The WordsManShip

Category: SEO strategies

The Boy Who Cried Penguin…….Now Cries Negative SEO

And will continue to point fingers at the latest threat to plague the SEO world. It was the same kind of paranoia that was being perpetuated when Google unveiled its Panda and the Penguin updates. While these can hardly be labelled as “threats”, they nonetheless were attributed as a prime cause of an abrupt decline in the web traffic as well as a fall in page rankings of many technical writing and content service websites. Negative SEO is all but a threat.

The Verdict Is Still Out

Of course, paranoia in most cases is unfounded. This does not mean we deny the phenomenon of Negative SEO. But we would like to point out that it is yet to turn into a rampant trend. We acknowledge its existence and recognize its results. But one has to remember that there could be various reasons which might have led to a certain fall in traffic or ranking. Simply assuming that you are afflicted by the dark side of SEO would be jumping the gun.

Besides, only the right diagnosis can lead to the appropriate remedy. Consider the situation that your rankings continue to languish in SERP purgatory while you cry foul over dark SEO tactics and sully your competitor’s name when in truth your SEO efforts have fallen inadequate. In this particular case, what good will changing URL’s and gaining authoritative link profiles ever yield you? So, Bottom-line; if you simply assume that you have been affected by Negative SEO, odds are that the problem is something different altogether.

Don’t Be So Quick To Blame Negative SEO

So can one dismiss the threat of Negative SEO for the while? Well, partly yes. Why, you may ask. The truth is that, SEO is a tough business and these tactics make it a notch tougher. It is a job for experienced and well trained hackers who too many a times seem to botch it up. True to how it’s generally understood, these tactics are rooted in an organized approach towards depreciating the value of your links and link profile and, in proportion with the popularity and success of the website; it will require an equally effective approach. Negative SEO can attack a website in the most formidable ways. Some are easy to detect, some not so much.

Look Inside For Mistakes Before You Look Outside For Malicious Intent

The most common Negative SEO tactic is to hit you with black-hat links across a myriad of domains. And your perpetrators would do it with a large bunch of links. As mentioned in earlier blogs, you can keep a track of it and remedy it with Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO etc. I would lay emphasis on ‘large bunch’. A few bad links is just a waste of time. Besides, which website doesn’t have bad links?

If you do happen to come across any such squibs, you might want to check how many more exist in the domain as well as the next one. Odds are that you or your subordinates might be responsible for these snafus. There is also the fact to consider that this poses a temporary problem only. It is quite easy to rectify and the problem disappears soon.

Staying Prepared For Such Contingencies

It is possible to find the silhouette

It is advisable that you keep an organized record of the links and track them. This makes it easier to correct, especially if the error was committed by an outside third party firm or individual that you may have hired for supplementing your report writing and ghost writing service providers. This is a common peril when you buy content

It is imperative of course that you keep an eye out for security breaches that may modify content or add outbound content or block spider texts form accessing your page. Such problems are genuinely Negative-SEO.

Then again, if the SEO world has to fess up, Negative SEO is yet to assume a diabolical figure. It has still not evolved from its youngling roots. So the industry too has not been able to formulate appropriate measures against the menace. Till then websites can keep trying to shore up their defences but it is obvious that they still have very little to go by and are not yet fully aware of what they may have to battle against.

Some tricks hopefully will be of help. But it will be quite a while, when you come across a website that has encountered the nuisance of Negative SEO, it is after a rare and fledgling monster.

July 23, 2012
Ghost Writers! Contribute To the Community, Contribute To Your Future

In the world of SEO, being selfless really does pay in the long term

In the real world, there are many cynics. Most people in the world are cynics and most of these cynics don’t believe in the concept of ‘karma’ i.e., what goes around comes around. In fact, most entrepreneurs and businesses believe that it is pointless to forward business to other companies, which is why they just focus on their own operations and clients. Anything beyond this tight purview and they just ignore it. However, in the online SEO world where ghost writers rule the roost and people look to buy content at a premium, contributing to the business community on the whole translates into contributing to one’s own future.

