I recently had to run an ad on Craigslist to find some writers to contribute to one of the blogs I run for a client.

The ad was very specific:

Calling all web developers who can share cool tricks, tips and tutorials with others, Developer Drive is seeking web developers who can write 500 – 700 word tutorials for our readers explaining how to do cool things in web development. Not only do you get some great exposure on our site, but we are part of the Smashing Network as well so your work will be seen by a few people.

Also, we pay for every published tutorial, $75 for every one we accept.

Understand that we are not looking for writers who can research how to do simple things in web development. We are only accepting tutorials from web developers who can write intermediate to advanced level tutorials.

If anyone can find the part of this advertisement that reads SEO skills, SEO writer or anything else that vaguely resembles a reference to knowing SEO raise your hand.

So it may shock some of you that for every one respondent that touted his or her web development skills I had three ramble on and on about their mastery of SEO. And ironically none of these people provided any evidence as to their mad skills; they just repeated SEO over and over.

What these people fail to understand is that the search engines are starting to catch up to what writing is all about.

People write to convey ideas, to inform their readers, to present their opinions or to simply entertain their audience. Since the beginning of time, until the late nineties, writing has never been about keyword stuffing or meta tags. It’s about what the writer has to say and how well he or she says it.

In the ever competitive world of the SERPs, I understand how important it is to make sure your content rises to the top. Optimizing content so that the search engines find it, and like it, can make or break a site.

However, if the content fails to build any trust in the readers or fails to inspire them to take action, then that content is just as worthless as the flyer that was left on your windshield on a rainy day.

Read more from Jeff Orloff.

There are a few things that are important to anyone who runs a web site.

No matter what type of site they own, everyone wants:

• A high position in the search engine results page for their keywords
• Relevant visitors who will stay on their site
• A whole ton of traffic

To do this, web site owners seek what are known as backlinks to their web site (or pages within their web site). Backlinks are incoming links to a web site or web page from another web site.

There was a time that any incoming link was considered good so people would flood bulletin boards, directories and comment sections with links back to their web site in order to reap the benefits.

That is until the search engines, and web visitors, started getting wise to this trick. After a while, just any old backlink was no longer good enough. Links had to come from quality web sites and the content surrounding the link had to be relevant to the site being linked to.

That is when guest blogging hit the web by storm. The trade off is great. Web site publishers get a steady stream of content for their readers and the guest blogger would be able to create quality backlinks for their site. And, if done right, the guest blogger could introduce their site (and/or product) to an entirely new audience. If they could build trust with their guest posts in these new readers then they had the possibility of capturing new, loyal readers/customers.

Taking a Turn for the Worse

Guest blogging has been a solid Internet marketing strategy for a few years now. However, whenever legitimate marketers find a way to reach new customers you can be assured that spammers will soon manipulate that for their own purposes.

Of course this eventually happened in the world of guest blogging.

With so many sites accepting guest posts in hopes of building strong content spammers have begun to saturate the blogosphere with low quality content in hopes that they can capture more visitors.

How They Do It

Nowadays, it is rather easy to get content written rather quickly. It just isn’t always that good.

There are plenty of businesses that offer content for prices as low as five dollars for 500 words. These are usually outsourced to non-native speakers who simply repeat keywords strategically throughout the content.

Others use what is called spinning software to create “unique” content. This software simply replaces certain words in the content with synonyms so that any site using the content gives the appearance to the search engines that the content is unique. In actuality, it is the same article written for one site but simply reused hundreds of times.

Some who rely on guest post spam don’t even bother with unique content. They simply submit the same article with their links to as many blogs as they can in hopes that it gets published.

Even if a hundred different web sites publish the article, they will all be competing with one another for search engine positioning. No matter who wins, the guest poster will receive the benefit.

Stopping This Type of Spam

Unlike other types of spam such as email spam or comment spam, there are no filters that will read the content and determine whether or not it is spam. Publishers instead have to sift through content submitted as a guest post to make sure it is not garbage.

To prevent a site from being spammed with garbage content, a publisher can take some of the following steps:

1. Don’t let guest posters register as authors. Make them register for your site and then manually approve those who make a legitimate case as a guest author.
2. Don’t allow guest posters to publish content on their own. This may make things easier for you, but until you trust an author you should approve and publish all guest posts by yourself.
3. Don’t publish content that is off topic for your blog. This simply attracts spammers.
4. Use copyscape or other similar tools. This allows you to search the Internet for any instances of duplicate content. If you find other copies elsewhere online, simply reject it.
5. Have standards for publishing. Don’t just throw anything up on your site just to get more content.

