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Topic cluster vs Keyword cluster

Search engines are evolving rapidly over the years and they are getting smart with every update. With the latest updates to the Google search engines, the primary focus for ranking would be content, lots of good quality content !

Long gone are days of keyword stuffing ; new smarter search engines requires new techniques of content implementation.

What are Topic clusters?

Topic clusters for seo is a new approach to build and organize your content based on a centralized method.

This is something like a master-slave approach.

Choose a master topic to work on , this is basically the main and important topic or niche topic that your blog revolves around. In seo community it is called pillar page. The slave topics are those that, serve the master topic. The slave topics are supportive structures of master topic and hence called topic clusters.
Each slave topic in turn is a master topic and has sub topics that are slave topics to itself.

Let’s consider an topic clusters examples:

Say, Digital marketing is our master topic or pillar page. Now, choose the slave topics that are supportive to the master topic. Search engine optimization, Search engine marketing, Social media marketing , Content marketing etc could serve as the slave topics or topic clusters for Digital marketing.

Now, consider Search engine optimization as your master topic and research the slave topics around it. Onpage optimization, Offpage optimization, Technical SEO etc could now act as a slave topics to the master topic Search engine optimization.

You keep creating the clusters around each master topic.

You get the idea, right?!

This technique is quiet powerful method of internal link building , not only you are building links back and forth to your web pages, but, also you are providing reader with the value that are inter – connected. This , will keep the audience engaged within your site and that’s a good sign for google search engines to reward you.

Focus on building quality links around the topic, let the slave topic pages link to the master topic page alone avoiding external links. You can provide the external links in master topic page if necessary. This way you can build good link juice within the site.

Pages with more internal links pointing to them are crawled more often. Source: OnCrawl.

Advantages of topic cluster

Improved internal link building, thereby, increasing the chances to rank more pages in SERP.
Larger audience engagement within the site, as the topics covered are related to one another.
Builds Content authority of your website/Blog.

Cons of topic cluster

Takes lot of time to restructure the website around main topic , if you have already established the website.
Needs lot of dedicated resource time to build contents of such large magnitude.

What is a Keyword cluster technique?

This is a content marketing strategy where we take top to bottom approach on finding a niche keyword and trickle down to the long tail keywords from that niche word.

How to create keyword cluster?

STEP 1: Do a thorough research on what topic you would like to write. Let’s say you want to write on automobiles.

STEP 2: Choose the master keyword for that topic; you would want to write on “cars”. Now, “cars” keywords in itself has a wide range of search, around 10M monthly searches.

STEP 3: Which topic in “cars”, would you want to write?. You can write only about “History of cars”, “Fuel and propulsion technologies“, “Emerging car technologies” etc… Wikipedia can help you here.

STEP 4: Once you decide on these two main keywords, you can start researching on further more specific keywords to target.

STEP 5: Let us write on “Emerging car technology“, my research on this in Keyword planner, gives me more nice keywords:

automatic braking
aeb braking

STEP 6: Drill down of “automatic breaking” gives me more keyword ideas.

Also, if you notice , the Google keyword planner provide more ideas for your long tail keywords. Target these keywords to build more topics in these niche.

Build similar keywords and use them to build your niche topic.

Hope this was useful , let us know by comments , how you are using these seo clusters in your writings.

Voice first gaming experience

Article on speech technology in gaming

Gaming has been one of the most successful entertainment industries right when it started in a digital version. Today Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. Not only kids but even for the adults , digital game has been their favourite pass-time.

From the era of pre console to modern day xbox the history of gaming is quite a remarkable journey. With the evolution of gaming consoles the evolution of game controllers have also evolved from early gamepad , joystick to keyboard and touch screen, we have seen it all.

Just when we are in a phase of getting comfortable with touch games another disrupter is waiting to explode and yes, that’s voice first game or voice-first experience. Amazon is already leading the pack with its powerful Amazon’s Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). You can create games with the help of Alexa Presentation Language.

Also, you can create voice games for android and ios devices as well.

Buy the new Amazon Echo Spot

You can build voice based games for children utilities like quizzes , multiple answer questions, FAQ’s and more.

Few voice based games built on voice-first experience are:

Chicken Scream
Big Mouth
One Hand Clapping
Resonance
Full Voice Throttle

Comment below your favorite voice game !

Update (24/June/2019):

Earn Money with Alexa Developer Rewards in India

yes ! now Amazon Alexa pays for the developers in India to publish there skills in India Alexa Skills Store. The developers can earn money based on customer engagement, more engagement, more reward. So, check out Alexa Developer Rewards Program today and start earning.

Let us know how was your experience with development and earning in comments below.

Shortcode within a wordpress template

Using a very easy single line method , let’s see how we can call shortcode into our wordpress template using php code. Usually , the shortcode are used by the plugin developers to accomplish certain task with minimal code effort to display.