Now, entrepreneurs and ghost writers who have been brought up on old school concepts would frown at this concept like Hulk would frown at an anorexic cowboy trying to talk like Loki. The reason, as is simple, is that they believe in being selfish. Some of you with an open mind might wonder how sharing and caring applies to this line of online work. Well, today we try to spread the joy about spreading the joy and, in the process, earn some selfish brownie points (more on this later).

Facilitate Your Own Standing amongst Your Peer Ghost Writers by Helping Your Industry

When you come across a client who wants a specific ghost writing service that you can’t give him, simply turning away and specifying what you don’t provide is pointless even though it may not seem that way at first glance. If, instead of telling your client that you can’t provide that service, you forward him to a peer in the industry or even a competitor, the resulting appreciation from your client as well as appreciation from your industry peer will make your business much more memorable.

Effectively, the next time your peer comes across a similar situation he would forward the client to you. Even if he doesn’t, the client that you forwarded to your peer will remember you for your good business ethics and will have positive thoughts about the SEO industry on the whole. The all-encompassing result? Next time he wouldn’t hesitate in coming back to you and the industry.

Establishing an Emotional Connection Is the Best Brand Recall Possible

Marketing has been described by experienced experts all over the world as an exercise in capturing the heart of the customer and using it as a stepping stone to reach his mind. What this, basically, means is that even though logic and common sense will help you, they would only be seen as logic and common sense, once your client’s heart is tuned to your words.

When you help out a client by forwarding him to another service provider in the same industry, you will be establishing an emotional connection with your client. Consider us, at the WordsManShip. We are a web content service company and don’t provide any SEO service apart from pure written content through our ghost writers, content writers, report writers, web content writers and other services associated with writing.

Now, when we get a client who wants SEO work done, we don’t turn them away, we forward them to SEO service providers in the industry. From our own experience, the clients we forward come back to us later to hire our ghost writers and we have even received work from the SEO service providers who we recommended. Win-win for everyone involved and that includes the clients folks!

Objective Should Be To Educate and Spread the Basic Tenets of the Industry

Even if you think that a client may not be interested in your specific services, its always good to inform and educate him on the basic tenets and benefits of your industry. What this means is that when you sell your industry as a whole, you also end up selling your services. If this is the case, then why should you only focus on yourself?

Again, let’s take our own example. Many clients that we come across know that they need ghost writers for SEO but don’t really understand what it means. When we educate them on their prospects not just through SEO content but also through other SEO techniques, their eyes open wide with dollar signs.

After all, which sane entrepreneur can resist the lure of the kind of conversion rates that ghost writers can bring in for a website, these days? Now, we do this and we know for a fact that some SEO service providers do this as well. Imagine if everyone involved in the SEO industry did this. Work would flow and the grumpy children of the SEO world may start smiling again with their bellies full.

July 18, 2012
Great SEO Content Deserves Great Marketing

Plus Why Indiscriminate SEO Is a Terrible Waste of Potential

One has to concede that the rules of SEO have gone through great many transformations. Be it organizations or individuals, many have attained a firm grasp on the rules of the game and in their efforts to trounce each other are consistently attempting various strategies. Some are new and some are rooted in old-school wisdom.

Most online business leaders are churning out great SEO content that is also well optimised. Even moderately good SEO content is optimised to a level that it becomes prominent in its reach. But this is where a flaw lies in the concept of optimization. Indiscriminate optimization somehow places all sorts of content on the same pedestal and, therefore, quite often marginally raises the value of moderate content and ironically devalues the worth and saleability of the aforementioned great SEO content. Calling a spade a spade, it’s a waste of potential. Since the SEO techniques are the same in both cases, it all becomes a question of sheer magnitude of optimization.

Going Back To the Basics

Now, It is generally a well noted business practice, that shopkeepers will place their most valued and attractive offering at such a corner of shop, where it instantly catches the eye of the customer. A majestic sedan will always be placed on a raised platform in the centre of the showroom.

The brightest diamond will be placed in a plush and ornate receptacle and be bathed in a beautiful light. The most valued object is showered with the greatest attention in selling it because customers and onlookers instantly identify and respect the trader in accordance with the best that he has to offer. This truism is well-founded in the SEO world as well.

