one of those years when Google brought in many changes to the SERP.

The few significant changes that happened this year:

• Google announced that the mobile-first index has finally “rolled out.” You must have seen the notifications inside Google Search Console if your site has been enabled with this feature.
• Google rolled out the mobile page speed update, in which Google made page speed a ranking factor for mobile results.
• Google added a new dedicated tab for videos.
• Google tested a longer display snippet of up to 300+ characters for a few months and also rolled most snippets back to the former limit (about 150-160 characters).

Additional to all those, on July 24, Google rolled out another big change with its in-house web browser, Chrome. With Chrome 68 it began to mark all non-HTTPS sites as “not secure.”

Now 2020 is here. This year again we can expect to see some major updates that will mostly revolve around creating the best user experience.

Today in this post I have shared 4 SEO trends that you can look forward to following in 2020 to outrank most of your competitors.

Let’s begin.

4 SEO Trends to follow in 2020:

Trend 1: Great content will win the SEO race

Like they say, Content is King;

“With great content, it is now possible to rank on the first page of Google without having a single link coming back to the site.”

I am not kidding.

You can look up, I haven’t build a single backlink to my site, yet I get some good relevant organic traffic to my site.

After Rankbrain, it really doesn’t matter how many backlinks you generate if you don’t have compelling content on your blog.

Why I said “generate”, you ask?

Well, if you need to build links that means it is not natural. So, you must be implementing some or all of the various tactics to create backlinks.

I am not saying you shouldn’t do that, all I am saying is focus more on providing value through your content and people will love to thank you with a backlink.

As you must have already figured this out, Google is completely focusing on providing the best user experience. And with the help of AI and machine learning, it is now trying to figure out the quality and usefulness of the content by using search intent as a signal.

So, if your content is not useful enough to fulfil the user’s intent, then you’re gonna lose your rankings big time.

No amount of backlinks can save you from that.

!! How do you prepare? –  Create great useful content, target long-tail keywords, get your on-page SEO strong.

Trend 2: the Mobile search will rise even higher

As soon as the mobile-first index rolled out this year, my blog had literally vanished from the SERP, all because the theme I was using is not completely mobile-friendly according to Google.

And to recover from that blow I had to finally change my blog’s theme and redesign it.

Well, I don’t blame Google.

According to a report from Hitwise in 2016, nearly 60% of all online searches were carried out on a mobile device. So, in the last 2 years, the percentage must have grown up for sure.

Since mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches, Google is obviously now giving more preference to mobile-optimized sites and contents.

In fact, if your blog doesn’t perform well on smaller screens and slower connections it might negatively impact your overall SERP rankings, which includes your desktop rankings as well.

And on the contrary, having a site well optimized for mobile devices can rank you well on both mobile and desktop.

So, get your blog optimized for mobile if you haven’t already done it.

!! How do you prepare? – Improve mobile site speed, Host your blog on a high-speed server, Implement AMP or use a responsive theme, and optimize your content for mobile users.

Trend 3: Social Signals will still matter

In 2010, Matt Cutts, the former head of the webspam team at Google had confirmed in one of his videos that Social Signals are a direct ranking factor.

Here is the video:

But, in 2014, Matt Cutts himself again reported that Google doesn’t use social signals in its search algorithm to rank sites.

Here is the video:

In the year 2016, Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, was asked the same question, Does Google use social signals as a ranking factor? He said, no, we don’t.

Since no outsiders can tell what’s Google secretly cooking, and what ingredients are being used, we have to satisfy our cravings with those comments as their official word — that social signals aren’t a direct ranking factor.

So, I ask, is this a coincidence that sites with high ranking positions also have high numbers of social signals?

Just because Google said they are not including Social Signals in its search algorithm it doesn’t mean it has no impact on the rankings at all.

Google loves authority contents; and how do they determine that? – by counting the number of times people are referring to a particular page or content. And people love to share on Social Media.

I say, if Google’s main goal is really to bring you the best experience, then it will never ignore your likes and dislikes.

So, in my opinion, it does matter how often you are being seen on the different Social media platforms.

How many times you’re being mentioned? How many times your content is getting shared? How many positive reviews you have? These all count.

A strong online social presence alone can help your site rank on Google. In fact, there are many websites I heard, already seeing a leap in their rankings just by having some good and genuine social signals.