One final tip any site owner can take is to put some sort of email spam filtering tool in place as well. Many who practice guest post spamming send out mass emails to web site publishers in order to find new places to spam. Having an email filtering solution in place will help minimize this.

Read more from Jeff Orloff.

I am a huge advocate of guest posting as an online marketing strategy. In fact, much of my writing and marketing business consists of writing guest posts for my clients and finding quality blogs to publish them on.

And I try to reciprocate as well. For a few of the blogs I run, I have opened up the door to allowing others to contribute with guest posts of their own.

So I set up a few ground rules, listed them on a Write for Us page and allowed people to register for the site. Just like I had seen so many times before.

Only I made one little mistake.

Guest Post Spam

Over the years, I have helped clients deal with email spam, link spam, comment spam and just about any other kind of junk advertising you can think of.

The one thing I had never thought I would see was guest post spam. But of course, it makes perfect sense.

Guest posting is a great marketing tool because it:

1)      Provides a site with essential backlinks to help with SEO and SERP positioning

2)      Introduces your web site (and/or products) to the host’s visitors

3)      It can drive traffic back to your website

4)      It can help build your company’s reputation

So with all of these benefits, guest posting would be a perfect platform for spammers to use.

My Sad Story

So back to my tale of woe in dealing with guest post spam.

One thing I did wrong when opening up my guest post capability was immediately allowing those who registered to become contributors. I figured that I would open it up, good people would submit their content and I would go through and approve the stuff that was on topic and well written.

Wrong. What happened was that because one blog, http://instatiabletechknowledgy.com, has a home page PR of 2 I found over 200 newly registered users overnight and over 600 articles submitted by them.

None of them were of any quality worth publishing.

Luckily, I could go in and delete all the newly registered contributors and at the same time, remove all of the posts that they uploaded.

Has this soured me on allowing others to guest post for me? Absolutely not. But I have made sure that newly registered authors are defaulted as Subscribers. If they wish to contribute, they will have to contact me so that I can change their permissions.

Proof that Guest Posting Works

The one positive aspect of this incident is that is shows how effective guest posting can be.

Spammers are in business to make money and truthfully, are usually on the cutting edge when it comes to marketing. They were early adopters when it came to email marketing, they took the comment world by storm, they have flooded social networks with their messages and now they are turning to submitting guest posts.

Of course, each one of their forays into these marketing channels were done quickly and cheaply so they burn out rather quickly. However, when done right email marketing is still one of the most effective avenues to take. The same can be said for social media marketing efforts as well as backlink building through comments (check out ComLuv if you need a good example).

So the same can be said with guest posting. Having a skilled writer who can effectively get your message across not only will help build traffic and boost your search engine ranking, but will help build your brand as a expert in whatever field of business you are in.

NB – I just read that the SABRE WordPress Plugin (Sabre is an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine) should help with this in the future as well.

Incoming search terms:

• guest post Search Engine Marketing
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Read more from Jeff Orloff.

I quite frequently laud the benefits of guest posting as a way for businesses to market their website and products. So when I stumbled across this inforgraphic that shows just what guest blogging can do, I had to share it out with my readers.

You see, many people forget all the benefits of writing a guest post.

• You build credibility
• You reach out to new customers/readers
• You build back links
•  You receive traffic from the web sites where your guest posts are published

The problem many people run into when exploring guest blogging as a marketing strategy is time. They are so busy creating content for their own blog that they feel creating content for someone else’s site to be a waste of resources. Time spent writing for someone else is time that could have been spent writing for your own site.

And if the content is good, why waste it on someone else?

Good content should be shared

That last question raises a good point doesn’t it? After all, wouldn’t you want your best content to be published on your own site for your regular readers?

Of course you wouldn’t want to disappoint your faithful followers by giving them crappy stuff to read, but that is a different topic entirely. What you should be focused on is writing quality content all the time (or hiring someone who does) and spreading the wealth. Post some on your site, but dedicate enough content to be used for guest posts. After all, if someone reads an article written by you, pointing back to your site you want to leave them with the impression that you blog has just as much interesting, useful content. This only happens if what you publish on other sites is high-quality. If you take the other approach and share the content that didn’t quite make the cut on your blog, your potential customers, or readers, will pick up on that immediately and move on.

