PureBlogging

There’s an Indian restaurant just a few blocks from the apartment I share with my girlfriend. It’s beloved by everyone who goes there. There’s always a crowd of well-dressed people waiting to get in. I actually caught the models on America’s Next Top Model eating there one night, when I watched America’s Next Top Model for the first time. Some friends of ours all but demanded we go there. So we tried it one night.

We hate this restaurant. The chicken tikka masala tastes like Chef Boy-Ar-Dee and the service is miserable. We love Indian food — it’s always our default decision when we’re trying to think what we’d like for dinner, and for the most part, we have yet to find an Indian restaurant that we really dislike. But this place… oh, man. I’m not sure if anyone who works there has ever even been in the same room as a good curry. But hey, for some reason, people seem to love it.

Seth Godin made a great point this week:

Here’s the thing: unlike every other species, human beings make decisions differently from one another. And the thing that persuades you is unlikely to be the thing that persuades the next guy. Our personal outlook is a lousy indicator of what works for anyone else.

Not everyone is going to like what you produce. And I’m not just talking about niches — some readers may not like your writing style, some may disagree with your assertions, and some may be put off by your design. You’re not going to win ‘em all.

Which is why you should pay attention to what your readers think… but not too much attention. When you write content, follow three simple rules:

Write what you know best. OK, I admit: There’s a big problem with this rule. If people just wrote what they knew, we probably wouldn’t have science fiction. We wouldn’t have Harry Potter. We might not have any kind of writing that involves pure imagination. But you can bet J.K. Rowling knows her characters inside and out — so I think the real thrust of this rule is “Know what you’re writing about.” In other words, don’t crap out on yourself. Do the research — even if it means researching your own thoughts.

Write what feels good. As a copywriter, part of my work involves writing about topics that are about as interesting as late-night C-SPAN. One of the consequences of this situation is that it’s hard to get motivated; another, more dire consequence is that I run the risk of writing something that doesn’t represent my best effort. If you’re in charge of your own blog, be sure to write what feels good to you — not what you think someone wants to hear about. Ultimately, the content will be more appealing to readers if it looks like you had fun writing it.

Write what you want to read. The best way to find good content is to produce it. Much like the previous rule, following this rule ensures that you’ll write things that bear the mark of someone who enjoys writing.

When you pay too much attention to writing something that will get hits, or writing something that everyone will talk about, you’re losing the game before you’ve even started playing. Writing is about creating something that, whether perceptibly or imperceptibly, is about you.

Earlier this week, Jim stressed the importance of striking the balance between good writing and good marketing. He did so by contrasting bloggers who excel at writing but fail to market effectively with good marketers who skimp on content.

If you’re just starting out as a blogger, I’d recommend being a writer first. You can always apply the latest marketing techniques to your blog, or edit keywords into what you’ve already written. It’s harder to sit down and create huge swaths of good content if you don’t have any.

Don’t assume there are writers out there whom everyone loves. And don’t assume there’s a formulaic path to creating something that everyone will read. Write what you know, and what you love. That’s the only real secret.

I came across an interesting article at SEOmoz.org the other day that talked about the top 35 factors that SEO experts believe Google uses in it’s page rank algorithm.  While no one is exactly sure how Google ranks pages (most experts seem to think that there are over 200 factors in all), there is some agreement on many of the major factors that influence that ranking.  If getting a Google ranking is something you are hoping to accomplish for your blog, this knowledge is gold.

When trying to figure out what counted for and what counted against your site, each expert gave the factor a rank between 1 and 5, with 1 representing low or no influence, and 5 being high influence.  The results were averaged to come up with the final score.

What Google Loves

1.) Keyword Use in Title Tag (Score: 4.9) - This was an almost unanimous choice as the number one factor.  If you want your site to rank well for your chosen keyword, you better get those keywords into your pages title.  If you really want to optimize this, make sure that you not only use the words, but use them grouped like you think people will be searching for them.  If your blog is about Facebook Widgets, use the phrase that way, not “Widgets for Facebook”  You may still get some love from Google when you use the words in the wrong order, but not nearly as much.

2.) Anchor Text of Inbound Link (Score: 4,4) - What this means is that while inbound links influence your pages ranking, the biggest boost will come from getting inbound links that contain your keyword phrase.  A link with the “Facebook Widgets” will mean more valuable than a link from “Facebook Add-ons.”

3.) Global Link Popularity of Site (Score: 4.4) - If you want to rise in the rankings, you have to make friends that
are more influential than you are.  You will never soar if you are tied to a rock.  I’m not exactly sure how you can program an ego into an algorithm, but Google seems to have found a way.  If it likes a page, it expects you to like that page as well.  And if a page that Google thinks highly of likes you, then Google will assume you must have something going for you.

