Blogging Tips

Though I don't employ any blogging strategies in this blog, I actually do know quite a bit about doing it well...I have been studying them for years.

I am not very experienced in using them for PPC/adwords kinds of strategies, but I do know how to create materials and get involved in communities that get you out there. I know some simple things that can make your blog successful.

I am not going to leak these tips out here, but I am writing a pretty detailed document on how to do some of it, from the ground up. I want it to cover most everything you need to know to get a blog up and humming. While it won't be here, it'll be infused in some way on http://www.articulayers.com/ in 2009, which is when I will finally release a new site for my own company.

In the meantime, if you are considering blogging and want some good, basic tips on getting it going, feel free to give me an email, and I will be happy to send this document to you.

Please - Look at the Spam Posted in the Comments of the Last Post

Here's a link: http://freelanceseowriter.blogspot.com/2008/08/my-non-optimized-blog.html

I just don't understand why some people think this will work.
"Dan" (or Sanjay) worked so hard on finding a simple contextual connection in my post to advertise his business, he disregarded the most basic rules of blogging...add to the topic, silly.

Normally, I would just kill it.
But Dan (or Sanjay) makes a good point--no wait, he doesn't.

He offers nothing of value, but wants to do it on my blog instead of his own. Although I am sure he has plenty of like-minded gunk on MANY blogs of his own, as well as many thwarted efforts to offer these wonderful comments on others' work. When you really think about it, getting something for nothing is a long, easy road of try and try again. He (they) have lots of failure to look forward to, I am sure.

So I left it there instead of deleting it like I normally do--and I sincerely hope this schizophrenic author figures out a better way to make a living. In the meantime, be sure to never visit his site, or the one being hawked. He'll be unemployed soon enough, reflecting on "the good old days" when he was a web "professional."

And NEVER, EVER think that comment spam is an SEO strategy worth pursuing.

What he does on my blog is similar to what the rest of us do in the bathroom.
Grunts and all.

My Non-Optimized Blog

I assume most people seeing this blog realize pretty quickly that it is not optimized at all. I am doing this on purpose--everything I do outside of this blog usually means intensive SEO, so I am not interested in it for this blog.

What?
I know, an SEO writer avoiding SEO on his own stuff makes no sense. But there are many reasons to do something, and in this site, optimizing does not serve my purpose as much as simply writing when I have time. It is like a focused diary for me...a way for me to simply keep writing, but in a much less formal way than I do for my clients.

If I were going to optimize this thing, I would:

• Link specific words and ideas to other sites
• Strategically blend in my keywords
• Become more verbally active in related blogs (to pull in readers)
• Quote other bloggers
• RSS feed it to the world
• Put social media links in it
• Target my subject matter
• Monitor traffic patterns
• Use my titles as linkbait

I am sure I'd do more too, but you get the point.

I had someone ask me directly this past week why I am not optimizing this, so I thought I'd explain.

I actually started this blog because I wanted to sort through some ideas I had for redoing my own site, http://www.Articulayers.com It has served this purpose for me already--I know I want to do 2 new sections of content on my site when I rebuild: one on SEO tips, and one on topics of interest for college students working on an English degree. I have been testing some ways to do this both on this blog, as well as on a couple websites I have out there, hidden from the world. It is slow going, because my workload has been very demanding this year...and my own site is perhaps not quite what I want it to be anymore, but it is still fine--for now.

Rest assured, when I do move this blog, it will be optimized.

And my site will be better because of it.

Multiple Sites or One?

I have been implementing some new strategies for some folks this week, and sometimes, I get asked which is better - to do many sites (like a microsite strategy) or simply putting more power behind one.

Like everything in SEO, there is no really simple answer here, but I will offer my own advice and experience.