!! How do you prepare? – Produce awesome content that people would benefit from and also would like to share, be present on all the top social media platforms, and don’t buy social signals, let it grow naturally, Google hate cheaters.

Trend 4: Voice search will rule

According to ComScore “50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020”

With the continued rise of both personal assistants and voice search, it is high time you consider semantic search and building context while constructing your content rather than just focusing on one keyword.

When it comes to voice search, it is not the same as a text search.

When you type something in to google the traditional way, google suggest is there to tell you the most searched terms related to that something you are looking for, but in case of voice search, it’s natural, you ask Google what you feel like asking.

So, Google is now trying to interpret the user’s intent from his voice to present him with the best results. In fact, according to Merry Meeker’s recent internet trends report, Google’s machine learning has successfully achieved a 95% word accuracy rate for the English language.

With devices like Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Google Home being on the rise, you can predict for yourself how long it might take for the voice search to take over the traditional search.

It’s just a matter of time before the people are aware of this new trend.

So, you better get ready for the internet revolution.

!! How do you prepare? – Write content in a natural and conversational tone; sprinkle LSI keywords throughout the content, integrate structured data and schema markup to help the search engines understand your content more efficiently.

Wrapping Up:

This was just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more to come.

Technology is growing faster than we could imagine. Mark my words, there will come a time when everything will be controlled by your voice.

And, Google being the dominant Search engine, it will keep on perfecting every aspect of it. And we are being the puppets, we will have to follow the guidelines and have to adopt the new trends even if we don’t want to.

2020 is here, so pull up your socks and get to work. If you want to win the race, you gotta be always ready to run.

What other SEO trends you think might rise in 2020?

The post 4 SEO Trends Every Blogger Should Follow in 2024 appeared first on Blogging Venture.

Like someone once said, “Nothing great is ever accomplished alone.”

There are very few blogs that grew into mainstream popularity all by themselves.

In today’s blogosphere, every other new blogger wants to know the ultimate way to make their blog a success.

Despite having the various forms of promotion like PPC Ads, SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, if you want to be successful in blogging the need of contacting other, fellow bloggers and being in touch with the people, in general, is not something you can ignore.

1. A Supportive Community: 

At times blogging can be hard and overwhelming, especially when you don’t see any results from your efforts.

You would just want to quit.

At such times, having a group of people around you who are going through the same struggles or the people who have surpassed those in the recent past will always come forward to help.

When you’re feeling low, won’t you get all excited again if someone comes to you and says, “Bro, this is just a phase, everyone needs to go through that, stay strong, success is just around the corner.”

Now imagine, a group of people writing you that.

2. Someone Who Gets You:

Imagine talking to someone who has no idea what you’re saying? Now, imagine someone talking to you and you have no idea what he or she is saying?

Exactly! no matter how exciting you think your “thing” is, no one will ever feel the same excitement as you, unless he or she is from the same field, or at least has the interest to learn about it.

It’s natural.

That is why it is important to have a community of like-minded people that can feel the excitement with you. Someone, to whom your things will actually make sense.

Makes sense?

That’s why we have a group of people who are coming together to learn and teach each other blogging & online marketing.

Join us if blogging and online marketing excite you too.

3. Learning New Things:

Feeling stuck at something? Don’t know how to do that or this? Just Ask.

You’d be surprised, how badly people like to help.

Being in a group where people exactly know what you’re asking, gets you the high edge.

How can I say that?

Just answer me this – if you were asked to pick a place between Spain or New York to learn Spanish in 2 months, which one will you pick?

Obviously Spain; as it will make the learning faster compared to New York, even if you can’t learn it in two months.

Likewise, when you ask your questions at the right place you will get the answers quickly and obviously the right ones.

And also not to forget, it’s not just you who gets stuck, there are others too, who would be asking their questions.

So, you have more opportunities to learn and share. And each question will bring in something new to learn.

4. Always Wear a Positive Outlook:

Like they say, “The people that you hang around with and talk to do influence who you are and what you do.”

It doesn’t matter how talented or smart you are. It doesn’t matter what are the skills you have, where you are from, or which family you belong; if you want to be successful in life, just surround yourself with people that are already successful or people who believe in their dreams.

Those who believe in their dreams and actively taking steps towards reaching it will succeed for sure.