Balancing Great SEO Content with Proper Marketing

Its worth pondering that great content will sell by itself given its inherent “greatness”, but you also forget that we live in an age where the Attention Deficit Disorder is a prevalent lifestyle. There is so much information floating around that is so overtly marketed and optimized that the audience barely buys into the need of the great SEO content. It is the blue bulb in a series of red one’s that catches your attention. It makes it apparent that there is indeed something different about the content.

This does not mean that you have to lower the SEO you perform on inferior content. That is just regressive and would mean underselling your product. You should rather try to enhance the SEO techniques you would perform on the content which you find superior. You can try to make it more receptive to search engines spider-texts, such that you attain the same level of SEO you get with your other regular content even without link-building.

Here are some methods through which you can achieve such optimization:

Establish Authorship Mark-ups

It is on good authority that Google is contemplating adding Author Ranks to its page ranking criterions. Implementing authorship mark-ups is simple and adds brand value to your name as well as that of your organization. This also makes it imperative that no matter how lacklustre Google Plus maybe. Writers have to become more active in their respective accounts. If you want to appease a demigod, you do it at his altar.

Another advantage is that, due to a name associated with your Great SEO Content, your future articles (and even your current ones) will attain greater back-links and develop a significant click through rate.

Better Page Titles

You might have the tendency of stuffing the titles of your regular pages with pickings from an extensive list of targeted words. But for Great SEO Content you really want to propagate, you should use custom made titles that are brief yet accurate in their description. This will also help in long-tail searches

You can also use these targeted keywords in the URLs since Google’s searches are accommodating enough to identify them.

Lengthy content

Lengthy or hefty content in any page bodes well for its ‘searchability’, be it technical writing or content writing. It is indicative of the amount of information the page will provide on the topic. It is also indicative of the research gone into amassing such data. Of course, this should not come at the cost of the quality. Here we go again with our trademark banter, you may think, but it’s actually for the sake of Great SEO Content.

Try to limit it to around 12 hundred words. Content services swear by the word count, but rather you should not get carried away to the point of being verbose. After all, you’re not writing an exam. Creative writing usually eschews verbosity but still has a great propensity stretch beyond a given limit.

Make an effort to link-out extensively

Link out to the sources you have absolute faith in. While you might do that normally, you should also take that extra effort to reach out to sources you don’t engage with that regularly (perhaps even freelance writers and ghost writers).

You may think it’s unnecessary but the fact is, since you are reaching out to them with Great SEO Content, you are not only helping in raising the visibility of the page a tad more but also coming with opportunities to establish connections with new sources. Moreover, considering the material you have on offer, they will gladly reciprocate. Whoever says no to caviar?

July 15, 2012
How to Counter Negative SEO Techniques

Learn to deal with negative SEO techniques as there is no telling when your website could suffer third party sabotage

Negative/Reverse SEO, currently the most controversial topic in the SEO world is yet to find itself a worthy panacea (To learn about Negative SEO, you may refer to our previous blog entry). As promised in our last blog, we, at The WordsManShip came across a variety of solutions and identified a few that might possibly help your cause. These are not sure fire solutions since, to reiterate, a single effective measure is yet to be devised. So these steps are not our claim to countering the menace. Rather, these measures will help you shore up your website against any possible attempts on your site.

Now, we at the WMS rarely barter in technical aspects of running a website. It is a job best left to IT hacks and their fellow ilk. But we surely can partake in the exchange of ideas in the terms that quite a lot of us non-engineer website administrators (specifically the content writing and technical writing fraternity) can understand. After all, apart from writing content for the web, protecting the site is our job as well. Not to mention, it wrecks our efforts at SEO.

Without digressing any further, here are some possible tips against Negative SEO.

Identify Whether You’re Afflicted with Negative SEO

We mentioned this in our earlier entry as well. You have to constantly monitor your traffic and keep an eye out for sharp drop in traffic as well as SERP’s. Such an instance of a steep fall may indicate that your site may have been attacked by spam or manipulative link-building. You can employ the services of Ahrefs.com, Google alerts or Majestic SEO.

