Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

What is easier? Creating linkbait content or requesting people to link to you?

May 12, 2008 No Comments »

I was thinking about increasing traffic on my websites, especially this blog and my copywriting and content writing website. I fare well on the search engines for some good keywords and expressions, but they are a selected few, and I’m working on optimizing my website for other keywords too (there are more than 40 keywords my website must rank high on, and doesn’t, yet).

But it’s not just generating content, you also need links from other blogs and websites to achieve more traffic, both from search results and direct links. I never feel comfortable (actually, never done that) approaching people to put my link on their blogs or websites. Comments etc. too I don’t leave any (I plan to focus on that) and I don’t participate much on online forums (I plan to focus on that too). But the thing that I like the most is producing content, and I think that’s the best of generating incoming links. In the near future I plan to write a lot for my website, and also for other blogs and websites.

Exchanging links or requesting people for links actually demands greater effort. Write an excellent blog post or a well-researched article and many people will voluntarily link to you. What do you think?

Should you use social media to boost SEO

Feb 25, 2008 2 Comments »

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuations decries this new trend amidst Internet marketers to use social media for the purpose of search engine optimization and Andy Beal reacts to it by calling it hypocritical. I think they are at the extreme ends of both the opinions.

Nobody can doubt that social media is revolutionary. It empowers people to interact and share ideas and thoughts with each other without any interference from the traditional media tools like television and newspapers and magazines and herein lies its quintessential strength and this is the reason why social media is such a hit among the average net users. And this is the reason why the SEO experts and the Internet marketers want to tap into its reach.

Blogging is a prime example of the power of social media. I don’t have much experience with other social media websites but I have plenty of experience creating and managing blogs so I can comfortably talk from this perspective. Is it wrong to use blogging as an SEO tool? Depends on what you call SEO.

The main purpose of SEO is to generate relevant traffic to your website or blog and I see no harm in it especially when you are generating traffic for genuinely useful content or service. For instance if I maintain a blog on content writing and content publishing what is wrong in it if I try to highlight my content in front of those people who want to read my content but don’t know how to find it?

Similarly using your blog mainly to search engine optimize your business website defeats the very purpose of maintaining a blog because the main purpose of maintaining a blog is setting up a communication channel with your readers so that you can exchange ideas and information with them. If, with various SEO tactics you can get tons of traffic but you don’t have anything important to offer, you are simply wasting people’s time and this is where I begin to agree with Steve.

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.

The Ongoing Microsoft and Yahoo! (or Google?) Merger Things

Feb 05, 2008 No Comments »

Note: According to the latest buzz Google is trying to salvage Yahoo from Microsoft’s hostile overtures by orchestrating a bigger bid than Microsoft’s $44.6 billion. By the time I read this latest update I had already started writing on the previous scenario so I am going ahead and publishing the post.

I have had neutral feelings for Microsoft for many years. Back in the mid-90s I used to admire it for making the PC easier to use. I still remember sitting on my friend’s XT computer and working with DOS, WordStar and dBase. I was doing my computer course and outside of my institute he was the only person who had that big and expensive (Rs. 50,000 plus, in today’s rates more than $1200) computer. Then during the course we were introduced to Windows 3.1 if I remember correctly. As software became easier to use I found more and more people using computers in their day-to-day lives with greater regularity and the credit goes to Microsoft. It followed monopolistic policies but at least the computer moved out of geeky realms  and became a common person’s productivity tool.

But as the new technologies emerged Microsoft became too complacent and got left behind especially by the companies like Google. Now it is just another company. It is able to sell its operating system and other software only because people have gotten too used to  using them and are reluctant — even at the cost of productivity and security — to try out newer, safer and more efficient software. It is just like some companies are still running COBOL applications. Microsoft sat smug on the strength of its operating system being shipped pre-installed with more than 90% PCs. It has hardly ever produced a totally new software; whatever it has produced and marketed so far has either been an improvisation of existing software or various acquisitions. The only aggression it showed towards making forays into the Internet was when it decimated Netscape in order to promote the Internet Explorer and even that now lags behind Firefox in terms of robustness and web compliance.

Easy availability of fast bandwidth is enabling people to access conventional applications like word processors and spreadsheets online. Google’s office applications are already making a dent into Microsoft’s commercial office applications market. There will soon come a time when people will require just a basic operating system — any operating system that can be easily used — and a decently compatible browser to use most of the day-to-day applications. Other than that they won’t need anything. To top it all most of the applications are either going to be available for free (like they are presently) or through very low cost subscription system. So Microsoft will soon have to curtail its dependence on selling desktop applications. It will have to change its business model drastically in order to survive.

Although Yahoo is an old company it changes faster than Microsoft just because by nature it depends on the Internet to survive. Just like Google it depends a lot on advertising revenue sources. With $1.4 billion in advertising revenue Yahoo earned $.20 of every dollar spent on online advertising last year. Compared to this Microsoft’s MSN earned just $423 million (according to OMMA magazine estimates). On top of that with $12.65 per thousand unique visitors Yahoo has the highest  CPM among the top online advertisers.

Hence one can easily make out that for Microsoft the shortest way to securing good, long-term advertising revenues would be acquiring an online company that is already a leader in this field.