A shortcode is a WordPress-specific code that lets you do nifty things with very little effort. Shortcodes can embed files or create objects that would normally require lots of complicated, ugly code in just one line.

– WordPress

Simple PHP function do_shortcode can do the trick. Here is the magic line.

<?php echo do_shortcode('[your_shortcode]'); ?>

If you need to read more on shortcode development in wordpress.

To know more on shortcodes in wordpress.

Click here to read more on generate custom shortcode for wordpress plugin

If you have implemented the same method then comment below.

How do I add a menu to appear in wordpress

PHP Code to add a header menu to custom wordpress theme

Open functions.php file in your theme and add the following PHP code snippet. If function.php does not exist , create one within theme folder and add this snippet.

/** 
 * Include primary navigation menu
 */
function themename_nav_init() {
  register_nav_menus( array(
    'menu-1' => 'Primary Menu',
  ) );
}
add_action( 'init', 'themename_nav_init' );

themename_nav_init()is a Hook to initiate a call to wordpress function to let you create the menus. Replace “themename_nav_init” with any name suitable for you. But, make sure you use the same name in add_action function.
register_nav_menus This function automatically registers custom menu support with options. The array parameters passed will help to create location and description. Read more info here on wordpress codex register_nav_menu.

NOTE: register_nav_menus() allows you to register multiple location . whereas, register_nav_menu() allow you register single location.

“menu-1” is a ID for which your menu location is allocated, in this case in header “Primary Menu“. It can also called in footer or sidebar.
add_action( 'init', 'themename_nav_init' ); this will trigger the function on page initialization, referred by “init”.

Open your header.php file and add the following snippet, where you want the menu to appear in your theme.

<?php
  wp_nav_menu( array(
  'theme_location' => 'menu-1',
  'menu_id'        => 'primary-menu',
  ) );
?>

wp_nav_menu is wordpress function to display the navigation menu.
theme_location location at which the menu to be displayed. Works when you register with register_nav_menu.
menu_id The ID that is applied to the ul element which forms the menu

Along with these, there are lot of optimization options to customize. Read more on wordpress codex wp_nav_menu

As you can see in the image below , under Appearance tab, we do NOT have Menu option enabled.

After adding the function we can now see that WordPress will provide menu option to add menu items.

WordPress theme with Menu option

What custom code do you need in WordPress? Comment below your opinion and suggestions also.

jQuery to search and highlight matching text

Today, I have worked on a very simple script to search and highlight words in jquery inside HTML. Let’s get started, shall we?

Let me explain the basic logic first. The idea is to look into the browser object’s content and try to match the word or phrase using the regular expression. Then , the object is replaced with the highlighted css, if the search matches.

First, the jQuery code, later the explanation…

jquery select text

function replaceText() {

    $("body").find(".highlight").removeClass("highlight");

    var searchword = $("#searchtxt").val();

    var custfilter = new RegExp(searchword, "ig");
    var repstr = "" + searchword + "";

    if (searchword != "") {
        $('body').each(function() {
            $(this).html($(this).html().replace(custfilter, repstr));
        })
    }

}

$("body").find(".highlight").removeClass("highlight");
This line removes the previously highlighted searched words.
var custfilter = new RegExp(searchword, "ig");i” is used to ignore case and “g” is used to search pattern throughout string. Look at this Javascript regular expression link for more info. (of course, you can use more complex pattern matches).
```
$("body").each(function( ) {...});
```
I am looking for the search word throughout the ‘body’ element, hence , for each word in element, am comparing the lookup text. If you want to search for a particular content or block of content, then use the element ID, for example $(“#division”).each(function(){});
```
$(this).html($(this).html().replace(custfilter, repstr));
```
$(this) here refer to ‘body’ element, using java script’s “replace” function we are replacing the searched word with the filtered word, with little css to highlight it!.

CSS

.highlight{ 
  background:#00FF00; 
  padding:1px; 
  border:#00CC00 dotted 1px; 
}

Content

<body>
  <input type="text" id="searchtxt" />
  <input type="button" value="search" onClick="replaceText();" id="highlightButton" />
  <p>
    The ACM Digital Library, a part of the ACM Portal, contains a comprehensive archive of the organization's journals, magazines, and conference proceedings. Online services include a forum called Ubiquity and Tech News digest.
    
    ACM requires the copyright of all submissions to be assigned to the organization as a condition of publishing the work.[2] Authors may post the documents on their own websites, but they are required to link back to the digital library's reference page for the paper. Though authors are not allowed to charge for access to copies of their work, downloading a copy from the ACM site requires a paid subscription.
  </p> 
 </body>

Just added a text box and a button ; onclick of which search is triggered!.

Is it not really simple?, But wait….

DEMO LOOK:

[sociallocker]

http://www.infoandapps.com/demo/jquery-to-search-and-highlight-matching-text/

[/sociallocker]

Please subscribe if found useful and click on above links to see more cool codes 🙂