Ahrefs.com will help you monitor your site’s linking behaviour and the pattern of the anchor-text used. Google Alerts will help you filter your search and Majestic SEO will help you attain additional time based data about your website (Plus, data about the popularity your content service).

Brand Reinforcement and Authority Building

One of the criterion’s search engines use to assess the relevance of a site is the prominence the site and its content has on other popular website and blogs. Try to penetrate popular blogs by getting your brand mentioned and try acquiring a conspicuous presence in the site.

This will not only elevate your SERP’s but protect you from miscreants motivated with malice towards your site. This makes it imperative that your site raise its quality of content, which brings us to our next point.

Generate High-Quality Content

So that it attains high-end back-links and establishes you as a leading figure in your field

This is more of an advice than a specific strategy against Negative-SEO. Seriously, you need to heed this advice irrespective of whether you are under threat or not. Otherwise, no self-respecting hacker or competitor would even bother sabotaging you, (which makes it a strategy unto itself but rather we keep our eye on progress).

Having a robust content will additionally make sure that even if the page is spammed, it will not get devalued instantly. Take the example of creative writing. Unique topics and a creative approach gain instant popularity and there are no easy substitutes for this. Ergo, it’ll still stay at the North end of the search page. This will buy you enough time to pursue the following step.

Remove Affected Pages and Transfer the Content

Move the existing content in your link to a new URL and remove the affected pages lest it induce more harm to your SERP’s. You can employ Google’s webmaster tools to report the page or other tools like Removeem.com.

Using Google’s webmaster will help de-index the pages and remove any sort of connection the afflicted link will have with the site.

The real pain would be to reclaim the blogs and links that the page had amassed, but damage control is a part of the job isn’t it?

July 11, 2012
Saboteurs on the Prowl: Negative SEO

This is a monster that needs to be nipped in the bud

The SEO world is not only a competitive place, but also a sly one. And why wouldn’t it be? Considering that it’s an industry worth billions, it would obviously employ the brightest of minds, be it in matters of technology or in management. It is in these minds that ideas fester. Many are new and innovative, some are passable and few of ‘em are plain genius. These ideas help charge at competing websites and businesses with vigour that one can label as ‘healthy competition’.

These bright sparks help take the business forward in a progressive direction. But somehow, much like in a Grimm’s fairy tale, there always seems to sprout in a dark corner of the industry, devious schemes and diabolical strategies, the latest of which is the alarming trend of Negative/Reverse SEO, pretty much the most raging and controversial topic in the industry at present.

What Are These Diabolical Schemes And Devious Strategies?

If you are still innocent to the concept of Negative SEO, it can simply be stated as outside or competing elements sabotaging your website to downgrade your page’s search ranking and traffic. To put it more descriptively, search engines have their specific criteria of ranking pages (some are outlined in detail for e.g. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines), and competing websites may load your website pages with elements that may have your site penalized due to the various algorithmic updates that the search engines are coming up with. Content writing and Technical writing websites are the most susceptible victims of such practices.

The simplest example would be, loading your page with spam comments or comments laden with a surplus of keywords so as to give it the appearance of a content farm. The search engines recognizing this as a Black-hat technique would instantly devalue your site’s links.

The Extent to Which Negative SEO Can Go

Of course, I reiterate, this was the simplest example. You’d be surprised to learn the various ways with which Negative SEO can be brought about. This can get as nasty as hackers injecting your website with spams and even blocking the search engine spider texts from accessing your website.

Disconcerting isn’t it, to know that you aren’t the only one who can harm your website with the mistakes you make. And even if you buy content, you will still have to deal with these saboteurs and parry their every move to sustain your traffic and your visibility in the web world. This is practice which takes down its prey on the sly. Needless to say, this unethical practice is blight on the industry but our concern is, considering the success of these sabotaging methods, there is a great chance that these practices are here to stay and will slowly burgeon. Writers in India are yet to feel the impact of this phenomenon, but it is only a matter of a time till it reaches Indian shores.

Dealing With the Negative SEO Techniques

Now that Negative SEO is a reality, the onus is on you to keep yourself protected against it. You may not know who the malefactor is, since it doesn’t just need to be your rivals who may be engaging in it. In fact, chances are that your competitor too may be a victim of the same. Rather than trying to identify the malefactor, you need to shore up the security of your website and SEO. The first step would be to identify if your website has already become the victim of Negative SEO and is infested with spams and manipulative link building.