In the present state of affairs as far as search is concerned, Microsoft, even when combined with Yahoo, cannot even think of competing with Google. More than 65% of search on the Internet happens on Google. This is more than double even if the searches from both Microsoft and Yahoo added together (according to Hitwise). The online ad exposure of course will get a boost and this is what Microsoft must be aiming for.

How is it going to affect all the services that Yahoo provides to its existing users? For instance what is going to happen to Flickr? Personally I have never used Flickr to host images but I know there are millions of enthusiastic photographers who use Flickr to share their images. I think the accounts will be merged with the existing windows live accounts as discussed on the Read/Write blog.

And what about search? Will you have to change your SEO strategy? I don’t think so unless there is a revolutionary change in the search concepts. My personal experience is that the most significant traffic source for a few years at least is going to be Google. The ranking system at Yahoo at present is quite weird and I prefer MSN results. Basically you should focus upon creating accessible websites with lots of relevant content and your websites and blogs should show up in all major search engines and if they don’t then it’s a problem with the search engines and not with your websites and blogs.

How to Make Your Blog Popular

Jan 31, 2008 15 Comments »

The success of your blog mostly depends on the amount of traffic it gets. This is especially more important if you want your blog to generate some kind of revenue. Frank on Biziki touches upon the topic of how to make your blog popular and I would like to share my version of the topic over here.

In order to receive tons of traffic you need to make your blog popular. The first most step of course is having lots of great content. Your blog content is the backbone of your Blogging success. In fact, personally I feel that getting lots of traffic to your blog is not the big problem; the greater challenge is generating lots of relevant, useful content, because it is only the relevance of your content that brings your readers back to your blog again and again. Your content also decides how many RSS subscribers you have; the more RSS subscribers you can boast of the higher is the value of your content.

That said, in order to make your blog popular there are some other things that you must take care of. Some of them are:

The design and look of your blog

Your blog design doesn’t matter much if you have highly useful content; people will throng to your blog no matter how it looks. but it helps your blog gain some popularity if its design is striking. If nothing else, there are a great many blogs and websites that routinely publish a list of beautiful and striking layouts. Once your blog starts appearing on these lists your blog will quickly get popular. Along with the design you should also make sure that you blog is user-friendly and all the content is easily available to everybody. Your blog design should not be browser-dependent.

The SEO aspect  of your blog

SEO (search engine optimization) of your blog matters a lot. Blog SEO does not mean manipulating the search engine results so that you can get lots of traffic from them; blog SEO means making your blog search-engine-crawler-friendly. The search engines want to index good content and if your blog contains good content then help the search engines index its posts without hiccups and obstructions. Formulate your blog posts in such a manner that the most important points are easily accessible to the search engine crawlers as early as possible, for the right keywords and this also means highlighting your keywords wherever necessary. organize the content of your blog posts using headings and subheadings, lists, and links, wherever needed. The more creatively you center your content around your main keywords and important expressions, the better ranking you achieve for individual blog posts.

Your interaction on other blogs and online forums

Interact on other blogs and online forums as much as possible because it not only gets you lots of incoming links it also helps you establish yourself as an authority in your blog subject. Take care that you don’t leave comments and messages just so that you get the chance to leave your links there; this needlessly annoys both the blog owners and their readers and there is nothing in your message that motivates them to visit your blog. Contribute to the ongoing discussion and if you feel that you have nothing constructive to say then keep mum.

Remember that lots of blog traffic is generated through networking with other bloggers. When you visit the blogs and leave useful comments the bloggers get interested in your opinion and visit your blog. If they think that your blog will add value to their blog they will add your link there. They may also refer to your particular blog posts and this is how you generate incoming links for your blog and your blog posts. Well-meaning incoming links not only send you direct traffic they also help you improve your search engine rankings. Additionally, even the readers of the blogs linking to you visit your blog and if they themselves are active bloggers there is a chance that they will link to your blog.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a great way of creating a presence for you all over the Internet. Actually this is not a new concept. Webmasters used to submit free articles to various websites looking for content. These free articles used to carry something called a “resource box” that used to contain information pertaining to the author along with the link to the author’s website. I have generated lots of traffic for my various websites using this tactic. I am gradually approaching other bloggers to write for their blogs but with the scene with my own blog looking so shady I doubt how regular I’m going to be on other blogs. Nonetheless this is one of the greatest ways of generating traffic for your blog and increasing its popularity.

A sense of regularity

A regular blog gradually becomes popular — of course the factor of relevant content being a constant — because the same people visit your blog again and again. When they visit your blog again and again they tend to remember it whenever they need to refer to something that exists on your blog. Regularity, for instance, one or two posts everyday, brings the search engine crawlers to your blog with greater frequency; besides, lots of blog posts, provided they are of good quality and relevant to the subject of your blog, will also increase the density of your keywords and key expressions, further fetching you higher search engine rankings.

Other reasons

You can organize contests and such events on your blog and this draws in lots of traffic, because many bloggers, if they find the events interesting, mention them on their blogs along with links to the concerned posts. Memes are an old method but it has been overused so much that many a time people want to avoid taking active part in them unless they are unavoidably interesting or relevant.

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