4 Alternatives to Google AdWords

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

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

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

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

Google AdWords Alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Add Google Analytics to Blogger

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

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

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

Implementing Google Analytics on Blogger

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

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

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

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

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

How to Increase Alexa Ranking of your Blog

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

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

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

5 Ways to Increase the Alexa Rank

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

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

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

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

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

On-Page SEO Tips for Blogger

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

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

Basic On-Page SEO Tips For Blogger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Express them in a comment!

Adding a Meta Description to Blogger

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

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

Meta Description in Blogger

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

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

Adding Meta Description To individual Posts

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

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

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

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

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

How to Install MongoDB (NoSQL database) on Windows 7?

In this post i am gonna show you how to install MongoDB, a NoSQL Database, on Windows.

First of all download Related version of MongoDB from http://www.mongodb.org/downloads.There are three types of build is available for windows.

• 64-bit 2008R2+, Use this build if you are running with 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, or greater.
• 64-bit, Use this, If you are using 64-bit version of windows.
• 32-bit, Use this, If you are using 32-bit version of windows.

You can check your operating system architecture by - 1) Right click on "My Computer" > Property OR 2) Running wmic os get osarchitecture command in command prompt

After downloading ZIP file, Unzip it. Run this command "move C:\mongodb-win32-* C:\mongodb" ,just to change complex name of folder to "mongodb".

MongoDB requires data folder to store its data. MongoDb stores data in db folder created inside the data folder. This folder will not be created automatically, you have to create it manually.

Now default path for this data directory should be C:\data\db but you can Specify alternate path using following command C:\mongodb\bin\mongod.exe --dbpath "d:\test\data"

Starting MongoDB server from command prompt

To Start MongoDB server from command prompt run C:\mongodb\bin\mongod.exe command. This will start MongoDB server. Prompt will show waiting status. By default server will run on localhost port no 27017. You can change port by starting server using C:\mongodb\bin\mongod.exe --port PORTNO command.

To connect with server we will use mongo.exe shell. Run C:\mongodb\bin\mongo.exe command.

Thats All !!. Now Every time you want to use MongoDB, you have to start server and then run mongo.exe shell. To avoid doing this, you can run MongoDB service , which will start every time windows boot.

Running MongoDB server as a windows service:

To install service run following command, mongod --bind_ip IPADDR --logpath "d:\test\log\mongodb.log" --logappend --dbpath "d:\test\data\db" --port PORTNO --serviceName NAMEofSERVICE --serviceDisplayName "SERVICEDISPLAYNAME" --install. Every attribute in this command is easily understood.

To start service you can use net start NAMEofSERVICE command. And to stop service you can use net stop NAMEofSERVICE command.

If every thing goes well, you have successfullly installed MongoDB on your windows Machine.

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Django: How to use Python in Web Application Development- Part 2

In this post I am going to demonstrate how to develop basic and very first website using Django - A Python Web Framework. First of all, You need to have Python and Django installed on your machine. In my previous post I have already explained how to install Django on both Linux and Windows. After installation is completed, you can start your first project.

For better understanding create new directory for Django(just for convenience). To start project run django-admin.py startproject firstproject command in your working directory. ("firstproject" is just a name of Project, you can replace it with any name).

It will create project directory named firstproject. There will be two directory, Outer firstproject and Inner firstproject. If you are using Linux you have to change permission of every single file and directory. To do this, Goto firstproject directory and run chmod 777 * command.Again goto inner firstproject directory and run the same command.

Outer firstproject directory contains manage.py and inner firstproject directory.

• manage.py is a command line utility. you can run python manage.py help commnad for help.

• Inner firstproject directory contains another four files.

Now we will create our first module. Create file named views.py in the Inner firstproject diretory. You can give any name to this file but, it is good convention to call it views.py.

Write the following code in this file.(line starting with '#' is comment line)

views.py

#bellow statement will import HttpResponse class from
#django.http module

from django.http import HttpResponse

#Following lines of code define function named "first_project".
#function accepts one argument request. And return HttpResponse
# object which contains string.

def first_project(request):
    return HttpResponse("<h3>Welcome to my First Project</h3>")

Now we have written simple module, But our Django project do not about module we've just created. To explicitly join this module with our project we have to assign particular URL to this module.

To configure URL open urls.py file, which resides in inner firstproject directory.

If we remove comments line it only contains following:

urls.py

#Line below import patterns, url and include function from
#django.conf.urls.defaults module

from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns, include, url

#line written below will import function first_project from
#module views, which we just created above.

from firstproject.views import first_project
urlpatterns = patterns('',
)

Now to configure our module, we will add url(r'^first_project$',first_project) line as argument to patterns function. Code will look something like this.

urls.py

from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns, include, url
from firstproject.views import first_project
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^first_project/$',first_project),
)

First argument to URL is Regular Expression and Second argument is name of function we want to call when URL is opened.

For basic understanding of Regular Expression,

• '^' sign will match staring with first_project/(e.g. first_project/first, first_project/help etc.)
• '$' sign will match ending with first_project/(e.g. .../first/first_project/, .../help/first_project/ etc.)

In our case it will match string "first_project".

After this our basic project is done. To run it, we have to start Django server.

• Change to outer firstproject directory
• run python manage.py runserver command. By default it runs our server on 8000 port.
• Now open Web Browser and type 127.0.0.1:8000 in addressbar.

If every thing works fine, You should see output "Welcome to my First Project". That's it !! this is your first Web application/Web Site using Django Framework.

Here we have simply returned plain text as response. But for real web site you have HTML code to be rendered on your page.

In the Next part of this tutorial we are going to discuss how you can use template to display/render HTML code on your website. Visit next part at: Using Templates in Django | Python in Web development - Part 3

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