You can employ the services of Ahref.com and software’s like Majestic SEO for the purpose of monitoring your content especially your SEO articles.

Google as well as other search engines are reportedly working on how to tackle this menace. Google for now is working on a ‘disavow link’ feature in its webmaster tools for site administrators so that they can remove spam links litter their search pages. This for now seems like a viable but painstakingly hard remedy. We have to concede, that it is one of the best remedies at our disposal (Well, technically we are still waiting for it. But it will be unveiled very soon).

Possible tips will follow in our subsequent articles in this blogs.

July 8, 2012
Make That SEO Horse Drink

You know how to draw visitors to your website. Now, you need to learn how to convert…

By which we mean the proverbial horse you bring to the water. Regular readers of this blog may be well aware of our recurrent rant about providing good content. Good content is of course, the foundation for the success of any website. But the definition of success goes beyond the concept of bringing in vast droves of traffic or attaining a respectable page rank. In many cases, websites are setup for garnering online business and it is crucial that the SEO techniques that are used on websites translate into business as well.

Search Engine Optimization is often understood as helping your website gain conspicuousness in the web world so as to bring in more business. Increase in traffic would definitely help with that but one also has to take note of how much of the traffic translates into business. Your content may attract hordes of visitors but the optimization that you were looking for goes to waste if the content in your websites doesn’t convince them to engage in a business with you.

After all, your investments requite an action from your visitors. The content has to be persuasive enough that a significant percentage of the traffic translates to business opportunities. It would be unreasonable to expect all your visitors to have business needs, but there are some qualities you can bring to your content can help you attract the right kind of visitors and persuade your existing traffic to engage in business with you.

Solutions They Never Knew They Needed

To propound the belief that Steve Jobs espoused, you shouldn’t provide your clients what they need. Rather you should provide solutions or services that they didn’t know they needed. This may not be the case with what you offer. But this is the impression that your content should make; that your services are much more innovative than those that exist in the market.

This not duping your clients. You can surely make your clients think that they have a need that only you can fulfil. If anything, this is a shrewd business tactic. Besides, it wouldn’t be anything that you can’t fulfil (And it shouldn’t be. That really would be duping) or they don’t need. This would a tactic that would be really relevant to the often mundane technical writing industry. The content service industry too can take note of this rule since they have a lot more liberty to be creative.

Relevance In A World Of Online Fluff

Providing relevant content on the page that the visitors are logging into is exactly what clients will be looking for. Providing content that is entertaining as well as relevant to what they are looking for. Content that pertains to what they seek in interest and lifestyle. Lifestyle too is an important part of it since it will, in turn; make their potential clients aware that your business is accommodating with their lifestyle too.

Timeliness Or Regular Updation Of Content

The content should be constantly updated with their current needs. Any business needs should be kept updated with the prevalent needs and erstwhile trends in the business environment. Since the business keeps evolving with time it is only business prudence that the content with which you intend to persuade your audience addresses the points that your clients are concerned about.

In order to have an edge over your competitors, you need to be updated with the latest fads in your business (On which note, you have to concede that most creative writing pieces strike the right chord with contemporary references). The more your website reflects the advantages that your clients can get over competitors, the more likely you are to snag their projects.

Setting Yourself Apart And Leading The Business

The content should be able to provide a brand identity to your business. This should be one of the primary dictums while formulating your content. The content should endeavour to set you apart from the rest of your competitors. It should try to present your services in a fashion that makes believe that your services are distinct from that of your competitors. Content for the web exists in a variety of forms, so getting creative with various formats so you have the liberty to dabble with a variety of ideas. Seeking outside help for innovative SEO content may seem like an expensive investment but it can hardly compare to the business a distinct brand identity will fetch you.

This too is one of the tactics by which a business can thrive. While you may provide almost similar services to your client, a brand identity will up your demand and in some cases if your content and services are really unique, chances are that the business will be synonymous with your brand.