Why Have Multiple Sites?
You might wonder why you'd even want to have multiple sites. Here are a few good reasons:

• More potential SERP results. In most cases, a single site won't have more than 2 results on any SERP. I sometimes sneak in a few more, but rarely. Yahoo is for some reason a little easier on this than Google, but neither one is very consistent. But, add a few more unique sites into the mix, and your potential for term domination increases. I say this, but ask you to be sure to note the rest of this post as my qualifier in saying it.
• Isolate tracking. On one gig I have right now, I manage about 70 sites. Of these, 2 are open for search--the rest are copies (that I intentionally block from search) on unique URLs, placed there to isolate the results of specific initiatives. It helps the business to track ROI on an effort without complicating things--I built out a few templates, so that I can enter in graphics and phone numbers but otherwise leave everything else as-is. Sometimes there are better ways to handle this, but for this client, it makes sense and works well.
• Try different approaches. Let's say you have a successful site, but want to see if you can do better by trying something new. If you start another site, you won't have to risk what the first one is doing to create a new avenue for exploration. Rather than split-test a site that is performing, you can take an entirely new direction with a new site and see what you can do with it. If it too becomes successful, you are in a great place. If it flops, no biggie...your main site is still there thumping away. Pitch the dud, and try again.
• Zero-in on a tiny aspect of the big picture. Let's say you have a site on fishing. You can launch another one on fishing boats, another on fishing gear, another on great fishing destinations. Each one is smaller, but more focused on the info it offers...can result in better SEO saturation, and better user interaction with each specific property.

There are many more reasons I am sure, but that is enough to help you see why this is sometimes a good idea.

What are some Problems with Multiple Sites?
While it may seem like a great idea, there are some things to be careful with if you are launching multiple sites.

• Duplicate content. Don't think that putting the same site out on different URLs will work...it won't. Don't think you can lift pages, swap a few words, and make all of it work. The engines are only getting better--and believe me, it is not hard at all for them to find and penalize duplicate content.
• Same Host. If you host all of your sites on one server, the search engines see it immediately. This can make them look more closely at what you are doing, which in turn, may make them decide to only show some (or worse, even none) of them.
• Same Site Structure. Same as above--if every site you launch has the same code "skeleton" (even with unique content in each), it is easy for the engines to see this, and possibly penalize you.
• Same Registered Domain Owner. Ditto to above.
• Updates/Management. The more you have out there, the more you have to update. The more you have to pay. The harder it is to maintain exceptional content across the board.
• Loss of Strength. If you have multiple sites and the engines see it, they may reduce the overall value of any one of these sites. I have seen this happen, but it is not something I can directly put my finger on - like "this" caused "that" positively. But I do think it is true--one site, one host, one registered owner can actually help you to rank a little bit. More so in Google than Yahoo or MSN, in my experience...I think it is because Google tries to be pretty proactive in thwarting spammy stuff.

Again, these are but some of the potential drawbacks--but the possibility of potentially harming your efforts should be enough for you to reel it in a little, and make sure you do things very carefully.

So What's the Best Thing To Do?
I don't think you should blanket this question with one answer. Handle it uniquely for each situation. I usually suggest at least 2-3 sites for any business - but some are handled perfectly well by expanding on one. It simply depends on what you are facing.

If you do decide to look at multiple sites as a strategy for a business, consider these tips for better results:

• Use multiple hosts if you have more than 10 sites.
• Use the privacy option when you register each domain. It costs a little more, but it is worth it to disassociate yourself from them completely, or at least, make it harder to draw a straight line between them.
• Use various site structures and different coding methods.
• NEVER duplicate/share content between them.
• Limit your links between them (may eventually hurt you, sometimes, penalizing all of them as a result).
• Make each one legitimate for its targeted audience...create real value in each site on its own.

Not the be-all-end-all on this subject by any means, but hopefully, you get the idea.

It All Starts with the Keywords

This week, I have taken on a couple of new clients. It made me think of how important the keywords are to any SEO project.

The most common thing I see is someone thinking a keyword will work, when it won't. Guilty of this one myself--I often think people will search on something specific when they in fact, don't. This is why you should try to limit your guessing in choosing your targeted keywords.

