Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

Blogging is a powerful tool that search engine marketers are using for contextual link building these days. Apart from specialist SEO copy writers, blogs can provide content writing professionals a robust platform to establish themselves as writer. Well, writing for blog is one thing and becoming a successful blogger is another. How can one bridge the gap? Here are a few suggestions regarding the art of blogging.

Image Courtesy: rickischultz.wordpress.com

Be candid, be simple…

When users read a blog they want the writer to be candid in expressing his/her point of view. Simple lucid language is appreciated. You can be informal with the mood and choice of words. You can be interactive by throwing some questions to your readers to encourage them in participating in the discussion. Subtle touches of humor can make your post even more interesting, but this is optional if it doesn’t come naturally.

Choose your topics carefully…

When you are writing with the purpose of earning links you are given a set of related keywords or key phrases that set up a platform for your article. But you have the freedom to choose your topic; freedom to improvise your own style, freedom to experiment with the style of writing and scope to know what your readers expect from you by following up blog comments. So, be choosy with topics and stand out from the rest.

Look into the readers mind…

Identify your readers (target audience). Do a good research on them, so that you can deliver exactly what they want and what they need. Remember, what you write must have a utilitarian aspect. Even if you are blogging to promote a specific product marketed by your company it’s not about writing overview of the product or advertising for it. Rather you can blog on how to make the best use of the product or highlight a particular feature that has been added lately. Shouting for your products or services directly can put your readers off. Product promotions can be saved for company website – blog-readers look for something more.

Be consistent …

Be consistent with the style of writing and presentation. Make it simple or a bit more complex; it’s your choice since your blog has a set of readers who are interested in the particular stream of topics and accustomed with the particular style of writing.

People will read your post if you…

• Cover a trending topic, of course with insight and authority.
• Give something extra about a commonly known subject or project it in a different light.
• Provide something useful, say, tips to optimize the usage of a particular device, or tool, or software etc.
• Be very specific on a particular topic to curb the competition, e.g, if you are writing for a web design blog ‘how to design a fast loading mobile website’ can be a wiser choice than ‘how to design a fast loading website’.
• Make it interesting with proper formatting and relevant images.

People will come to your blog if you…

Make sure you put an attractive title to your post and use your keywords craftily to maintain the natural flow.  Inserting keyword in the title is important to feed the search engines so that your blog is found in organic search. I would suggest keeping it closer to the start of the title as much as possible, but not at the cost of naturalness, of course.

Note that external links play a key role in boosting your blog’s rank on SERPs, which in turn may sharply increase the number of visitors to the blog. But, that’s a separate issue.

People will keep visiting your blog if you…

Well, there are a hundred ways to retain your readers and at the same time increase readership. But, I am not here to discuss on the technical aspects, such as adding plug-ins for subscription or integrating your blog with social networking sites. This post is purely about what you can do with your writing. Therefore, one idea will be, explicitly asking for comments. You can easily add a line in the end asking your readers to express their takes on what you have written. Inviting to comment does have a positive psychological impact on readers.  And if you find the comments worthy of responding never forget to leave a reply – a simple ‘thank you’ can do wonder.

Online video is one of the biggest phenomena to hit the web in recent years. For every person who claims it’s the best thing since sliced bread you’ll come across someone else who believes it’s just a passing fad. The people who do believe it won’t have any validity are normally the same people who claimed email would never catch on and no one would want to use the mobile phone. Online video is not a passing trend it’s simply the internet evolving to the next step.

Although online video itself has been around a few years now, the process of actually optimizing it is still relatively new. It’s only been within the last year that Google have been making so much noise about making video sitemaps and YouTube has grown at a faster pace in the last six months than it’s ever done. Because of this constantly evolving landscape coupled with the fact video is one of the few aspects of your site that hasn’t been designed with the algorithm in mind, optimizing it can be very hit and miss.

As with any optimization one of the most important factors is still going to be your keyword research and this is still the best place to start. Like any online content your video will need a title which will normally be the same title as the page it sits on. If you sell curling tongs for hair, naming your video ‘about our product’ isn’t likely to win you any positions in the search engines. Titles like ‘how to use curling tongs’ or ‘top tips for curly hair’ would probably be more productive both for your site’s visitors and your chance of appearing in the results pages. You also want to make sure the file containing your video and any code underneath it also contains your chosen keywords. Remember when the search engine spiders crawl your site they can’t read the video; they can just read the code. Because the search engine spiders can only read text, a transcription of your video is a great way to not only legitimately bring your keywords to their attention but it will also be beneficial to your sites visitors too.