When you have a positive environment, you will automatically start to see the positive side of things.

You won’t worry about why things won’t work out? you would rather focus on how to make them work out.

Don’t you wanna be among peoples who are constantly challenging themselves through trying and learning to achieve their goals in life?

If Yes, Join Our Facebook Group

5. New Opportunities Will Show Up: 

When you start to collaborate with other bloggers, it could lead to something amazing; new opportunities and ideas that can inspire and excite you to implement something new or make some improvements on your own blog that would make it even better.

And who knows? You might end up co-authoring a book, start a joint project or make partnerships and so on, possibilities are endless.

Essentially, you’ll be starting a new friendship, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how valuable that is.

Moreover, staying in touch with fellow bloggers can actually work in your favour, coz no one likes to recommend somebody they don’t know.

So, if there ever comes a time, they need to recommend something (that you do) to someone they will surely keep you in mind.

If you’re already an established authority then it’s a different thing. But if you’re a newbie, then you definitely should not overlook this.

6. Improved Decision Making: 

Have you ever felt stuck at how to price your work?

Maybe you’re offering a service or have written an eBook or planning to start a course, but confused about how to charge your clients? how to price the eBook or the course?

Not sure what should you write next on your blog? What kind of freebie can you offer to your subscribers?

A network of like-minded bloggers is an amazing resource for suggestions on such topics.

7. Knowledge Sharing :

Every soul has a different angle on things, that’s why when you share ideas and knowledge with others it allows you to see things from another perspective.

Maybe you’re asking for feedback or discussing your point of view on something, connecting with the people from the same field will definitely expand your knowledge and might save you from making the same mistakes again. Hence can save you time and money.

We all have something to learn from each other.

Everyone has different strengths; some might be good at creating content, some might be good at analytics, some might have good technical knowledge or some might be good at marketing.

So, by sharing your strengths you can actually make each other strong and grow together.

8. Personal Satisfaction of Helping Others:

In my experience, “nothing gives you more satisfaction than helping someone to achieve something.”

We all have our own problems. And the good news is all problems can be solved. Maybe you don’t know the solution but someone else in the group might.

Group gives you an opportunity to help others to solve a problem by using your skills.

Whenever I see a question I know the answer to, I would just jump right in and answer it; given no one else has already answered it or there’s nothing more I can add to it.

So, if you see a question that you know the answer to, yet if you’re not answering it because it’s not your problem, then you seriously don’t belong to a group.

You should not expect anything in return for your advice or help. Remember someday you might have problems that you don’t know the solutions to.

And trust me, when you help someone you always get the return in some form.

Besides, I believe personal satisfaction of helping others is the biggest return you can have.

If you agree with me Join The Facebook Group for Newbie Bloggers

9. Being visible:

This is the best benefit that you can reap out by being active in a group.

By sharing your knowledge and experiences, you can actually build your reputation as an authority in your field.

When you offer useful information or tips or help others to solve a problem, everyone will start to see you as a knowledgeable, reliable and supportive person.

So, next time when they need any suggestions or help they will know you’re the go-to person.

Like I said, being visible and getting noticed is a big benefit you can have from a group.

10. It’s Fun:

It’s a no-brainer; when you are in a group of like-minded people, who understand what exactly you’re referring to when you say “engagement” or “traffic” or “viral”; darn right it’s a fun place to be.

For what it’s worth, you can even take the party offline.

Build relationships with other bloggers and if you are from the same region you can even organize an offline get-together event to know each other even better and can discuss things face to face.

Being around people who love to talk about the same stuff as you, just makes the whole experience of blogging more enjoyable.

Final Words

Do you still need more reasons why you should start networking with your fellow bloggers? Just say “Hi” already.

And if you’re still wondering whether you should start a blog or not? I guess you have one more good reason to join the group.

Just join in, ask your questions, communicate and find out if blogging is your thing?

Go ahead and Join Our Facebook Group and surround yourself with the people who will help you reach your goals.

See you inside.

Buh–bye!

The post 10 Reasons Why Networking is Important in Blogging? appeared first on Blogging Venture.

In a kingdom, having troops overloaded could be a big winning factor; but for a blog, it might work the other way.

Having too many plugins can actually slow down your blog, which can eventually lose you your readers.