Start With a List

A business owner, or a freelance SEO writer on the job needs to free-associate some terms with the way they want the business to be perceived. List them out--that's what whiteboards and legal pads are for. Think of what you want the website to do, what the company offers--simple, basic ideas or more specific ones. Write them out and don't edit them. Do as many as you can.

In my experience, the initial list you develop here is seldom the list of keywords you will actually target in SEO.

Not to say you can't target them, of course...and you usually do. But the list a business owner and another web professional creates, and the list a street-level web user creates may not line up. They will usually intersect through obvious keywords, but many business owners are surprised to see the really odd things people type in an engine to find them.

There is often a gap between how intimately someone on the inside considers the business, and how a potential web customer sees them, or more accurately, searches for someone like them.

An SEO copywriter steps in here, to help bridge this gap.

Use the Tools

Take the brainstorming list, and run it through some really basic keyword analysis.

There are some great free tools to use to get a look at search volumes for specific keywords in various engines. Some even offered by the engines themselves. I suggest to try a couple out to see which one you like. I use more than one usually...simply because they all offer something different, and no one of them is perfect. I also like to gather as much data as I can before making a decision on keywords.

So get a few tools you like to use. Plunk in your keywords, and a good tool will not only show you the search volume on that specific term, it will list related ones. This helps you see things clearly from a user's perspective. Don't think of a keyword report like this as the Bible, or something carved in stone...try to see it as a direction.

I usually export out these lists in full, into Excel. Then I manually cull the lists, tossing out duds, and non-target worthy results. I sort the data by search volume, and the list starts to take shape. I combine the best words from the initial brainstorming list (because these are important to the business) with keywords from the analysis (because these are important to the web users) and I am able to map out a clear strategy where everybody wins.

Everything I do, depends on this list. I need to create pages that answer needs...a user's and my client's. I depend 100% on the research and data behind the keywords that make this all click together in our favor.

Take the time to really understand the keywords and search habits of your audience. Don't guess, dig deeper. The results are always worth it.

An English Major Doesn't Mean You Have to Teach

Talking with a new friend this week, she expressed some angst over being asked, "Oh, you're an English major...so are you going to teach?" and it reminded me how much that used to bug me too. Not that it's their fault for asking, but it is a little frustrating to hear time after time.

But make sure this sinks in: an English major creates a LOT of potential career paths. It's up to you to decide which one to choose.

My friend didn't quite know what she wants to do yet, but she knows she doesn't want to teach. I was pretty much the same--I liked a lot of the ideas of teaching, and respect teachers a great deal. But as a career path, it wasn't for me. I was in my early 30s, and wanted something more. I wanted to write, and not really limit it to any one thing--I wanted to tackle lots of different types of writing. So I looked into commercial writing, and soon started to land copywriting gigs. Over time, I got into web work, and soon my career path found me, not the other way around.

I didn't think, "I want to be an SEO writer." Google was just starting out when I was getting out of college, and since it was in the late 90s, the Internet boom was imploding all around me. So web work was kind of sketchy as far as a future was concerned, and I didn't really go that route at first. It was intriguing, but so much money was lost that the market was a little shaky for a while there.

But within a year or 2 right around the year 2000, I started seeing what the Internet boom and bust had done to a lot of people's sites. There were a lot of things out there that needed some attention, and I started to look at the web in a different way. I saw the potential for its greatness, and tried to help people make the sites better. It's proven to be a great thing because now I have been doing this for over 6 years, and I still like working every day. In fact, it is hard to think of a job I could like much more than this--it feels perfect. I consider this to be pretty lucky.

The point is, for a time there I didn't know what I really wanted to apply my English Degree toward. Lots of people around me were trying to get me to look into teaching, but it just didn't feel right for me. Not to say that I won't look in that direction at some point, but not for a while anyway. I knew that an English degree could be worth more to me than that if only I could find the right way to market myself and my talents.

I learned that many businesses need good writers, but don't necessarily want them on payroll. They may not need them all the time, but they need them. This led me into freelancing, and the rest, as they say, is history, or maybe my-story.

