Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

What is blu ray technology?

Feb 20, 2008 No Comments »

Blu ray is the next generation optical disk format. OK, every new technology is "next generation" so whenever you get something new of the old it becomes "nextgen". Prior to Blu ray (not blue ray, strangely) we had the HD format of a burning data onto CDs. So what is a big difference? Unlike the HD DVD (high-definition DVD) format (pioneered by Toshiba) that uses a red colored laser to write data on CDs the Blu ray technology uses, yes smarty, you guessed it right, a blue colored laser (rather, blue-violet).

The Blu ray enables you to compress more data on smaller CD area. With the help of Blu ray technology you will be able to burn anywhere between 25 GB to 50 GB of data on a single CD. This is because the blue-violet laser has a shorter wavelength (405nm — nm stands for nanometer) compared to the red laser (wavelength 650mn). This quality of the Blu ray technology enables the laser to focus upon the CD area with greater precision and this further means more data can be stored on the same amount of CD space.

Major movie studios like Disney, Fox, Warner, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate and MGM have already started releasing movies in Blu ray format. So is it going to render your current DVD players useless? Remains to be seen. You can read more on the Blu-ray website.

How can you make your blog content interesting?

Feb 20, 2008 No Comments »

This is the post that triggered this thought. How interesting is your blog content? Does it keep your readers engaged for a long time? Does it bring your readers back to your blog again and again? What actually defines "interesting"? Different people have different definitions but you can call your blog content interesting if it

• Is highly useful, relevant and contemporary
• Is presented deftly
• Interacts with your readers
• Solves different problems and delivers timely solutions
• Encourages conversations

Let the readers of this blog know what keeps your blog interesting. I just now came across Maki’s excellent post where he gives his own perspective of what is good content.

SEO your individual blog posts

Feb 19, 2008 1 Comment »

Optimizing individual blog posts for your human readers as well as the search engines is as important as optimizing your entire blog. In fact it is much more beneficial, and easier to search engine optimize individual blog posts rather than focusing on the entire blog, and this reasserts the importance of sticking to the quintessential theme of your blog.

Many blogs become famous not for their overall content but for the amount of attention some of their posts get from all over the Internet. That’s why more emphasis is given to the quality of individual posts because any post can turn you into a blogging superstar. I am not an SEO expert but my experience tells me that if you stick to the following guidelines you can search engine optimize your individual blog posts. Please keep in mind that you rankings depend on lots of other factors.

Make your title straightforward, compelling, and use your primary keywords in the title

Some SEO and blogging experts insist that your blog post title is the most important component of your blog post but I slightly disagree because I think the most important component of your blog post is the content of your blog post. Have a great title and mediocre content and in just a few moments your title is declared bogus.

The title does two things: it gives your blog post a unique identity and it conveys to the readers and the search engines what your blog post contains. In that sense it is very important; whenever somebody links to your blog post or whenever your blog post appears in the search engines result pages it is your title that grabs the attention of the reader. This is why the search engines take your blog post title so seriously. The keywords in your blog post title tell the search engines what your blog post deals in and then they rank your blog post accordingly.

The blog post title attains greater significance in the case of social bookmarking websites like Digg and del.icio.us where it’s mostly your title that decides how many clicks you’re going to get from there. Websites like popurls.com display just your blog post title and you can only get clicks if your blog post title is enticing enough. Please don’t mix enticing with misleading.

Organize your blog post content under headings, subheadings and lists

Since there is so much stuff to be read, heard, and watched on the Internet, everybody is in a perpetual rush. So it helps your readers and the search engine crawlers if you organize your content under well-defined headings and subheadings. Using your headings and subheadings they can quickly browse through your content without having to read the individual paragraphs although your effort should involve making them read more and more.

Since it is easier to read headings and subheadings the search engines crawlers go through them to understand what you’re trying to convey. Use your main keywords and key expressions in your headings and subheadings because they are used while calculating your rankings.

Lists too are a great way of highlighting your keywords. Whenever you can, express your main ideas in the bulleted lists.

Use interlinking wherever possible

Interlinking means linking to other blog posts from within your latest blog posts. This can drive traffic — both human and search engines — to less popular blog posts. This also creates a network of links, facilitating easier crawling in the process. Make sure to use the relevant keywords as anchor text when you are interlinking because this way the search engines can make out what sort of information the page is being linked to contains. It then helps boost their ranking too.

Keep the most important part at the top

This is because the most important part contains your keywords. Since the search engine crawlers are anyway not going to read your entire blog post it is better to present to them your main point as soon as they enter the blog post. Make it as interesting as possible because your initial paragraph more often than not decides whether people are going to read further or not.

Highlight your keywords without overdoing

I don’t know how much it really works but many say it does. Highlighting means making your words and primary expressions appear in bold. Don’t highlight every occurrence.

Create great content

Although this point appears in the end it is one of the most important ways of search engine optimizing your blog posts. When the content of your blog post is superb your blog post gets linked by other bloggers and webmasters and this helps you boost your search engine rankings significantly. This is how linkbaiting has evolved; people specifically write blog posts or get them written by expert bloggers so that they are linked by the others.