So, don’t install too many plugins; instead have only the required ones, and of course the right ones. And don’t use more than one plugin for the same task, doing that might conflict and can end up breaking up the whole site.

There are more than 50,000 plugins available with WordPress, and that in fact makes it tough to pick the right ones for your blog.

So to help you out a bit, here I have listed 10 must-haves that your blog should have.

10 must have plugins for any blog – doesn’t matter which niche you are:

Wordfence Security

Security being one of the main concern for a website owner, it is always a wise decision to keep your blog on the safe side and safeguard it with a security plugin to keep your blog protected from any kind of malicious attacks.

Just a few weeks back, one of my client’s website was attacked by some hacker. I still don’t understand why the attack was made. They simply just broke the website, and even if you fix it, it will automatically break up after some time. Finally, I had no option but to recreate the whole website.

Luckily for me, it was just a six pages website and there’s not much content in it, I got away with it just by spending a day. You might not!

You might think, “I don’t have anything that would benefit a hacker, so why would anyone attack my blog”. That is exactly what I used to think and still, my client’s site got attacked.

If you are not being targeted, you are lucky. But just know that there are people who find it funny to dismantle a website for no reason.

So, like I said, it is always a wise decision to keep your blog safe from any kind of security breaches.

If you have made up your mind then, wordfence is one of the best security plugins out there and one of my favorites. It gives you real-time protection from known malicious attacks.

It works as a firewall to keep your blog safe from any malicious traffic and detects and prevents all sorts of hacking attempts.

It has a premium version as well, which comes with some extra features, such as real-time protection from the latest threats.

All in all, it is a very good plugin to start off, and once you have established your trust you can always go for the premium version and protect your blog from all kinds of malicious activities in real-time.

WP Fastest Cache

Loading speed being one of the main factors of a website’s or blog’s success, it is very important that you have a cache system implemented on your blog.

When there are too many readers coming to your website and browsing through the contents at the same time, it increases the RAM and CPU consumptions of your server and that makes the blog slower.

What WP fastest cache does is, it simply creates a static HTML version of your dynamic WordPress blog; hence increases the loading speed of your blog.

What I love about this plugin is that it is very simple to use. Anyone with little to no technical knowledge can easily configure it. You don’t need to know any coding.

And whenever you create a new blog post or add a new page or make any changes to the blog, the cache system generates new HTML files automatically, replaces the old ones and saves it on the server; so that whenever someone comes to your blog, he or she reaches those files instead of the heavy PHP WordPress files.

Finally, to enhance the performance a bit more you can also connect the fastest cache plugin with a free CDN, like CloudFlare.

We will talk about that in details in my coming posts.

Optimize Database

When you update a post, page or any portion of your WordPress blog on a regular basis, the database grows larger over time. And a large database can significantly affect the performance of your blog as it takes longer for your server to retrieve information from the database tables. That is why database optimization is one important factor you cannot ignore.

Along with the contents of your blog, a database includes all the theme and plugin settings and also it stores the revisions of posts and pages, each time you make a change in it.

So, in the end, the database becomes so much of a dump that, those needs to be cleared ASAP to improve the efficiency of it and make your blog load faster.

Optimize Database comes with a lot of options and the best part is it allows you to choose how you want it to perform.

You can decide how many recent revisions you want to keep. You can even exclude certain tables and specific posts or pages from optimization. You can schedule optimization to run automatically once hourly, twice daily, once daily or once weekly at a specific time.

WP Smush

The size of the images you upload on your blog affects its loading speed. If you upload images well above 1 MB, chances are, if the user is on a slow internet connection, it might take him ages to finally see your post.

As for a good SEO and a good user experience, it is very important that your site loads up in the first 3 seconds.

Well, you cannot just stop using images in your blog posts, right? A study shows that blog posts with images get 94% more visibility compared to blogs without images.

So, here, a simple solution would be to use an images compressor, like WP Smush.

WP Smush can compress all your images and reduce the file size without losing its quality. It is super easy to use. If you are using it after uploading a lot of images to your blog already, then, there’s an option to bulk compress; you can manually compress up to 50 images at once with the free version. Afterward, it will automatically optimize the images each time you upload them.

This is one of the best image optimization plugins that I have come across. I am currently using it on this blog.