So I told my friend, like I am telling you, don't let someone convince you that to use your English degree, you need to teach. You need to teach if this is what makes you happy, and what excites you. For me, this wasn't a path I wanted to travel on...yet.

I love that fact that I am a word nerd. I love being a writer. I don't mind that I write sales stuff and what some might think is boring--I find it challenging to be creative and effective--it is a true art form if done correctly. I don't even mind trying to explain what I do...because believe me, not very many people out there really know what an SEO writer does. But if this is the price I have to pay to do what I want to do for a living, so be it. There are much worse fates.

My English degree doesn't come up any more unless I am talking to students, or those looking to break into the business. And when they hear that I too, was peppered with this question repeatedly, they find solace in the fact that I have an answer. And my answer was (and still is) "No, I am not looking for a teaching career...I am looking to creatively help businesses with my utilitarian corporate communications."

That usually says enough--or, it is enough to make me feel better anyway. And with all those big words shoved together, it usually makes the questions stop too.

Avoiding SEO Traps, Part 2 of 2

Link Farms, or Getting Something for Nothing
One of the most common ways that I see some questionable SEO firms operate, is to cash-in on a farm of sites. In an email, they will offer something like "We have hundreds of sites, and we will focus and harness them to improve your website's rankings..." In a nutshell, they are offering you a paid link back to your site from their own farm of established websites.

I am relatively sure this works right now because there is such an emphasis on backlinks, but feel this is a tactic that will have a very short shelf life. It is too easy, and it will not last forever.

How and Why it Happens
Things like open source code, Wordpress, Blogger and social media have made it much easier and quicker to get a bunch of web properties out there.

So people launch site after site, looking for the ideas that stick. They may cycle through hundreds to arrive at ten that get some decent traffic. So they jettison all but those that work, and then start over and do it again and again. In time, they build a farm of a few hundred or even a few thousand sites. This is all about the numbers, so the sites all look pretty much the same, and they'll usually function pretty much the same.

Scraping content is simple, so someone can get lots of these sites going and not really have to do much as far as ongoing development. There are scripts that populate sites so no human ever gets involved in what the site says. So you can create it with a script, populate it with a script, and use another script to change the content dynamically. It's hands-free developing--which is why it is so popular.

Then, once a few sites are established, the owners sell space on these sites where they create links to other sites. Sometimes, depending on the skill and knowledge level of the SEO offering these links, they are niche-targeted. That's a best case scenario--like a farm of financial-related sites leading back to your financial website.

But more often, the SEO provider isn't as concerned with the link quality as the link quantity...which is actually something that could hurt your efforts as much as help them. This strategy may show some immediate and impressive short-term gains, but the engines aren't stupid. They will look at who, and what is linking to your site, and why. And if everything is not kosher, they remove the link juice. Worse still, they may penalize a site for using these so called "Untrustworthy" links.

Even though this flooding of content through "cookie cutter" sites is a strategy that is working right now, I don't see this surviving for very long. It is too easy to game the system using these link farms, and it has never really been the intention of a search engine to reward this kind of thing. My prediction, based only on what has worked in the engines (and why) for the last 6 years, is that these simple-to-game farming strategies will soon lose all power.

Links are meant to offer strong juice to content. So create more viable content, and as the value of link juice diminishes, the content will resurface as the pinnacle of truth. Amen!

Content Is, and Remains King
The search engine algorithms are at their core, all about content...and the best content will not lose long to the sites that are better at manipulating links. Links are much much easier to fake than good content...so mark my words, in time, the value of backlinks will diminish or at least refine itself to a point where these strategies have much less value, if any at all. Creating a million websites and passing out the links is free and easy--so a better content filtering system will need to be employed to separate the men from the boys, as it were.

If you are investing in SEO, invest in content. SEO is a little about manipulation. But it is more about understanding, and creating good, solid reasons for continued website interaction. In a word, SEO is about content. If someone promises anything more than this, expect to pay a lot. And good luck to you...you'll likely need it.