Incoming search terms:

• infographics guest postiong

Read more from Jeff Orloff.

When contacting blogs for my clients who I write guest posts for I am often asked the question, “Is the content original.”

Since I don’t want to get into an argument about semantics, I always say yes but the question should be, “Is the content unique?” because there is no such thing as original content on the Internet.

Just run a search for Top iPad Apps for… and see how many results you get. Or better yet, try searching for there are no new ideas. There are pages of articles discussing this very topic.

Fiction writers are taught this early on.

When crafting a story, writers of fiction know full well that all of the storylines have been used up over the years. But they also know that what separates Hemmingway from a trashy dime store novel is how the story is crafted.

Need another metaphor? Think of content in terms of music.

There are only a certain number of notes that a musician has to work with. However the way in which these notes are combined makes all the difference between random noise and a symphony. (By the way, this thought came from Netkid on the Warrior Forum.)

Doing it Different

To stand out among the 150 million+ blogs out there your content has to be different than the rest. It has to stand out among all of the other people who are writing on the same topic.

Seinfeld was undoubtedly one of the most popular sitcoms ever to grace the airwaves. People talked about it long after the show ended as possibly the best comedy show ever.

Then It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia came along.

While much more irreverent, the show followed Seinfeld’s proven formula to a T. Four friends, three male and one female, at conflict with just about everything making their way through everyday life events.

Even the characters mirror those from Seinfeld; Dennis provides a match for Jerry, Sweet Dee obviously takes on the Elaine role, Charlie makes a strong case for the show’s George and Mac plays a pretty good Kramer – even to the point of using the term “giddyup” on occasion.

And Frank, well he would be Neumann of course.

Not only did the crew from Sunny create a hysterical show, but they fared pretty well against the original in a poll taken by Gamespot.com with 36% of voters choosing Sunny as the better show and 58% voting for Seinfeld.

Uniqueness + Added Value = Success

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wasn’t successful because they used the same formula as Seinfeld. It’s success came from taking a proven approach, making it unique and adding value to it.

The same approach should be taken when writing content for your blog.

Take for instance the ever popular Top Ten iPad Apps headline. You know that it is a successful title because it is a list and it is about iPad apps.

But if you simply rehash the same thing said by the other million people who wrote a similar post your readers wouldn’t make it past the first few lines. And those who do would most likely use the comment section to blast the article.

On the other hand, if you were to take this proven formula and put your own twist on it you give readers something that can actually help them. That added value separates you from the many others who are simply wasting their visitors’ time.

Incoming search terms:

• original content
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• original photos blog
• unique content

Read more from Jeff Orloff.

Will Critchlow was a recent guest on SEOMoz’s Whiteboard Friday where he discussed a questionnaire he uses to help people better understand how to create content that Google’s Panda update sees as quality content.

The questionnaire, as used by Critchlow, would be given to survey takers about a particular page on a web site. Those surveyed would simply answer yes or no to the questions. The data returned from the survey could be used to see how well the targeted content would fare.

Of course that doesn’t mean we can’t take something away as bloggers, writers, SEOs, marketers, etc. By looking at the questions, we can simply take this information and apply it to every post we write.

If we write content that would make a survey taker answer yes to all, or at least most, of the questions then we can feel confident that our content will be viewed upon favorably by Google.

If we find no to be a more prevalent answer then it is time to reexamine the content and fix what doesn’t work.

To start with, we can look at some of the page level questions that Crichlow used in his survey and then some thoughts on how we can improve our content:

• Would you trust the information presented here?
• Does this article have obvious errors?
• Is this article written by an expert?

From these three questions you should have picked up on the fact that Google is looking for content that people can use.

And if someone is going to actually use the content they first have to trust the that the information is going to help them.

But to build trust, we have to look to the other two questions asked.

Does this article have any obvious errors?

Errors can be broken down into two categories: grammatical errors and errors in what is being said.

Grammatical errors are easy enough to spot and they almost immediately turn off a reader. After all, if an article is laden with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, how accurate can the content really be, right?

Errors in content are as equally off-putting to the reader. They are looking to solve a problem or learn something new. If what you are posting is inaccurate, you can bet that they won’t be bookmarking your site, sharing your content on the social channels or even reading another article.

