Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

What about the Opera browser?

Jul 01, 2008 4 Comments »

With so much hype surrounding the release of Firefox 3 I was wondering how many people are using the Opera browser. I find the interface quite cool.  My only problem is I’m using so many add-ons with Firefox that it won’t be worth the effort switching to Opera; although it does seem inviting. Are you using Opera instead of the Internet Explorer or Firefox?

Checking out ScribeFire

May 23, 2008 3 Comments »

Update again: Well, it is not THAT good. As each time I’m editing a post and republishing it, it is publishing a new post. In Windows Live Writer whenever I want to modify an existing blog post it downloads the post from the server, lets me modify it, and then republishes the existing post, altered. I guess I’ll have to go back to WLW.
Update: and now I’m checking whether it updates the existing blog posts or not.
For a long time I’ve been using Windows Live Writer; I don’t know why it is very slow on my laptop, and it really bothers me to wait for 10-15 seconds just to post a few lines. So I’m checking out ScribeFire after installing the plugin. It doesn’t have as many features, but at least it is faster.

Just wondering

May 09, 2008 1 Comment »

How come people selling you ideas and secrets that are earning them 500000 to 1000000 dollars yearly have such lousy websites? Even their copywriting sucks most of the time.

Use Your Content For SEO

Oct 17, 2007 3 Comments »

The content of your website or your blog can be a great SEO tool because the search engines index and rank blogs and websites on the basis of content they have and nothing else. So whether you have text, videos, or images make sure they can attract maximum traffic from the search engines.

Using your text content for SEO

When you’re writing content for your website or your blog the point is not having lots of content (although having lots of content does make a significant difference); your content needs to be organized in a search engine friendly manner. Take care that your most important keywords or the expressions appear in the first or second paragraph. Actually the keywords are not there merely to increase your web page’s SEO value; having the keywords in your first or second paragraph helps you come to your main point immediately. For instance if you are a content writer and if you write about your content writing services and if you mention the fact in the very beginning then of course you will have to mention the phrase “content writing services” at least once or multiple times depending on the need. Just make sure you don’t use your keywords and key phrases needlessly resulting in a gobbledygook sort of message.

Another thing that can help you a lot in your SEO efforts is the use of headings and subheadings. Try to highlight the main points of your web page or your blog post with the help of headings and subheadings. Your headings and subheadings help your human visitors as well as the search engine crawlers scan your page or the blog post. So make sure that you include your keywords and key expressions in your headings and subheadings.

Also organize your main points at least once in bullets. Bullets help you create a list of the main ideas and in the bullets use your keywords and key expressions as much as possible, but without sounding spammy. The search engines take the words appearing in bullets seriously. You should also highlight the main portions of your content to put more emphasis and convey to the readers, and of course, the search engines that these portions are really relevant to what you’re trying to say.

Interlink to other web pages and blog posts under your domain. Use your keywords and key expressions as text of the links. This increases the so-called link juice of your web pages.

Using your images for SEO

Images these days are an integral part of your web pages and blog posts. They enhance your message and make it more attractive. With most of the major search engines incorporating image search capability you should definitely leverage this advantage in case you use images frequently. Lots of people are experiencing great surges in their traffic because people come searching for the images.

A good way of using your images as an SEO tool is adding your website to Google’s webmaster tools. When you add your website or your blog here Google submits your images to people or rather volunteers who attach different tags to your images. For instance the more people attach the tag “content writer” to a particular image from your website the more this image gets found for the expression “content writer”.

When you put images on your web pages or in your blog posts never leave the ALT attribute of your image tag blank and preferably put your keywords or the key expressions over there. Make sure that your image is relevant to the topic of your web page. When you put an image surround the image with text that describes the image appropriately, and use your keywords and key expressions around your image.

Try to use unique images as much as possible because unique images stand a greater chance of being ranked higher. It also helps if you re-upload your images to keep them fresh. Store all your images in the images folder. When you are naming your image files try to give them meaningful names. For instance if you have an image depicting the content writing process it is better to name your image as “content-writing.jpg”. When you are using an image as a link then put the appropriate text in the title attribute of the <a tag.

These small things can significantly help you SEO your images.

Using your videos for SEO

Well you cannot directly search engine optimize a video because videos are either embedded into your web page or your blog post or they are simply linked to. I think the best way of using your videos for SEO is creating great videos so that hundreds or maybe thousands of people link to them. If your video becomes popular it generates lots of incoming links and this increases your search engine value. That’s kind of overwhelming, so what you can do is, optimize the textual content surrounding the video. You can also create smaller versions of your videos and submit them to various video hosting websites like YouTube and Google video. Naming your video files using your keywords also helps a lot. I have also seen people embedding their website links into their videos so people who are watching the videos on the video-sharing websites constantly see the URL. If they really like your video some of them also visit your profile and through there they come to your website.

When it comes to search engine optimization it is all about your content. so make sure whatever content you have on your website or your blog you derive maximum traffic for it from the search engines.

Technorati Tags: website SEO, content SEO, image SEO, video SEO

Writing content for the perfect landing page

Jul 19, 2007 7 Comments »

Your landing page is one of the most important pages of your website. Don’t let the laws of generalities and guesswork govern it. Pay close attention to what you write and present on your landing page and you’ll see a big change — for the better — in your conversion rate.

A landing page is a web page where your visitor arrives for the first time — from where he or she enters your website. Many think that your index page, or your home page is always the landing page, or should always be the landing page, but it’s not like that. As you grow your content, as you grow your number of pages, different people link to different pages from your website, and the search engines too rank your pages differently. For instance on Google, your index page may appear on the fifth page of the search result pages but one of your subject-specific pages may appear on the first page, or may be at the top. So for that subject, the subject-specific page becomes your landing page and hence, becomes your most crucial page if you want to earn some business off the traffic from Google. But then, if you consider the incoming links from the search engines, you cannot, and I think you should not, consider every page as the landing page. So there are two most important landing pages on your website:

• The page from where your visitors buy your product, or decide to pay for your service
• The page where your visitors arrive when they click on your advertisement appearing on another website (or your own website or blog), for instance, the Google Adwords.

The second kind of landing page too can be a “buy” or “pay” page, but sometimes you just want to provide information on that page. The main point is, a landing page should do precisely what it is supposed to do and it should do it optimally, without any distractions.

There are many things — images, text, layout, videos — that make a great landing page, but since I’m a copywriter I’ll focus on how to write content for a landing page. Here are a few points:

Read the rest of this entry »