Yoast SEO

When it comes to WordPress SEO, Yoast SEO is the best on-page SEO plugin I have known. Even if you are new to SEO, and thought it very complicated, then, Yoast makes it pretty simple for you. And the best part is you don’t need to know any coding.

SEO is no doubt the biggest traffic source for any blog. So, it is important that you optimize your posts from the first day on.

The plugin helps you optimize every single post or page on your blog. Below each post or page, you will find a Yoast SEO meta box, where you can see the snippet preview (how will your post appear on search engines). Below that you can set your SEO title, Meta description, focus keywords for that particular post or page, and a list of SEO parameters that you can follow to get your post a better SEO score.

I have written a detailed post on how to implement SEO Yoast on your blog? You should read it to get the maximum out of your WordPress SEO

AccessPress Social Share

Social media integration is very important to increase a blog’s reach. If you are not giving your readers the option to share your content, then, you might actually be losing a lot of potential readers, other than the existing ones.

No one will copy the link to your blog post and share it with their friends, even if it is the best piece of content you have on your blog.

Along with the good content, you will have to make your blog social share friendly. You should make “easy to share social buttons” available right after the post or in between; preferably after the post.

Acesspress social share plugin does it perfectly. What I like about it is, it’s very easy to set up and comes with five different themes to match your blog.

The free version has a limited number of social media options though (but yet the most used ones). It includes Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Digg. You can add “share by email” or “print” the page options as well.

Another alternative to look for is Mashshare

Contact Form 7

On my last post as well, I have mentioned having a contact form is a must for any blog or website, as it gives the users a sense of integrity, so to the search engines. So, having a contact form on your blog is a good practice for SEO as well.

Having a contact form is the most convenient way for your readers and followers to connect with you directly off-site. If a reader wants to have a discussion on a private level, he would be delighted to see a contact form on your blog.

Contact form 7 is one of the oldest contact forms available with WordPress. It is being used by millions all over the world.

It is simple to configure. You can modify the notification messages, the email contents and the form without any hassle.

You can easily incorporate CAPTCHA to the forms. It supports the Akismet spam filtering and Ajax-powered submitting as well.

Akismet

No one likes to read the annoying spam comments on their blog post or the emails they receive from the installed contact form on their blog.

So, How important is it to block spammers from your blog?

Glad you asked,

Spam content on your blog can significantly affect your search ranking. If your blog is indexed by search engine and found to have spam, it might be assessed negatively and that could lead to the worst, your blog might be altogether removed from the search results.

So, make no mistake, having a spam blocker is as important as creating awesome content on your blog.

Spammers will spam, you can’t make them stop doing it. Alternatively what you can do is, install an anti-spammer and prevent them from doing it on your blog.

Akismet is one that does it well. It comes by default with all new WordPress installations.

Akismet checks your blog’s comments and contact form submissions against their global database of spam to prevent it from publishing malicious content. It automatically scans through all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.

Jetpack

Jetpack is so much like an all-rounder. It is literally packed with everything; from your blog’s security to its social engagement it has a feature that could eliminate a long list of plugins. It is developed by Automattic, the creator of WordPress.

To see the various features it has, go here https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/

I have jetpack installed on all of my websites and on my client’s websites.

Few of the features I like most in jetpack are

A CDN for your images called Photon to speed up your blog’s loading time; you can also connect it with WP fastest cache for better performance.

Brute force attack protection is a new inclusion that I am using on most of my websites.

Related posts, it simply lists down a few of your old posts suggesting to your readers what they should be reading next. It encourages the readers to spend more time on your blog; hence helps improve your bounce rate.

Last but not the least, Publicize, once you enable this feature it will automatically share your blog posts on various social media platforms as soon as you hit the publish button.

Google Analytics for WordPress

When you start a blog, your main goal is to get traffic to it. For that, you would promote your content on different online platforms that are available. In short, you would make investments in terms of time and money; and when you make an investment you want a good ROI.

Now, how will you know which platform has brought you the highest amount of traffics, so that you can focus more on that platform and get the most out of your investment?

That’s where Google Analytics comes into the picture.

With this amazing FREE tool from Google, you can track down everything, literally everything; where did the readers come from? How did they find your blog? How did they engage with your contents? How much time do they spend on your blog? Which post is getting more traffic? And much more than you can imagine.