4.)  Age of Site (Score: 4.1) - For Google’s purposes, your sites age is when Google first started indexing the content.  When you are brand new, you will spend a little time in the sandbox before Google lets you go out and play with the other kids.  There seems to be a belief that while Google has always factored age into it’s rankings, this has become more of a factor over the past couple of years.

5.) Link Popularity within the Site (Score: 4.0) - I’ve always heard that linking to yourself is important, but this is a little more specific.  What this means is that if a lot of your internal links point to one page, that page will get more of a boost.  This gives you the ability to focus your articles toward a particular phrase, and consistently linking back to an anchor page that you want to rank well on Google.

What Google Hates

1.) Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots (Score: 3.8) - Not only does Google want it’s bots to be able to see your page, it wants to be able to see it every time it looks.  When the bot looks and your page isn’t there, you will drop in the rankings.  If you have used code that instructs bots how to look at your page, you want to make sure that it is formatted correctly, and that Google can see what you want it to see.

2.) Content is Very Similar or Duplicate of Content Already in the Index (Score: 3.6) - Write original content for everything you post on the internet.  I’m not talking about copying material from someone else’s site (if you do that, you deserve to dwell in the Google basement).  I am talking about not posting your article in more than one place.  I don’t care how good you think the piece is, it only gets posted one time!

3.) External Links are of Low Quality (Score: 3.6) - I wrote before about Google liking links from sites that rank higher than yours.  This is the other side of that coin.  Too many links from sites that rank lower than you will drag you down.  When doing link exchanges, make sure you are targeting quality sites, and not just agreeing to tie yourself to anyone who comes along.  The better the link quality, the more your ranking will be helped

4.) Participation in Link Schemes (Score: 3.3) - There are a lot of “link farms” and “buy-a-link” sites that tell you that the more links you get, the more Google likes you.  That is true for quality links, but Google doesn’t really seem to care a whole lot for massive pages that are just a collection of outbound links.  In fact Google dislikes them so much that it will ding your rankings if you take part in one of these programs.

5.) Duplicate Title or Meta Tags on Many Pages (Score: 3.3) - Give each of your pages a unique name.  If your permalink settings title the page the same as the title of your blog post, make sure each post has a unique name.  Don’t title every post “Facebook Widgets.”  Show a little creativity (after all, you are a writer).  You can still use your keyword phrase as much as possible, but do it with some variety: “Track Friends with Facebook Widgets” or “Facebook Widgets for Twitter.”  I think you get the point.

Google’s goal is to look for relevant content on the web.  If you are focused on producing a quality web site, and you make friends with other quality web sites, you’ll do alright with Google.  As soon as you start trying to scam the system, or running tricks to increase your rankings, you run the risk making Google angry, and you won’t like Google when it gets angry.

About a week ago, entrepreneur and blogger Jeremy Schoemaker caused a bit of a stir in the SEO community when he said that he doesn’t like 95 percent of SEO experts. It got me to thinking a lot about the whole concept of SEO and search marketing, and how it’s perceived in the online community overall.

I’ll be the first to admit that there are plenty of unethical SEO practitioners out there. Hell, I’ll do more than admit it — I’ll embrace it. There are plenty of people on the Web who perform only the bare minimum required to squirm, limbo-style, under Google’s anti-spamming guidelines. There’s an abundance of optimizers who think the road to high page rank is paved with nothing but keywords. It’s an emerging business based on concepts that are difficult to understand and predict, so it’s certainly going to attract its fair share of jerks. It stinks, and it results in a lot of crappy content taking up bandwidth that could otherwise be used for something more useful, like humorously captioned cat pictures.

But then, I’m new at the SEO game. I’ve been at it for less than a year. I’ve still got plenty to learn about the art and science of optimization. So you should definitely take the things I say with a few shakes of Mrs. Dash.

But here’s the thing I think the SEO haters haven’t seemed to figure out.

At least one blogger who responded to Schoemaker’s assertions seems to claim that companies can easily perform SEO in-house. And overall there seems to be a general feeling that anyone who claims that they can raise your page rank is a snake-oil salesman feeding you a service you could easily do yourself.

Now, the company I work for has a whole list of SEO clients for whom I need to write keyword-rich copy, great meta descriptions and page titles, and attractive PPC ads. Most of these clients are anything but tech-centric: We’ve got building contractors, hotels, hometown pharmacies and paintbrush manufacturers. All great companies with great products. But not exactly the IT crowd.