Is the article written by an expert?

Proving that you are an expert can be a bit of a hurdle. You have to capture your audience early on and show them right from the start that you know the topic and what you have to say can help them out.

And this goes against many of the tactics that are often used to game the search engines.

Take for instance a client I had up until a few months ago. They insisted that I load up the first 100 words with the primary and secondary keywords regardless of how the content read. To them, gaming the system was far more important than making sure their readers found value in their content, despite my continued insistence that we abandon this route.

Starting your content with a strong foundation and building from there is one way that you will hook the reader and get them to pass along your content to others.

From the way things look, these social shares are going to be the next big thing in how well your pages rank. Getting people to trust your words enough to pass them along is going to be vital if you wish to survive Panda and the next round of algorithm changes.

Incoming search terms:

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Read more from Jeff Orloff.

While here are many who repeat the mantra, content is king whenever the topic of Search Engine Optimization is discussed, there are just as many who dismiss the need for good writing and still make the claim that quantity, no matter how poorly written, trumps quality when it comes to web content.

However after Google’s Panda update, sites that provide high-quality content seem to be doing better when it comes to SEO. This infographic from Brafton explains why:

Read more from Jeff Orloff.

A while ago I noticed that some of my less popular posts were at the top of the list in my posts section of WordPress. Two of them were showing today’s date as the date published and on my blog they were on the front page.

I really didn’t want this because like I said, they were two posts that had poorer bounce rates and a low number of comments. I keep them around because they provide some good information and there have been enough visitors coming in from Google that are searching for the exact information they contain so I figure if I can help out some of my readers then the posts deserve to stay.

I just don’t want them on my front page.

So like anyone who has worked with WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, etc. I knew that if I was having a problem, odds are someone else was having the same problem and the fix was a search query away.

Of course it was so let that be a lesson to any new bloggers out there.

The problem was that one of my plug-ins was trying to help me out by promoting content that it felt didn’t have enough search engine traffic.

The offending plug-in

The WordPress community is great for solving problems and they really came through here.

The first recommendation was to disable all plug-ins and then re-enable them until I found the one that caused the problem.

Not happening.

I read a bit further and found someone who claimed that SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 was the culprit and all a blogger needed to do was to turn off the promote old post setting and all should be well.

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 is a great little plug-in that I installed to help me save time. What it does is add internal linking to the blog post using the most popular keywords used by search engine visitors to find the blog post from a search engine.

I didn’t want to lose the benefits of this plug-in so I took the guidance of my fellow WordPress users and turned off this setting.

So let’s see how that works.

The problem with plug-ins

In all actuality, I should have completely disabled the plug-in and gone through my posts to set up my own internal linking.

Internal linking is great because it creates stickiness for your blog. Readers click on links to other posts you have written so your bounce rates stay low and the visitor’s time on your site grows.

The visitors benefit because they get more good stuff to read.

But back to the problem with plug-ins. I have written many articles on why WordPress plug-ins aren’t always the way to go. My latest one for Developer Drive, explains some hacks that you can use in place of plug-ins because hacks:

• Keep your site from becoming bloated
• Don’t break your blog as often as plug-ins do
• Don’t leave your blog open to vulnerabilities as often as plug-ins do
• Teach you how the backend of your blog works

Am I totally against plug-ins? Absolutely not. There are some great plug-ins that will help you tremendously. But before you install anything on your site make sure that you do a bit of research on it first. Don’t just install it because it has five stars or a fellow blogger thinks it’s the greatest thing on earth.

Incoming search terms:

• wordpress

Read more from Jeff Orloff.

If you follow me on Google+ then you know that I am a big fan of SEOMoz’s Whiteboard Friday videos.

A short while ago Rand Fishkin, the host, posted a video titled Article Marketing: Mostly a Scam.

As someone who runs a content marketing business that focuses on guest blogging and using articles and other content as a way to engage customers, build trust and rank more competitively I was horrified at first. After all, here is someone I trust for valuable information degrading my work.

In fact he starts right off referring to article marketing as this when it comes to SEO:

• Scummiest
• Lowdownest
• Dirtiest
• Ugliest
• Messiest
• Nastiest
• No goodnesst

Ouch.