July 5, 2012
Viral Marketing: Arrows for Your Shot In The Dark

Guidelines for Online Entrepreneurs, Internet Marketers and Website Administrators for Their Viral Marketing Efforts

Since we emphatically claimed in our last post that Viral Marketing is nothing short of genius, we thought it would be good manners to help you to the road to genius. To put it a tad more idiomatically, why leave you shooting in the dark? Then again, when it comes to viral marketing, the gray is as far as we can take you unless of course you have some really crackling material in which case you don’t need any more help, your ads will take you pretty much everywhere. Such content for the web will have little difficulty finding a large following among users.

And I don’t just mean snappy videos, but also articles for SEO, given the right target audience. (Yes! Even SEO articles). Viral marketing does not necessarily need to reach out to a general audience when all you seek is popularity amongst a niche crowd. But it helps.

If you’re going to be shooting in the dark, then you employ the following SEO-seeking ballistics to hit the SERP bulls-eye.

Get Media Coverage

Not unlike link-building for content service, getting mentioned in the press for your content by having it noted as resource or a popular content will certainly help accrue and massive amount of referred traffic to your site in a short span of time. In fact it may even be as short as a day.

It only makes sense, the larger or more effective the network, the more likely your content is going to spread. Of course the catch is that you’ll need something really newsworthy or your site needs to have a great brand-value to get any possible mention in the media.

Look for Blogger Outreach

This is much similar to the previous point. Getting featured in popular blogs and their newsletters is again a great way to go about propagating your content. Now you may ask, why not propagate your websites regular content instead? You are after all link-building and conducting standard SEO procedures.

As true as that may be, ads or the viral content you come up with are veiled in the form of entertainment. They don’t just serve the purpose of making the user sample your content; they’re primarily intended to persuade the user to check out all the features of your site.

But of course, the biggest difference lies in the fact that viral content is meant to be passed on from one user to his/her vast network of other users. Plus they may quite often lead to build connection. Sometimes ingenuity is found in the simplest of methods too. It is advised that you keep track of the connections you may form and forge a proper relation with those bloggers and site administrators.

Improve Your Content’s ‘Shareability’

Your content while being available to the public must also be easy to share. How do you expect your content to get mass attention if there are no proper channels to help the mass spread it amongst itself? The ‘shareability’ of your content with proper call to action buttons like sharing in social media or posting in them are a constant reminder to the users to share it and might actually prompt them into doing so.

Try To Latch On To Any Traffic You May Get

Sustaining the rise in traffic after your content goes even a little bit viral is sometimes key to a campaign’s success. It is true that going viral is usually synonymous to an overnight popularity of the material. But your content may not spike in popularity the instant you release it. The overnight spike might happen sometime soon. But it is essential that your content stays in public light until it strikes that very point which turns it into a sensation.

You can contain the users visiting your site by making them avail your subscription, blogs or RSS feeds. Even if this doesn’t get your existing material to go viral, it will increase the odds of your future content getting noticed and becoming an instant sensation. As little as she was versed about SEO, we’ll paraphrase Emily Dickinson, “fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate”. Be it for movie stars or simple viral content for SEO.

July 2, 2012
Viral Marketing: Crouching Opportunity, Hidden Genius

Supplementing Top Quality Content for the Web with Viral Marketing Campaigns

Dear readers (I’m assuming there’s more than one), has anyone of you heard of the ‘Dollar shave club’? Type in those words in the search engine of your choice and amidst the page littered with links to the aforementioned club, you might notice a link to a short video. It is of course an advertisement and it wouldn’t find a mention in our modest little blog if there wasn’t something extraordinary in it. This is a video that took the internet by storm sometime in April this year. Suckers for the occasional YouTube rib-ticklers might have heard about it.

The video was a simple advertisement fashioned comically around a business idea that can be described as nothing less than ingenious. Of course, in truth, it may not be, but the video could definitely convince you otherwise. The video went viral and needless to say, as Aldo the apache might put it, “Cousin, business is just boomin”.

A Case Study on Viral Marketing

In any other case, people might have scoffed at the idea and considered it a run of the mill hogwash scheme in spite of the absurdly low investment of one dollar. Perhaps it was the low investment that might have actually made it seem crazy to begin with. But the video made the audiences buy into its craziness.