As I’ve mentioned the spiders that crawl your site can’t read video and if they can’t read it they won’t know to index it. You need to specifically tell the search engines your video is there. Google have been putting a lot of effort into indexing video content over the past few months and in the last couple of week’s they’ve made a renewed attempt to revamp their video sitemap process. A video site map can be submitted to Google in the same way you would a regular site map through your Webmaster Tools console. The parameters in a video site map will tell Google exactly what your video is called along with a brief description as well as other important factors like the length of the video, any ratings your video has and the number of times its been played among many others.

Once you’ve got your video sorted on your site and you’ve told the search engines it’s there you need to think about syndicating it round the web. Unsurprisingly there are hundreds of thousands of sites that will accept video content. Ranging from the generic to the industry specific with the most obvious being YouTube. YouTube is a search engine in its own right and is the second most popular search engine in the world and has over 80% of all online video views. The only difference is you have to take your content to YouTube, it won’t find you. Like any search engine it even has its own algorithm taking into account things like video title, description, tags, views, play list additions, shares comments etc.

The overriding principle of video is, in theory, the same as any other content online, produce good quality content and you’ll be rewarded. Informative, quality videos are more likely to get thumbs up and shares on YouTube and they’re more likely to acquire natural links for your site. Of course this may be a somewhat naive attitude so a little bit of good old fashion SEO would probably help too.

Do you have video content? What tips do you have for people wanting to optimize their online videos?

I have heard quite a few people ask about keyword density. It spurs from either not exactly understanding the term or how they can apply the concept to their site. However, what does that mean for you and what you want to write about?

According to Wikipedia:

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.

When you write an article, you have a topic. Usually that is what your keywords pertain to, but some people write articles and put a relevant keyword. For example, if I was writing about designing a site and decided instead of using web design as a keyword and linking it to another site, I want to do that to web hosting. I could and that would be a keyword.

It does not have to do with tagging your posts. Tagging is something like categories, they are both used for organizing your site – categories for general topics, and tagging is more specific topics.

For anyone who has professionally written for article companies that focus on keyword density, a lot of them ask that a keyword not be used more than 1.6%, but at the least .6%. This could mean you could use that keyword any where from 1 to 5 times depending on how short or long your article is. After that, search engines like Google may believe you are trying to keyword stuff your article which is a big frown face no-no.

The beauty of language is that there are many words that are similar and you can avoid keyword over usage by consulting a Thesaurus.

If you are concerning about keyword density, you can use the keyword density analyzer, which is free for anyone to try out.

If you are using WordPress, you might want to try out Keyword Statistics.

What other tools might make monitoring your sites keyword density more convenient?

Alright, so after some inspiration and needing to revamp my link exchange buddies, I wanted to put together a dofollow list here at Blondish.net. Since it is new, pretty much there are no links.

The problem with regular link exchanges is that you end up linking with people who may not have relevance to your own site. I have made it a personal challenge to put together a DoFollow list of sites that are relevant my topics Blondish.net and list them in their specific niches.

Kind of a re-focus on link juice. I want to also be able to use this as a substitute of my own blogroll.

In order to be on the dofollow list, your site must be a dofollow site. Your site must also fall under one of the following categories:

• Social Media
• Blogging – (blog tips or a blog about blogging)
• Social Networking
• Tech
• Internet
• SEO
• WordPress
• Web Design

If your site does fall in those categories and you want to join in on the dofollow, fill out the form on The DoFollow List.

I probably should not be shocked, but as more and more people are becoming more confident about having their own sites, as a web designer and developer, the questions the things they say are a bit alarming. I fear they are not getting the information they need.

Often I refer them to Joost de Valk’s site Yoast because he is extremely knowledgeable about SEO as well as WordPress. Of course, I also refer clients and potential clients to SEO niche blogs like SEOmoz blog an SearchEngineJournal.

The problem is a lot of people get into a lot of hype on things like buying themes that are supposedly optimized for SEO, like Thesis. In the end, they waste either a developer’s fee or a single license fee when they can have a dynamic site and install recommended plugins by people that are top in their niche. Thesis is nice and allows a lot of things to be done, but design-wise, it does not really offer the flexibility that people need to brand themselves properly.

Of course, there are people who can write awesome content and get away with slinking by and not having a fantastically designed site to help with branding, but even people who are not as savvy in SEO should be taking the time to read up or watch videos. These days, people really do not have the time, but this is important.

As a site owner, it is important to try to be up-to-date in a lot of internet techniques. It is what leaves one site in the dust while its competition succeeds because they were open to keeping up. It is kind of like when I went to college for web design. The text books, even though they were informative, they were well behind for the time. Typically, by the time most internet related technology books are behind in information when it is put to print.