Getting to the Point

Of course, Rand went on to state that these labels can’t be attached to all forms of article marketing. For example guest blogging and other forms of authentic, trustworthy content used to build trust and authority for your site.

When approached in this manner, content marketing can be one of the best tools for SEO.

The type of article marketing that took a beating in this edition of Whiteboard Friday is one that has become all too popular with SEOs and businesses who are looking for quick results in the Search Engine Results Page and don’t understand what cheap, poorly written, garbage content can do to their reputation or conversion rates.

Let me explain.

A common content marketing, or article marketing, strategy is to quickly write a keyword rich article and include a certain number of links back to pages on your site. If you use the right variety of keywords as anchor text for these links you used to be able to get some serious link juice for your efforts. Regardless of how crappy the content of your article was because they were often submitted en masse to article directories where not many people were even reading them.

When it became easy to pay someone 5 bucks to write this type of content the industry flourished. Even small businesses with a limited budget could build a steady stream of incoming links to help their SEO efforts.

Now for a few hundred dollars more you could also buy some article spinning software that would replace certain words in the content, which already sucks, with synonyms that you suggest making the article look unique to the search engines. By spinning your 5 dollar piece of trash you could now have 10, 20 even 100 “unique” articles at your disposal to use on your site or for your article marketing campaign.

Pretty neat huh?

For a while this strategy was a great way to quickly bump your pages up in the search engine rankings. And we all know that those coveted top results are a sure way to get more traffic

However the engineers at Google and Bing are pretty smart and it doesn’t take them too long to figure out that people are trying to game the search engines so they update the algorithms so that these cheap tricks no longer produce the desired effect.

Earn Respect, Build Trust, Convert Visitors

Going back to Rand’s presentation, he did state that there are noble ways of article marketing. It’s just that the term article marketing has taken on such a bad connotation that most people use it to refer to those tactics meant to cheat the system.

Guest blogging, or guest writing, is used to describe the credible manner of marketing through content.

Guest blogging has the same result when it comes to link building. Each guest post you have published on someone else’s blog helps strengthen your SEO. Use the right keywords, the best anchor text and post on the right blogs and you can see a real difference in how well your pages rank.

But guest blogging can offer a great deal more than just link building. It can help you attract targeted readers and/or customers.

For some of my pages, and my clients’ sites, I have noticed that I get just as much traffic – if not more – coming from the links in my guest posts as I do from the search engines.

People who are already interested in the topic read my work on another reputable blog and click on the link back to my site to learn more. Not only does this build traffic, but these visitors read more pages than those coming from the search engines and the bounce rate is much lower.

They also tend to convert at much higher numbers because I was able to build trust.

If you are interested in learning more about how guest blogging can help your company or web site, feel free to contact me. I would be happy to discuss the different solutions available.

If you are using guest blogging in lieu of crappy article marketing techniques let us know about your successes as well as any challenges you may have faced.

Incoming search terms:

• article marketing
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Read more from Jeff Orloff.

Every once in a while, I will google my name to see where my work is showing up in the blogosphere.

As a writer, I am thrilled to see my work being reposted on different sites. From a social media standpoint, I can’t help but think, “Another blown opportunity.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that when a fellow  blogger links back to my work and thousands more people have the chance to read it.

What bothers me is that it is such an inappropriate use of a blog.

Social media isn’t about getting as much content on your site as humanly, or electronically, possible. It’s about connecting with your audience.

The beauty of blogs is in the fact that readers can comment on what you write and engage in conversation. Their participation is what makes a blog special. But if I go visit John Doe’s blog and find three articles by Jeff Orloff in the last five posts, why would I want to comment? I’d be better off going right to the source of the article and commenting there where I can express my opinions directly to the author and hope for a response.

There are times when someone’s content may work well in one of your postings. That’s great. Link to it inside original content that you wrote. Use it like you would a reference or citation.

Oh, and a, “Hey, check out this article…” doesn’t count as original content.

No, if you are going to repost, write about it. Make it your own so that you can actively engage your readers. There are many examples out there on how people write their own content while referring back to something that has already been published.

Blogs can be great tools to bring people into your community, but at the same time, a blog for blogs sake doesn’t cut it. If the goal was to get as much keyword-rich content as possible, a simple static website will do.

Incoming search terms:

• inappropraite use of my name in a blog
• john doe\s blog

Read more from Jeff Orloff.