Effective Content Creation

Writing for the Web

1. Use blogging software. I am a personal fan of WordPress and use it for everything, for the simple reason that it’s beautiful to look at, easy to use, and Google likes it. But there are alternatives.
2. Make sure the font on your website is readable. Don’t use pale gray font that is difficult to distinguish. Don’t use tiny font that no one can read, and don’t use white on a dark background for large tracts of text (for many this is a design no-no).
3. Use a spell check: sounds elementary but so many people have spelling and grammar mistakes all over their pages–it doesn’t look professional and it puts people off.
4. If you have doubts about your writing skills, either get others to write your content, or at the very least have someone check over what you write before you publish it.
5. Write about what  you know. It will ensure that you come across as an authority. Still research everything though.
6. Find a resource, or more than one, that will help you make sure you keep up-to-date with the hot news in your field. Twitter is great for this. Follow the thought-leaders in your field and you’ll be sure to always have a good supply of information for new copy for your website. Some excellent resources might be Quora, Pearltrees, Google+ and Stumbleupon.
7. Research your articles well. Spend a little time making sure you have your facts straight and that you link out to other articles/blog posts that together will make your piece a fantastic resource.
8. Invite guest posters to write for you, and make sure that you give them the byline they want as well as a link back to their own site.
9. Make sure your copy is broken up by useful and interesting sub-headings. It makes your web copy easier to read and facilitates scanning, which most of do when we’re reading. It also has the other advantage of helping Google categorize your post.
10. Keep your paragraphs short No more than three sentences each.
11. Use images to add interest. Human beings are pretty visual creatures–we like pictures!
12. Don’t ramble on for pages and pages. You need to have enough content to say something worthwhile, but most people using the Internet have a limited amount of time, so don’t make them wade through 10,000 words when 1,000 would have done it!
13. Don’t use words that the average person is going to need a dictionary for, but on the other hand don’t write for morons either. Keep it average and comfortable. Don’t make your readers work or they’ll go somewhere else.
14. It’s not for everyone, but opening up the comments on your blog can actually provide further great content for your readers.
15. Here’s Yahoo’s styleguide for writing on the Web if you want to do some further reading.
16. Unless you want to commit to constantly updating your web posts, consciously try to limit content that will date your piece. Sometimes its unavoidable, but for the most part it’s a good plan to try to write information that will be as timeless as possible.
17. On the other hand, it is worth updating your best pieces as and when things change, or new information becomes available.
18. Use visual cues to help guide your reader through your content: in addition to images you should have bullets, numbers, quote boxes and more to make it all look good.
19. Don’t forget to link out to other sections of your own content that will enhance your pages.
20. Don’t obsess. You don’t have to create masterpieces to provide reading material that is informative and interesting. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by setting your standards too high–you’ll simply never write regularly enough.

Improve your powers of laser focus!

Laser Focus–Make it Your Watchword for 2012

I totally agree with the trend back towards FOCUS, as opposed to ‘multi-tasking’, which is the modus operandi of anyone who is easily distracted by the latest shiny new thing. In fact, I’m making it a major part of my business plan for 2012 to learn to focus. It’s going to be a challenge for me because naturally, I have what my mother used to call a butterfly mind.

Multi-Tasking–Out With the Old!

I always felt rather uncomfortable with multi-tasking, even when it was regarded as a virtue, because it just doesn’t sit well with me that when you’re flitting from task to task you could possibly be doing your best work. And now it has been confirmed that multi-tasking is actually bad for you. Could you read three books at a time? No! You unquestionably get more out of your reading experience if you allow yourself to focus on the words of one book at a time, and read it in sequence, page-after-page, right to the end.

To me, it seems common sense that everything in our life is like that. Natural health experts of all persuasions tell us, for example, that we benefit more from our food if we allow ourselves to focus on nothing else, and if we don’t try to combine eating with catching up on email, or watching TV.

And there’s no question that what allows Olympic-class athletes to be the best is focus. Often assisted by some kind of meditation or mind training.

While i acknowledge that being too much of a perfectionist could be what’s holding many of us back from reaching our true potential, when we put off completing anything because it’s never good enough, I still believe that a far higher level of focus than average is necessary to plow through our to-do list and reach our goals. The key is balance. To be focused while you’re in the midst of a project, but to have the presence of mind to know when the task is done, not perfect but done to the point where it serves its purpose, and just put it out there for the world to see.

So, for me, the order of work for 2012 is going to be to create a plan and tick off those tasks, one-by-one, with as much focus as I can muster until I reach my goals.

What can focus do for you?

