The key difference is that ghost spam interferes with your GA data but doesn't actually visit your site, whilst crawler spam will behave like a real visitor to your site.

Ghost spam often disappears on its own, so you may think you've stopped it but in reality it just isn't accessing your site anymore.

In the past I have used this filter from Tom Easy Referal Spam Filtering which seems to have worked, however I am also looking at the differences and read this by Moz which suggests you need separate approaches for ghost and crawler spam but I haven't needed to add anything yet.

https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

Here is a dissertation on filtering and treatment of this type of spam: https://www.ohow.co/ultimate-guide-to-removing-irrelevant-traffic-in-google-analytics/

It depends on a lot of factors. Best to test to see what gives best results.

I think it's better to use both for maximum conversion.

I try to use images and links and include back links to related posts within each of my blogs.

Hi Erica, see this suggestion by Nathaniell, it seems text link: Which is better linking words or images?

Best to try both and test the results. Both have advantages. I wonder if it is possible to combine a link with an image?

I guess it depends on how well You embed Your in-text links and how Your call-to-action images look like. A nice picture with a cool call-to-action could for sure convert very well. If You have the possibility try both and track Your links to find out what performs best.

Please don't ask me how tracking really works the shortest way possible, because I am just on my way to learn it myself... ;o)

Hope that helps a little.
Kay

I'm not sure what works best yet as my website is very new, but i have incorporated both, so i'll let you know in time.

Hi Erica, under 50 competing sites is good, but it depends on how strong those competing sites are.

This is a great training by Jay that shows you how to judge the strength of the competing sites. Keyword Competition Analysis Definitely worth a watch.

sounds a good prospects, Paul Goodwin seems to be great at getting this number 1 spots

Hi Erica; I don't know how I managed it with my site in only 3 weeks from starting with WA, but I did. One thing I DID do was to look at the tags and keywords used by those above me, and if they fit in with what I was posting, I used them as well. At one point, I actually used one person's name as part of a tag. As of this moment, I have been on page 1 on Google, Bing and Yahoo for the past 9 weeks. Like I said, it took experimentation and constant updates of my tags and keywords until I got it right. Even now, I still add the odd word here and there. Hope this helps.

Ian

Hi Erica, there are loads of reasons and remember your website will get stronger as you go along so in time your keywords will rank higher. Have you checked out my checklists? Checklist for researching content and keywords Checklist for Creating Content Checklist for AFTER Publishing Content All of those checklists help me to rank so much higher!

Bear in mind the majority of 'Woohoo, I'm on page 1' posts on WA are misleading The authors either are still signed into Google when they search, which pushes their site higher that it would for someone else. Or the keyword is very obscure and has minimal searches. Or they're searching in " " for a pretty obscure keyword.

In real life there are hundreds or thousands of sites in your, or just about any, niche. So getting to page 1 is a significant achievement. Getting to Page 2 or 3 just through writing good content alone is also an achievement. You're doing better than the vast majority of others. And it means that you may well get to page1 in the future.

But for the vast majority of sites, if you want to get there for a search term with a high volume of traffic or buyer intent then you need to also think about getting other sites to link to you. Backlinks are one of the key factors to getting a site onto page 1.

Use long-tail key words for some of your posts and pages. These are keywords that have relatively low supply. They make it easier to attain high rankings because there is not much available for them yet on the web.

Well I use singles keyword at the front and the last 12 posts are all number one page one may be just have a look at my last few blogs

I am also struggling but i get slow progress when i started to interlining pages. Try to identify pages those have high authority and than interlink to pages that are on second page of Google.

This may also work sometime. But if you do it regularly then results will likely to come, though it is slow.

Hi Erica

You may check Bill Training, it may help you to finalize your work, Difference is in the details soemtimes. Best Regards, Jeff The new SEO

I dont think other members get there easily to be honest... it takes time...

I also have a lot of pages ranked on the 2nd and third pages... but I think until your site has authority it is a little bit of a struggle and a lot of patience.

How old is your site?

Chris

Good question!