And there you have it, a case study on how Viral Marketing can make your website an instant sensation. And in case you’re wondering, yes these are exactly the kind of results that Viral Marketing fetches you. It too has its drawbacks but considering the ruthless competition that you are likely to face, viral marketing maybe the perfect tool in your arsenal.

The Problems with Viral Marketing

People usually flinch in the name of viral marketing since it usually means a sudden spike in traffic which few websites can hold on to. Other forms of marketing and SEO are consistent and easy to sustain. Viral marketing on the other hand provides a recognition that slips through your fingers way too easily. There is truth in it.

The average user has the attention span of a goldfish and there are about a gazillion viral campaigns out there that are tripping up over each other. What are the odds that your campaign might come out tops and stay there? The uncertainty element just looms large.

But then again, one has to keep in mind that getting noticed is one of the most crucial steps in SEO and content writing. The rest that follows would be predicated solely on the user’s needs and experience with the website. It would be up to you to make the user feel a need that only your business can satiate. Viral marketing can make the horse come to the water. It is up to you to make it drink.

The Potential of Viral Marketing

The internet is a complex place. Subsequently, content for the web exists in many radical avatars. The exponential growth that SEO is witnessing has made marketing in the content service and technical writing industry as propitious as it is complex. Content marketing nowadays has evolved as a well rounded confluence of link attraction, social, search, branding etc. in one single force. The competition (and not just for web content writing) is vast and intense. And taking up strategies like viral marketing would be what one terms as bringing a gun to a gunfight instead of a knife.

Coming back to the uncertainties that one will face, one is yet to figure out what makes a viral campaign really go ‘viral’. What really makes the target audience carry forward the campaign? Perhaps it’s just a wild stroke of luck or maybe the answer may simply be compelling material for advertising that is zany and informative in the right mix. It is a gamble. But you’ll never win until you roll the dice now will you?

June 29, 2012
Blog-Nip to Deal with SEO Nap

Tips on How You Can Further Entice the Cogs of the SEO World to Turn In Your Favour

Anyone even remotely versed with SEO and its various techniques and processes (especially link-building) should by now be well aware of the importance of bloggers. Amassing a respectable blogger outreach has become all the more significant now owing to the various beastly updates search engines are rolling out.

Acquiring links for your web content through blogs is generally considered better considering that it provides better search rankings and helps build a better brand presence amongst your target audience. Spreading the word, True dat!

The Age Old Concept of Blogging as a Part of SEO

Of course, there is nothing new in the concept of improved blogger outreach. Blogs have been an important part of SEO from the very beginning. So naturally there already exist a lot of conventional techniques with which professionals in the industry have penetrated blogs for link opportunities with varying degrees of success e.g. pitching guest blogs, offering branded info-graphics etc. The general aim is to come up with links which seem organic in the site.

Modern Challenges Plaguing Bloggers

However, the internet being the rapidly evolving entity that it is has quickly rendered these techniques hackneyed. I do not mean obsolete in any way. These techniques still work. But they have been rendered hackneyed mostly due to over-usage resulting in the saturation due to competition that quickly accompanies popularity of a technique.

In any business, it is all about staying one step ahead of the competition. And on the internet, the competition moves vast and mobilizes in multitudes. It is this competition that makes link acquisition more intense and results in lower response rates.

The following tactics may help you in giving an edge to the strategies and techniques that you may be currently employing for expanding your blogger outreach. These aren’t complete and will surely be followed by more tactics in further entries.

Be an Enterprising Blogger Yourself When Pitching For Guest Blogs

The blogging community takes care of its own. Bloggers are more likely to entertain business opportunities with other bloggers than a website’s online marketing team. This is not virtual nepotism. It’s just that fellow bloggers would understand the problems encountered better and therefore it would easier for the two to reach an arrangement. This holds true, be it the content service industry or technical writing industry.

Here’s the deal, bloggers understand the value of their sites and blogs in matters of link building and branding campaigns which means that having some credibility of your own as a blogger will definitely help your cause.

