Category Archives: SEO

Does the language you use on your website or blog affect your search engine rankings?

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words-search-engine-ranking

By language here I don’t mean English or Portuguese or French; by language I mean the words and phrases that you use in order to create content for your website or blog.

Creating search engine optimized content is all about conveying the right message for the appropriate search terms. Whenever you are writing for your website you have to keep in mind – if it is important – for what search expressions your website should draw traffic from various search engines. For instance, my website is about offering content writing and online copywriting services. So any mixture of these expressions must get me higher rankings if I want to keep doing business through search engines.

There are many webmasters and Internet marketing experts that suggest that one shouldn’t solely depend on search engine traffic and this is true. Nonetheless the majority of your traffic comes from search engines if you don’t have thousands of incoming links from other web sites and blogs and you haven’t got tons of money to invest in online advertising. Traffic from search engines can be an invaluable, low-cost opportunity that you must leverage, and this can be done by using language that conveys the most appropriate message to the search engine algorithms so that they can rank your website or individual web pages accordingly.

Language definitely affects your search engine rankings at least in the current context. People talk about semantic optimization, and even natural language processing, but right now it doesn’t seem to be happening. The actual words still matter. If I am promoting content writing I’m not getting search engine traffic if people are searching for a creative writer, even if I wish I did and suggested subtly somewhere on my website – I get found if people are looking for a content writer because I talk so much about content writing.

This I learnt the hard way. Before deciding to become a content writer I used to design and develop websites. Due to some vague reason I ended up optimizing my website for the term “Web designing” rather than “Web designer”. I featured on the first page of Google for Web designing for a good two years and I didn’t generate much business (blogging hadn’t arrived at that time otherwise I would have converted the website into a blog). I should have actually optimized my website for web designer (of course the good side is I became a content writer). These are the small things that can have long-lasting repercussions if you’re not careful about the language you use on your website.

Image source: brandis78

Writing for traffic or for the right audience?

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You many often come across blogs and articles telling you how to get spikes of traffic by writing content that pulls people towards your website or blog. They advise you to use “highly compelling” titles and submitting your link to social networking and social bookmarking websites such as FaceBook, Twitter, Digg and Delicious. I wonder how much this sort of traffic helps your business. Mind you I’m not questioning the process and I’m not even suggesting you not to indulge in such activities, I’m just thinking about it.

For instance I provide online writing services, so I would, ideally, like to draw traffic that can fetch me more business. This doesn’t mean I don’t want other people to visit my website. After all I share my thoughts on various subjects on this blog for instance, and I’d love it if people from all over the world access my blog and participate in various conversations. I feel good when all of a sudden 200 extra visitors come to my website and 5 among them subscribe to my RSS feeds or my e-mail updates. Even if they never do business with me, it is exhilarating to see the number rising day bay day. The good doesn’t always come from prospective clients.

When more people, let’s say 2000 in a day, visit your website and read your blog post or article, all of a sudden so many people are made aware of your existence and what you do. If you somehow keep on generating such spikes this number keeps on increasing. Get 4-5 traffic spikes every month and you can easily become a known person.

Does becoming known get you more business? It certainly does. As they say, success begets success. Similarly, traffic begets traffic, popularity begets popularity and trustworthiness begets trustworthiness, and all this is needed to generate more business.

When people know you, they eagerly link to you. I’ve seen even dumbest posts by popular bloggers getting popular. They bookmark you, they forward your links, they follow you on Twitter (want to follow me? It’s @amrithallan) and they add you as a friend in FaceBook. All of a sudden, heavy traffic becomes a regular affair because even the search engines begin sending you 1000s of visitors every day. All this helps you build your brand.

Having said that, slow and steady wins the race. You don’t have to prove anything as long as you meeting your business goals. Just be regular and share your experiences sincerely. The traffic will magically pick up.

How to write SEO text

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You want to know how to write SEO text to improve your search engine rankings, most probably. When you are writing for the web, it’s not just the human readers who are going to read, evaluate and then act upon whatever you have published, even the various search engines are going to evaluate your text and rank it accordingly. Although the search engine companies like Google are constantly trying to mimic the human psyche as closely as possible there subtle differences in the ways that humans and the search engine algorithms make sense of your text. If you want to learn how to write SEO text you should also spend some time understanding how the search engine crawlers access your individual pages and how those pages are ranked according to keywords and other, longer expressions present on your webpage.

Although there are many SEO experts who say that words don’t matter but they really do. Ever since we started using language to communicate words have been an integral, inseparable part of language. So in order to convey something you have to be careful about your words. For instance if you want to tell somebody, I love you, you don’t say I have the extremely opposite feeling of hatred for you. The search engines are going to think that you’re talking about hatred and not love. So if you want to learn how to write SEO you must also learn to use the right words to say something. Aside from that here are a few pointers that can lead you towards writing effective SEO text.