What so great about this tool is, you can stop guessing the answers to those all questions and instead focus on the solid stats that it provides and start making data driven-decisions that will bring in the best ROI.

So, it is very important that you analyze your traffic from the very first day you publish a blog post.

What Google Analytics for WordPress does is, it helps you connect your WordPress blog with Google analytics. It is one of the most popular Google Analytics plugins for WordPress. It’s extremely easy to set up and great for you if you are just starting up. The best part about this plugin is you can review the reports without living your WordPress dashboard.

Jetpack also comes with site analytics, but it limits your curiosity; the data it provides is not so comprehensive. You cannot rely on it to make a solid decision.

Another good alternative is the Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)

Final Words:

All the plugins that I have mentioned above are being used on thebloggingjob.com and are recommended to you as well.

Most of them are FREE. Although all of them has a pro version with extra features; but as you are just starting up and might not have a big budget, you can simply go with the free versions, for now, they do most of the required works anyways.

P.S. it is not necessary that you only use those plugins that I have listed above. I have made that list after testing a lot of plugins and found those to be working best for me. But what worked for me, might not work for you.

What important here is, why am I using them for?

So, keep your focus on the “why” and if you like, go ahead find some other plugins that might work best for you and if you find any, do let me know; I would love to try them all as well if I haven’t already.

Did the post help you? please let me know in the comments. And if you have any other must-haves that should have been added to the list, please share that with me too.

The post 10 Must-Have Plugins for Any Blog appeared first on Blogging Venture.

When we say search engine our minds straight away think of Google. And it’s obvious to think of Google when we say search engine coz Google alone holds 92.37% of Search Engine Market Share Worldwide as of November 2018 (Source).

And for India, it is 96.23%. So, my suggestion is to forget about the other search engines, just optimize your blog/website for Google, that will be more than enough.

That being said, I am not encouraging you to try some black hat techniques or anything. Google is constantly perfecting its algorithm every day; so, it would be foolish of you to think that you can keep fooling Google for a long time.

Sooner or later you’ll get caught and that will hurt your blog a lot.

So, optimize your blog/website the traditional way and focus on helping your audience by sharing great content rather than trying to manipulate them for a few extra bucks.

Like I said SEO has evolved drastically in the past few years; in the year 2011 adding your target keywords too many times in your content could put your blog in the first page of the SERP and now doing so would completely vanish your blog from the SERP itself.

You see the picture.

And in 2018 also we have seen many ups and downs in the SERP. This was one of those years when Google brought in many changes to the SERP.

The few significant changes that happened this year:

• Google announced that the mobile-first index has finally “rolled out.” You must have seen the notifications inside Google Search Console if your site has been enabled with this feature.
• Google rolled out the mobile page speed update, in which Google made page speed a ranking factor for mobile results.
• Google added a new dedicated tab for videos.
• Google tested a longer display snippet of up to 300+ characters for a few months and also rolled most snippets back to the former limit (about 150-160 characters).

Additional to all those, on July 24, Google rolled out another big change with its in-house web browser, Chrome. With Chrome 68 it began to mark all non-HTTPS sites as “not secure.”

Now 2024 is here. This year again we can expect to see some major updates that will mostly revolve around creating the best user experience.

Today in this post I have shared 4 SEO trends that you can look forward to following in 2024 to outrank most of your competitors.

Let’s begin.

4 SEO Trends to follow in 2024:

Trend 1: Great content will win the SEO race

Like they say, Content is King;

“With great content, it is now possible to rank on the first page of Google without having a single link coming back to the site.”

I am not kidding.

You can look up, I haven’t build a single backlink to my site, yet I get some good relevant organic traffic to my site.

After Rankbrain, it really doesn’t matter how many backlinks you generate if you don’t have compelling content on your blog.

Why I said “generate”, you ask?

Well, if you need to build links that means it is not natural. So, you must be implementing some or all of the various tactics to create backlinks.

I am not saying you shouldn’t do that, all I am saying is focus more on providing value through your content and people will love to thank you with a backlink.

As you must have already figured this out, Google is completely focusing on providing the best user experience. And with the help of AI and machine learning, it is now trying to figure out the quality and usefulness of the content by using search intent as a signal.

So, if your content is not useful enough to fulfil the user’s intent, then you’re gonna lose your rankings big time.