Installing Authorship Mark-Ups and Engage In Social Media

A basic thing that many industries have to understand is that the tech savvy will always trump the plain-jane websites of internet yore (Yes-Offense, writers of India). The Darwinian natural selection in SEO exists in the form of authorship mark-ups and social media. For e.g. Google + mark-ups, Author tags etc.

This will help you make connections with your link targets and help build long term relationships with the site administrators. You might want to start with compiling a list of blogs that you can approach for such alliances.

Trawling through social network websites might also fetch you a few contacts. You can go about it by requesting bloggers for guest blogs.

Quid pro Quo

Actively involving yourself in their blogs might help you coax bloggers in staying active in your site/blog (A technique, most useful in SEO blogs). Regularly provide ideas and assure them that you’ll bring in readers. Offer compelling and click-worthy titles and actively respond to forums and discussion. Keep it in your head; you scratch their backs and sooner or later they’ll scratch your back too.

Provide incentives…other than SEO that is

You can give away e-books as well as free merchandise to a select list of your blogger associates. This has disguised advantages. Consider this, if the e-book contains links to your website, they’ll perhaps help disseminate it further. This may occur if the administrator decides to publish the PDF file.

June 25, 2012
Flair for Writing…Why Does No One Care?

In The Long Run, YOU Should…

Sounds like angst doesn’t it? Truth be told, it might be too. Who nowadays bothers to sweat over great content and prosaic meaningful phrases when all you need is Search Engine Optimization? Isn’t this what half the cyber world (especially content service and technical writing industry) has debased itself to? Pages and pages of repetitive drivel linked to fraternal clones of the same poppycock.

‘Pablum Picassos’ or ‘Problem Picassos’?

The established technique is to just stuff the pages with adequate number of anchor-texts and voila, the page scores a vast horde of traffic which will lose itself in the maze for a little while, only to exit the page and never return again.

Cue in a professional team of ‘Pablum Picassos’ (‘Pablum’ means something that is ideal for infants, possesses no flavour and is, in essence entirely devoid of anything original) and their article spinning (among other processes) paintbrushes adept at producing a humongous load of sibling pages and content for the web and you have in your hands a pitiful excuse for a website which even SEO can’t salvage.

The Comfort of Convenience in the Rat Race

But that is the general outlook isn’t it? Quantity over quality, for whoever earned more by writing less? It is a practical approach indeed. And if your strategy is trumping your competition depending on quality content rather than SEO, then of what use is the latter? In an ideal situation, a writer would be able to generate quality content in quick spurts of time.

In reality of course, ‘ideal’ hardly comes to fruition. The fight is for greater content and heft in numbers than in the matter presented. Seriously, where did all the creative writing disappear to?

Like Everything Quality Great SEO Content Is Rare

What good SEO content usually does is make your moderately written page more conspicuous in the web world; which literally translates to greater SERP’s with search engines. This would mean that audiences would give your page a dekko.

Great SEO content would have audiences not only check out your website, but pull in more people to do the same and have them returning to your site on a regular basis. This spike in traffic too is one of the factors which influence SERP’s. This is exactly the difference between a mundane con job and a true creative yield of a hard work. This would automatically raise the variety of content and subsequently the value of your site.

Credit Search Engines for Promoting Flair for Writing

Search engines are gradually growing more and more sophisticated in their search processes and therefore require more than just a simple barrage of anchor-texts so as to properly get you content really out there. So, where does flair for writing figure in all of this?

To regular readers, it would come as no surprise that we can’t get by one entry without having to mention the importance of great and unique writing. A signature style in writing and the sort of material presented cab make your pages more alluring. Remember, a truly readable write-up goes beyond the traditional concept of essay writing. The trend of identifying the writer through the article has steadily faded in the SEO industry and all the materials have neatly mashed in to an impersonal ball of instructions and guidelines.

Presenting your material with a recognizable style of writing makes the reader identify and set apart your site from all the insignificant web-goop that he comes across daily. This will undoubtedly generate greater return rate and back-link generation. Your website will, over time, gain popularity and amass a multitude of loyal visitors. In a sense, that’s half the purpose of SEO achieved by you isn’t it?

June 22, 2012