Make a list of the keywords that you’re going to use in the SEO text of the current page

The keywords of course must be context specific. Before preparing the text you should prepare a list of keywords and expressions that you would like to highlight on the page. Try to use these keywords while forming your sentences. Writing SEO text doesn’t meaning filling up your webpage with nonsensical repetitions. Don’t overdo it and stick to relevance. Recently I read that you should use your keyword in the first sentence of the first paragraph, in the last sentence of the first paragraph, once in every paragraph, and then once in the last sentence of the last paragraph. I don’t think all this is necessary, just use your keywords whenever you think they should appear justifiably. Use them in your headings and subheadings, bulleted lists and in anchor text. The moot point is that you have to convince the search engine algorithms that you are seriously talking about the keyword on your page.

Put your keywords in the title of your page

The title of your page is very important because it tells the search engines what your page contains. Although there is no harm in creating esoteric titles it helps a lot if your title contains the expression for which you want to be ranked higher on the search engine results pages. Various studies have revealed that search engine users have a greater tendency to click on the hyperlinks that contain the expressions they have just used to conduct the search. The title of your webpage appears as a hyperlink on the search engine results page.

Talk about the topic in the very beginning

The search engine crawlers have millions of pages to crawl and they are constantly economizing the time they spend on individual pages. Talk about the main thing in the very beginning of your webpage so that even if they don’t go through the entire page they can make out the basic theme of the page and analyze it accordingly for the appropriate keywords.

Organize your text with headings, subheadings and bullets

Headings, subheadings and bullets often present the whole picture. Many visitors just go through the headings, subheadings and bulleted points and skip the finer print. You can use your headings to kindle their interest and encourage them to read the rest of the text also. Anyway, since headings, subheadings and bullets often contain the main highlights, if they are present on the page the search engine crawlers first go through them.

Basically, there is no set formula for writing SEO text because every keyword has its own peculiar way of performing, and you shouldn’t worry much about it. Just make sure the text is properly laid out, you use the keywords enough times, and you make the text reader-friendly. And don’t try to cram many keywords into one page, 2-3 keywords should be focused upon, and in fact, you should have separate dedicated pages for all your important keywords.

Creating a page not found 404 error page if you are managing your website with WordPress

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About a couple of months ago I put my entire website into WordPress…now every page on this website is actually a WordPress blog post. This makes it very easy to add new content and modify existing content, and it is also good for SEO (it is already manifest in my stats). Besides, whenever I want to change the layout/design, I simply have to create a new WordPress theme, and then activate it using the WordPress control panel/admin area.

After a few days I noticed that my 404 page was not working. Wondering what’s a 404 page? 404 is the error number that is generated when a visitor comes to your website using a link that does not exist on your website. For instance, on my website, if you click on a link http://credible-content.com/doesntexist/ you will be redirected to http://credible-content.com/404-page/ because "doesntexist" doesn’t exist on my website.

On normal websites you can add the following line in your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://credible-content.com/404-page/

You need to store your .htaccess file in the root folder I guess. But this doesn’t work if you are managing your website with WordPress; somehow it doesn’t redirect the page using .htaccess file.   After some research I found that WordPress uses its own 404.php file to display the "page not found" page and you have to store this file in the folder where you’ve stored all your theme files, like /blog-url/wp-content/themes/your-theme-folder/404.php.

But what if you want to display a page or blog post that you’ve already created, if someone comes on a non-existent page? It’s very simple. Delete whatever you have in your 404.php file and instead, have this php line inserted:

<?php header("Location: /404-page/"); ?>

Please remember that /404-page/ is something what I’ve created for my website; you may have something else.

Are SEO and content related?

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SEO and content are definitely related because the search engines rank your website or individual pages according to the content they contain. Your website is known to the search engines, and also to the human visitors, by the worth of its content.

Does merely having content help you in SEO?

It depends on your competition. It’s not just any content that helps you in SEO. Having hundreds of pages and blog posts on kite flying is not going to help you appear higher for model planes related searches.  The content on your website must be relevant to the primary theme of your website. What message are you trying to convey through your website and does that message address the query being used by the search engine user? You have to convince the search engine crawlers that you have got the information their users are looking for.

How can one improve SEO through content?

Generate content that is relevant, useful, and exactly talks about the topic under discussion. Take for instance, the title of this webpage; it asks “Are SEO and content related?” If somebody searches for this question and if the search engine algorithms think that this blog post contains the most appropriate answer to this question they are going to rank this blog post higher compared to other pages and blog posts. How do we do that?

Obviously the question must appear on this page at least once, prominently, in this case it appears in the title of the blog post. It is also repeated, contextually, within the blog post, this means this particular expression appears on this blog post. It doesn’t have to be repeated needlessly; use it exactly where it needs to be used.

You can also use the expression within the bold typeface (preferably just once, don’t repeated wherever your expression appears), as anchor text, in bullets, and in headings and subheadings. The basic idea is to highlight the expression and convince the search engine algorithms that this particular expression is central to what you are trying to discuss on the page.

Another way how your content can help you in SEO is creating dedicated pages for individual expressions. Again, take the question in the title of this blog post. The title asks the question and the body elaborates upon it. I’m not sure whether it is going to happen or not (with the search engines you can never be too sure) but this blog post stands a great chance of appearing higher on various search engines.