No amount of backlinks can save you from that.

!! How do you prepare? –  Create great useful content, target long-tail keywords, get your on-page SEO strong.

Trend 2: the Mobile search will rise even higher

As soon as the mobile-first index rolled out this year, my blog had literally vanished from the SERP, all because the theme I was using is not completely mobile-friendly according to Google.

And to recover from that blow I had to finally change my blog’s theme and redesign it.

Well, I don’t blame Google.

According to a report from Hitwise in 2016, nearly 60% of all online searches were carried out on a mobile device. So, in the last 2 years, the percentage must have grown up for sure.

Since mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches, Google is obviously now giving more preference to mobile-optimized sites and contents.

In fact, if your blog doesn’t perform well on smaller screens and slower connections it might negatively impact your overall SERP rankings, which includes your desktop rankings as well.

And on the contrary, having a site well optimized for mobile devices can rank you well on both mobile and desktop.

So, get your blog optimized for mobile if you haven’t already done it.

!! How do you prepare? – Improve mobile site speed, Host your blog on a high-speed server, Implement AMP or use a responsive theme, and optimize your content for mobile users.

Trend 3: Social Signals will still matter

In 2010, Matt Cutts, the former head of the webspam team at Google had confirmed in one of his videos that Social Signals are a direct ranking factor.

Here is the video:

But, in 2014, Matt Cutts himself again reported that Google doesn’t use social signals in its search algorithm to rank sites.

Here is the video:

In the year 2016, Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, was asked the same question, Does Google use social signals as a ranking factor? He said, no, we don’t.

Since no outsiders can tell what’s Google secretly cooking, and what ingredients are being used, we have to satisfy our cravings with those comments as their official word — that social signals aren’t a direct ranking factor.

So, I ask, is this a coincidence that sites with high ranking positions also have high numbers of social signals?

Just because Google said they are not including Social Signals in its search algorithm it doesn’t mean it has no impact on the rankings at all.

Google loves authority contents; and how do they determine that? – by counting the number of times people are referring to a particular page or content. And people love to share on Social Media.

I say, if Google’s main goal is really to bring you the best experience, then it will never ignore your likes and dislikes.

So, in my opinion, it does matter how often you are being seen on the different Social media platforms.

How many times you’re being mentioned? How many times your content is getting shared? How many positive reviews you have? These all count.

A strong online social presence alone can help your site rank on Google. In fact, there are many websites I heard, already seeing a leap in their rankings just by having some good and genuine social signals.

!! How do you prepare? – Produce awesome content that people would benefit from and also would like to share, be present on all the top social media platforms, and don’t buy social signals, let it grow naturally, Google hate cheaters.

Trend 4: Voice search will rule

According to ComScore “50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2024”

With the continued rise of both personal assistants and voice search, it is high time you consider semantic search and building context while constructing your content rather than just focusing on one keyword.

When it comes to voice search, it is not the same as a text search.

When you type something into google the traditional way, google suggest is there to tell you the most searched terms related to that something you are looking for, but in case of voice search, it’s natural, you ask Google what you feel like asking.

So, Google is now trying to interpret the user’s intent from his voice to present him with the best results. In fact, according to Merry Meeker’s recent internet trends report, Google’s machine learning has successfully achieved a 95% word accuracy rate for the English language.

With devices like Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Google Home being on the rise, you can predict for yourself how long it might take for the voice search to take over the traditional search.

It’s just a matter of time before the people are aware of this new trend.

So, you better get ready for the internet revolution.

!! How do you prepare? – Write content in a natural and conversational tone; sprinkle LSI keywords throughout the content, integrate structured data and schema markup to help the search engines understand your content more efficiently.

Wrapping Up:

This was just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more to come.

Technology is growing faster than we could imagine. Mark my words, there will come a time when everything will be controlled by your voice.

And, Google being the dominant Search engine, it will keep on perfecting every aspect of it. And we are being the puppets, we will have to follow the guidelines and have to adopt the new trends even if we don’t want to.

2024 is here, so pull up your socks and get to work. If you want to win the race, you gotta be always ready to run.

What other SEO trends you think might rise in 2024?

The post 4 SEO Trends Every Blogger Should Follow in 2024 appeared first on Blogging Venture.