Something the geek community has never been really good at grasping is the notion that there are people out there who are not geeks, and who have no desire to be geeks. The waste management company I write for isn’t really prepared to run their own Google AdWords campaign. They’re too busy, y’know, collecting people’s trash. Thank God they’re not spending time and energy running their own AdWords campaign. Otherwise we’d all be drowning in scrap lumber and empty Fiddle Faddle boxes.

(I’m not saying AdWords is an arcane and mystical discipline requiring years of harsh, ascetic training on the ghats of the Ganges delta. I’m saying that just because your doctor knows how to answer his phone doesn’t mean he’s not going to hire a receptionist.)

Anyway, all this was geared toward asking all you gentle readers a question, which (spoiler alert) is right there in my headline: What SEO rules do you follow? What SEO ethics do you think everyone should follow?

I’ll start the ball rolling with my own ironclad rule: Provide compelling, useful content, and the rest will follow. Oh, and anyone who uses the phrase “content is king” doesn’t actually think content is king; they just want you to believe they give content more than a passing nod. What they really care about most is text messaging David Allen’s blog posts to each other.

In order to rank well in the search engines, your business blog should be search engine friendly. To begin, the title as well as the content of your blog post must contain keyword phrases that are relevant to your business blog. However, before you choose your keyword phrases, research each keyword phrase and pick the ones that are most popular and have the least amount of competition. Some tools to help you select the best keyword phrases for your business blog are Wordtracker, Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool and/or the Digital Point Keyword Research tool.

After you’ve chosen keyword phrases relevant to your business blog, place the most important keyword phrase in the title of your post. Next, place all the keyword phrases you chose throughout the content of your blog post. Once you’ve completed these two steps, check the keyword density with a free keyword density tool such as the Keyword Density Analysis Tool. A good keyword density to aim for is anywhere from 3% to 5%, anything over 5% may be considered spam. If you discover that your content needs more keyword phrases to reach at least 3%, then the above-mentioned keyword tool will allow you to rewrite the content for your business blog while viewing the keyword density for the keyword phrases you entered. As you write the content for your business blog, you want it to be interesting enough to keep your visitors reading, so try to let your keyword phrases fall into the content naturally.

In addition to including your most important keyword phrase in your title and sprinkling your chosen keyword phrases throughout the content of each blog post, I also recommend installing a SEO plugin.

For more tips on how to make your business blog search engine friendly, read JohnTP’s “8 Simple SEO Tips for Bloggers.” Finally, join me next Wednesday as I reveal how you can make more money with your business blog.

A lot of bloggers around the blogosphere have been noticing that Google has been updating their PageRanks. This is still yet to be confirmed by Google but Problogger and DBT have noticed. This PageRank change has happened very early in 2008 and was totally unexpected, especially since the last update happened late in October.

Back in October there was a huge buzz due to the new policies Google adopted that was targeted towards the selling of text links without the nofollow tag.  A good example of this was my site Crenk that went from a PR3 to a PR1, and now after the new update it is back up to a PR4 (which is still not where i wanted it to be).

Has anyone else noticed the changes? and if so, has your PR gone up or down? and finally if you removed text link ads has your sites PR improved?

It’s been a long, jet-lag-filled post-holiday week here in the House of Kev, so my post this week will be devoid of the usual top-flight content-creation advice and Algonquin-Roundtable-worthy bon mots. Instead I’m going to point you to a potential moneymaking resource that I could see myself using someday. Mostly I’m curious to see what you all think of it.

It’s called WordHugger, and as I mentioned in my title, it’s not dissimilar to Squidoo, in that it allows users to create pages centered around specific topics. It bears one fairly major difference, however — it’s a paid service.

Collin LaHay, WordHugger’s developer, markets the site as a method of investing via microlending — he even offers a money-back guarantee. A page costs $60 for ten years; each page revolves around a single word, like Wikipedia or dating, and uses can do whatever they like with them — add clickthroughs or affiliate links, or fill them with random and seemingly useless information.

Overall LaHay seems pretty knowledgeable when it comes to SEO and online revenue streams; his blog is full of useful information, and one of his most recent posts, titled “Top Ten Reasons This Post Will Be Popular on Digg,” recently took the top spot on, well, Digg. So clearly this is a guy who’s got his head in the right place when it comes to monetizing and marketing.

What I’m having trouble figuring out is why anyone would choose WordHugger over Squidoo; the best reason I can come up with is altruism, since half of the profits from WordHugger go to Kiva, a nonprofit organization that offers microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries (LaHay claims the other half goes to pay off his student loans).  I think that’s a great idea, but will it take off among an audience of Web-based entrepreneurs? My own dim view of human nature makes me wonder.

LaHay also recently introduced a new site called rssHugger, which is similar in scope. We’ll talk about that next week.