1. Increase your productivity.
2. Improve the quality of your tasks.
3. Reduce the stress associated with intense multi-tasking.
4. Brings tranquility and order into your life. The more you focus, the more you invite tranquility.
5. Reduce stress-related health issues.
6. Free up valuable time to allow you to set more ambitious goals for yourself.
7. Give you a huge sense of achievement.

Learn to Focus!

OK, so that’s all very well. But how can we improve our levels of focus to a point where we’re achieving nicely?

• Decide when you are most likely to achieve that all-important mental clarity that can lead to intense levels of focus. It’s not the same for all of us.
• Create a checklist of sub-tasks that, when completed, will mean that your project is finished. This is so that you don’t become subconsciously distracted and convince yourself that the project is finished when it’s not. There are a million online tools for creating your to-do list, but here’s the Google lead–it’s free and good.
• Decide on a length of time you want to focus on a task to the exclusion of all else
• Use a timer and ignore everything else but the task to hand until the timer goes off
• Don’t set yourself unrealistically long periods of time for focus. Anything from 2 minutes to 30 minutes is optimal. But the trick is to ignore everything else while you’re ‘focusing.’
• Learn how to meditate. It increases your powers of focus no-end and has other desirable side effects that will help you move forward in your life.
• Increase your powers of focus by training yourself not to move on to another new project until you’ve finished the one at hand. The more unfinished projects you have in the pipeline right now, the more important this part will be to you… (note to self…)

I sincerely hope that you achieve mental clarity, laser focus, and all of your goals for 2012!

A Look Back at 2011

Let Me Explain..

I hate scrambling to remember everything of note as the year draws to a close. So this year I’m starting my ‘farewell to 2011′ post in the middle of October. I will continue to update the post over the coming weeks so that as the New Year advances, I will have a post worthy of 2011 already up.

Expectations–Did 2011 Live up to Them?

2011 has not been the year we all hoped it would be. But then can any year live up to the hopes and expectations we experience as we sail through January 1st? We have seen a lot of banks go south, quite a few businesses have closed their doors, but paradoxically, the Internet marketing field, or Digital Marketing as I think it’s better to call it, has blossomed. I will get to that later. Let’s take a look at the big news of the year:

• As far as the Web is concerned, I think the passing of Steve Jobs was probably the main event of the entire year. He will be missed–brilliant guy.
• Of course the Panda updates have been the main focus of SEO folks this year. We even talk about being ‘Pandalized’! I wonder what the 2012 updates to Google’s algorithms will be called?
• Sweeping changes have occurred all over the world, from the Arab Spring which is chasing out a lot of bloodthirsty old dictators, to Occupy Wall Street which threatens to unseat the Western system of capitalism that has reigned supreme for hundreds of years. Interesting times indeed.

Update December 25, 2011:

• Panda seems to have stabilized somewhat over the past couple of months. Some sites have reverted to earlier ranking, despite doing nothing at all–not even posting. And some have even improved their ranking. Others remain lower than their pre-Panda position and I think it’s true to say that Panda has established a very definite priority for great content. It is now difficult, if not impossible to rank for your targeted keyphrases if you do not provide valuable content for your readers.

Google rigging results? Can it be true?

Google Rigging Results?

Although the first time I had suspicions that Google is rigging results was way back in 2007 (another story that I’ll save for another time), I was still shocked when I read today of the revelations about the accusations being leveled at Google at the Senate Antitrust Hearing.

There has been precious little on the Web about this. And that in itself is a scandal. Google again? This story actually broke on 21 September. Why wasn’t it front page news? It’s important enough–most certainly.

The thing is, we rely on Google to serve up the best matches for our search queries. That’s how Google got so big. It has always proven itself best at doing just that. An institution (for that is what Google has become) this big, and this important, absolutely must hold to its core values, core ethics, and core reason for being. If it’s not, then it’s simply no longer Google.

That takes a few seconds to sink in, doesn’t it?

Think of the implications. Not just for business, though Lord knows that’s bad enough. But for science, politics, and Heaven help us, war.

If these accusations are true, and I for one believe they are, then it’s time we all started looking for alternative search venues. But more than that, it’s time we, collectively, started doing something to ensure that our Internet cannot be manipulated. The consequences would be just too damaging for all stakeholders.

Anyone with me on this?

What could be done, all you geniuses out there?

Panda had far-reaching--and not-so cute and cuddly results!

The Mists Roll Away and All is Revealed!

I’ll admit that I planned to write this post some time ago, but I’ve been over-committed time-wise, to put it mildly. As it turns out though, it’s a good thing I gave the dust time to settle. Now is actually a very good point at which to take a look at what the Panda Update, rolled out on February 25, has meant for our Google search rankings.

For some sites, the loss of traffic due to Panda was drastic. Anywhere up to 90 percent, it seems, and when you’re talking about many thousands of visitors daily–well it’s a tremendous impact.