What sites do you think are huge resources for webmasters needing more information on search engine optimization?

I recently submitted my blog to BlogDistributor to try them out. After waiting for the site to be reviewed, I got back a noticed saying to resubmit when I fix the issue of the fact my articles do not all display full posts and only display excerpts from the front page. The reasoning behind the decision is because it was not good for search engines. (I was also suggested to use themes from known unsafe free WordPress theme sites to download in the case that I was not able to code.)

WHAT?!?!

Where is that little piece of information on the net? Seems fine and dandy to me to display excerpts. Some of the top blogs on SEO use excerpts to display posts and it is not hurting them one bit. Search Engine Journal does it, Joost de Valk does it at Yoast, and even the SEOmoz blog does it.

The whole work is within the site layout, and the content itself to build SEO. It does not really matter if your site displays full posts or excerpts because it is ALL read by the search engine. And because of social networking, and RSS, it makes it easy for people to bypass your layout and go straight to he content itself.

However, I have never had an issue with this with Pay Per Post or SocialSpark, so why is this a reason? I am not changing my site, so I am not sure why this is even an issue because I know it really does not matter.

So, I am wondering if people are not being given the right information or are we all still wrong?

What is the correct way to display your posts on your front page?

I respect Michael Gray, but I cannot agree with his post Why Everyone Should Turn Off Blog Comments. Now, I do keep my post dates and it is a choice. I do not put it in my permalinks. Google will still index your site and tell when your post has been last updated.

Yes, you should create content that is relevant for months and maybe even years to come. Putting the date in your post’s layout is a personal preference. Also putting it in your permalink is, but for SEO, you probably should not unless your site is literally a personal journal. It will do nothing to effect your site’s SEO. Your content will… remember – Content Is King!

If you are not certain about great SEO practices, I recommend reading up on WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk.

Comments are still important. What good will it do if you turn your comments off and your post does not present the best case, especially if you are a competitive blog in your niche. How will you learn and develop more as a site owner, a blogger, and in some cases, a professional?

Your readers might not always have something to say and that is fine. However, when they do, you might like to listen. Of course, they can send you an email through your contact form any time, connect with you on your social network streams, but what about your site? Your site is your headquarters. If you are not encouraging feedback there, what does that do for you – not much.

I am not a person that relies heavily on building my site rank like crazy. I do blog regularly – most might say quite frequently. I love comments. I am not the best at returning as I want to be (and I am working on that), but I have always loved to respond and I love to learn. I also get a chance to connect with others outside the 140 characters.

I was laughing lately about the title in the article that Dan Keller writes, called Does your blog suffer from ADHD?. However, as much as it was a funny title, the article shares a serious issue. Before I go into sharing some ways to help give your site a better focus, I thought I would share my own personal experience.

Some of the bloggers that are still learning the ropes may have started a site for whatever reason and built it with zest. However, months or maybe a year or two later, the site is one heap of a mess. This is what happened here at Blondish.net at one point. And that took 3 years and a very bad decision to have a hiatus. What I realized was that I needed to focus on what my site was about. I never wanted Blondish.net to be a personal blog. In fact, this site has evolved from a website I had in site competitions and the goal was to give free advice and free graphics.

Blondish.net is always evolving. A lot of people who visited 6 months ago have seen it in action. Two years ago, this site was quite a stranger. So, as I have focused more on what was important, my site has improved greatly.

Here are 5 ways I did this:

• 1. Go back to the drawing board. Your site does not make you. You are the one responsible for your website and can control it. Brainstorm what you want your site to focus on. Keep it within so many topics and make sure what you talk about is something you are familiar with as well as eager to learn more about. Too many topics and your site could continue to seem chaotic.
• 2. Get rid of the excess or move it elsewhere. All that content that no longer fits needs to go somewhere. You might want to open a second website, or keep it on draft.
• 3. Is your site design reflecting what you want it to? You need something to be proud of. If your site is too plain Jane or does not give anyone a reason to want to visit, why bother. Even if your site has awesome content, how can you make your site memorable. Think ‘McDonalds’ and all those places that you probably knew what they were as a child before you could read by just the logo on the sign.
• 4. Get feedback. As some people in your niche that you know about what you can do in order to improve your site. Make a survey. Send an email out or send a message through your social network streams. Ask anyone who has visited your site what interested them and what they believe would help you covert over more visitors.
• 5. Be open to changing and revamping your site focus at any time. You might go through several brainstorm sessions on your site focus before you get a winning plan. It is up to you to make sure you or your webmaster is on top of the most current ways to optimize your site for search engines, designs, and even your visitors.

What other ways do you believe will help a website owner have a better site focus?