I would say test SumoMe on a test site and as far as Shareaholic goes it does slow your site down that is why I deleted it all the best Max

We get 25 free websites on SiteRubix, so you can dedicate a couple (or more) sites to testing things out - themes, plugins, whatever.

create yourself a test site with siterubix and test it out to see if there are no problems, I have to say I am using sumome and watched a webinar last night it is a good plugin and can help reduce the number of other plugins you may have

I often smile when I see this asked because the site Kyle recommends for social media comes up as not compatible and untested with WP. I think you can try but back up your entire system first just in case and then you can reload if needed. I've found if they don't work I can just delete them without any damage.

Often times the ones that are untested with your website just means the developers haven't updated it to the newest website version. There are quite a few plugins and themes that developers abandoned. Keep in mind, just because a plugin is compatible with your version of website, doesn't mean it's going to work right. That's not to say I'm encouraging you to use an outdated or untested plugin. Just making you aware.

As for me, I tend to avoid untested plugins unless I've used the plugin before and really like it. I'm willing to take the risk that it might not work properly. For an unknown plugin, I typically bypass.

I'd create a dummy site with Siterubix to test it first. :) Sumome is very good and a preferred free option for many but it can consume your site if you're not careful and yes it does slow down your site, not by much but you can tell it's installed.

If it's in your budget use Thrive Leads and Thrive Content Builder, they are awesome :)

Read this first:) Using malicious scripts can wreck your website, open a test site

I think it depends upon what you are trying to say. The training suggests never less than 300 words.

Actually someone just wrote that an ideal length was a bit over 2000. He was quoting an "internet expert." The concensus is over 1500 for sure.

I tried to keep between 500-800 as a lot of people don't have long attention span, like me!

Not forgetting that we are all bloggers here at WA so 1k to 2k+ is not a big deal. I don't believe we are the average reader though, nor do we have the average education.

Cheers!

There are many opinions but there are also statistical data. There exist optimal length, but again this is statistics so you can do well with both short and long articles. Have a look into this text: Length of a post or page

Hi Erica thank you for asking the question. The amount of words in a post seems to be an abstract metric. Google seems to like posts within the 1000 to 1500 range, but then google is in the process of introducing artifical intelligence to rank posts. It endeavours to follow human thought processes. The punters are moving to engage via smart phones, we have on average 1 0 seconds to make contact with viewers, which then may lead to further engagement. Perhaps varying the lenght of and the variety of the content may lead to better engagement. Problem solved, just coming from a different perspective

I'm using Yoast SEO to help me create search engine optimized articles.

The minimum length of an article is 300 words. Readers often tend to lose interest at about 600 words.

Often I will divide a long article into 2 pages with a "read more" link at the bottom of the first page.

I will often create 1000+ words in an article. I'm a writer and words just tend to flow.

I'm careful to make my article compelling so the reader wants to learn more by scrolling down the page.

My paragraphs are not a typical paragraph. My paragraphs are normally no more than 2 or 3 sentences.

My page content is divided into sections of about 6 or 7 paragraphs. The goal is to present a long article in a way so it doesn't look like a long article.

This message is about the limit of one of my sections in an article.

I forgot to mention that I have had many of my pages ranked in the top 5 on Google with only 150 words for my keyword. Go figure.

Hope that helps.

The short answer to that question is - it depends! The search engine algorithms have changed a lot over the last few years and Google has focused on trying to determine which sites are more authoritative and should rank higher.

One of the ways to achieve this is through showing that your article matches the needs of the searcher, the longer the post the greater the chance of being able to use multiple keywords or variations of a term and convince Google you are the post for the job.

However other searchers just want a short answer to a question and if your post is that specific it will still rank highly.

Other factors that determine authority are the number of posts indexed by the search engine, many newer sites opt to produce more shorter posts to build up numbers as another way to gain authority.

Ideally post lengths should vary between specific shorter articles (400-800 words), longer informative pieces (800-2000 words) or more research based and detailed articles (2000 words plus).

There is debate on this topic, no-one has the definitive answer but if you want some more facts and figures I have an article on this on my own site.

http://howtowriteandgetpaid.com/writing-blog-posts-the-long-and-short-of-it

Hope that helps a bit, Marie