Joost: bringing streaming content to your PC

Feb 18, 2008 2 Comments »

A long time back I had received an invitation to join Joost — an online TV viewing website — but as it happens with every contemporary technology I never explored it until today. You can blame it on my fraud of a broadband connection that never is. I think this was the reason why even after installing the program provided by Joost I never proceeded beyond viewing the "Loading…" screen. Today again I stumbled upon (not through StumbleUpon) the website, and since I recently upgraded my broadband connection (with no significant improvement of course) I decided to give it a try again. I must say I really liked what I saw and here is a screenshot:

As you can see in the screenshot you can choose many channels belonging to various genres. Even with my shameful broadband connection I could manage watching some quick shows. The reception wasn’t THAT good but for an Internet TV and considering the kind of connection I have it was quite decent.

They were sending only invitations when they had launched the website a year or so ago, but now you can simply go to the website, download the installation program and then sign up through that program. The program is like any other Windows media application. On the left-hand side you have a menu of channels or topics and when you click on them you are presented with an array of other choices. For instance you can view horror movies, animation and cartoon movies, documentaries, etc. I didn’t have enough time to go through all the channels but they seem interesting upon first look.

I am not a big fan of Internet television because in our household TV-viewing is mostly a family affair and we don’t like watching films and other TV programs alone. Nonetheless it can be an interesting diversion when you’re feeling totally distracted and for a few minutes want to do something else. I couldn’t notice something like mainstream films and TV serials but then I have yet to explore all the options.

Just today I was thinking that in near future they might offer TV sets that would connect to streaming media websites like YouTube and show their content. This will be interesting because watching programs is more fun on TV rather than on your computer or laptop. But I wonder how they will show clickable ads on TV. Or maybe they can devise some alternative revenue model without directly having to charge the viewers.

How to make sure your website or blog is indexed by the search engines

Feb 16, 2008 4 Comments »

Much before you start expecting tons of traffic from various search engines you need to be sure that your website or your blog has been included in their databases. This may look like a minor problem but many people who wonder why they don’t get any search engine traffic haven’t had their URLs indexed.

I know the search engine crawlers are constantly scouring the length and breadth of the Internet and sooner or later they end up indexing almost all the websites and blogs, there are still chances that sometimes they get ignored or the webmasters have created, may be inadvertently, conditions that stop the search engine crawlers from crawling and consequently indexing their links. Listed below are a few steps you can take to make sure that your website or blog is crawled and indexed as soon as possible.

Make sure your robot.txt file is not creating hurdles

Robot.txt file is used to tell the search engine crawlers what files and directories should not be called and indexed. Some people prefer to do that when they keep files on the server and they don’t want people to find those files on the search engines. For instance if you don’t want the search engine crawlers to index your images folder you will use the following lines in your robot.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/

The first line containing "User-agent: *" means that no search engine crawler should crawl and index your images folder. It so happens sometimes that instead of specifying the name of the folder your robot.txt file blocks your entire website through

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

/ on its own means your root folder. Although this command in your robot.txt file should not exist unless you have put it there it is better to have a look in there. If you find such a villainous line in your robot.txt file remove it immediately.

Avoid over optimization

Some people become overzealous when optimizing their websites and blogs for keywords and key phrases. Their keywords appear everywhere like leaves of Fall. They erroneously think that repeating the keywords again and again, even when their copy sounds nonsensical, can achieve them higher search engine rankings. Search engine rankings not just depend on the appearance of your keywords they also depend on many other factors like what sort of content you have, how many people are linking to your website or blog, and what is the overall navigation structure and content organization. When you stuff your keywords all over your website the search engine crawlers cannot make sense of your content, and consequently, fail to index your link.

Create relevant content regularly

The search engines love regularly updated content and the websites that have fresh content get indexed with greater frequency. Once you have conveyed to the search engines that your website gets updated frequently they on their own start crawling your website almost on a daily basis and this I have experienced myself. There was blog I was updating multiple times daily and I did that for almost 2 months. The newly registered domain not only started appearing on the search engine result pages within 5 days my new pages appeared there usually within a few hours.

Get incoming links from respected and legitimate websites and blogs

Your incoming links not only get you clicks from the websites and blogs linking to you they also help the search engine crawlers find your links rapidly. When search engine crawlers are crawling a particular website or blog they try to visit all the links present there. So if your link exists at many places it becomes easier for the search engine crawlers to get to your website or blog.

Use legitimate search engine optimization

By using spurious SEO tactics you can get your link banned for a long time. Only use SEO techniques that are legitimate and to be frank they are much better and easier to accomplish. Some of the accepted search engine optimization steps are

• Use your keywords in your page titles
• Create search engine friendly URLs
• Organize your content under appropriate headings and subheadings
• Use your keywords in your headings and subheadings
• Use lots of interlinking
• Use your keywords as anchor text when you are interlinking
• Highlight your keywords whenever it seems appropriate
• Encourage people to link to your website or blog
• Keep your main content as near to the top of your page as possible
• Make sure there are no broken links under your URL
• Make your main navigation well-defined and use your primary keywords in your navigation; avoid using images in your navigation
• Maintain a well-structured sitemap and link to your sitemap at the top of your website so that the search engine crawlers encounter it as soon as they enter your website

These steps will make sure that you are on your way to a great search engine optimization effort.

Keep your server and file management in order

The servers that are too slow also prevent the search engine crawlers from indexing all your pages. When the server is very slow or when it is often down your web pages remain inaccessible to the search engines. Sometimes, call it bad luck or anything, your website is down exactly when the search engines are about to visit it. Host your website or blog on a decent server, it’s worth the extra cost. Also make sure that there are no missing links on your website.

Although the search engine crawlers take their own time, by making sure that you have taken care of the above-mentioned factors you will facilitate a faster and a smoother indexing. Once your website or blog has been indexed you can start improving its performance on the search engine result pages.