Now let’s stop and think about that for a moment: websites that had been doing many thousands of dollars worth of business on a weekly basis were now reduced to practically nothing. And in some cases they weren’t guilty of any crime, or of any short-coming, as far as experts could see. Talk about a stressful event!

It does take time to accurately asses the effect of any update. And in the event, quite a few of the websites most drastically affected by Panda report that their traffic has returned almost to normal levels, a couple of months later probably as Google fine-tuned the algorithm that was obviously penalizing some pretty good sites. But for some of them that’s still tens-of-thousands of dollars in losses!

I was going to compile a list of some of the sites affected, but see that my good friend Donna Fontenot has already done that!

Better a Guilty Man Go Free…

The fact they many of the sites have bounced back up doesn’t entirely vindicate the stress that was caused though–or the financial losses.

In his interview with Eric Enge over at Stone temple, Rand Fishkin said of the Panda update:

You can’t simply say “we would like to boost back up these five sites.” The reality is unless you rewrite the whole system you can’t individually boost up one site’s ranking. What do you do? Turn up a “this site is good” knob? I don’t think they have one of those.

He was referring to the fact that Google does seem to have made reparations for the effect Panda had on some huge sites. But the fact remains that it caused extreme stress to site owners who not only run sites according to high ethical standards, but who have huge personal and financial investment in their business websites.

Blocked From Adwords Too!

Along with a drastic decline in traffic, some of the affected sites couldn’t even purchase Adwords as a result of the update, according to SEObook.

OK we’ve taken a look at the Web-wide stress-effect that Panda caused. Now let’s take a look at what it seems Panda was trying to achieve. All the buzz sometimes makes it seem as if Google has suddenly slapped a whole new set of parameters on search. But even with Panda, this just wasn’t the case.

We can tell from the type of site most dramatically affected by Panda what the update was aiming at:

• Article sites
• Commercial website that relied on second-rate writers and link-builders.
• Tech sites that, traditionally, don’t have much in the way of quality content (they’re mostly graphics, figures and links).

And the particular crimes that these websites were supposed to have committed were:

• Having poor quality content, or worse, content stolen or scraped from other web sources
• Poor quality incoming links

Almost universally, SEOs have now been able to draw a firm conclusion from the Panda update that, as far as poor quality incoming links are concerned, they’re not merely harmless baggage: they can actually bring down your ranking. I’ve been saying exactly this for a while and few agreed with me. Now that Google has turned up the amplification a little, it’s easier to see that a high volume of low quality incoming links are clearly a burden. I wonder if it’s possible that Google has decided that hundreds of tacky incoming links might signal link purchasing, which of course Google also frowns upon. I’m just thinking aloud here though.

So what can yo do to remove those bad links? Sadly, once they’re there it’s not so easy to remove them.

The easiest way to protect yourself of course, is to limit them in the first place. Don’t even think of buying a cheap link service. Either you hire a professional SEO or search marketing service, or forget the whole deal. There’s simply too much at risk here.

Ultimately, if you want to recover from the Panda Update, or even try to protect yourself from future updates (which may be less kind than Panda), here’s a link to the famous 23 questions that you’re supposed to ask yourself to decide if your website is Panda-worthy.

Should I set my inner child free?

Quite Out of Character For Me…

After twenty years of freelance consulting I arbitrarily, and quite uncharacteristically decided to accept an offer from a major publisher–a very flattering offer I might add–to go and manage their local publishing operation in the Middle East, which is, as I’m quite sure you know, a major emerging market for many fields these days.

Talk About Diving In Head First!

Although it wasn’t exactly far for me to go–no relocation was necessary–it was a drastic change from my usual pace: not quite working in my pajamas every day, but certainly enjoying the extreme latitude that working from my cozy leather recliner afforded me. Now I must snap out of bed at a respectable hour every morning, slug down a cup of something hot and get myself showered, dressed to face the world, and out of the door in time to negotiate the short drive to the office. I’d almost forgotten what rush-hour traffic was all about, since consultants rarely venture out at those certain hours of the day. They’re at perfect liberty not to!

The Good–And the Not-So-Good!

In some ways working in a brand-new, high-tech, corporate office has been a ball. I often wondered, as an SEO consultant working from home, how I’d get on in a real-live-office after all these years. And no, I’m not going to tell you how long it’s been since my last full-time job. There are some things one should simply to keep to oneself.

Anyway, I found out that I’d do just fine. I admit that I have a huge advantage over many who must battle it out in the corporate jungle every day: my surroundings are pleasant and my co-workers are, for the most part, a delightful bunch.

But I miss my SEO work. I sorely miss writing every day. Writing is an art that, if you have it in you, you just gotta do it. It’s as simple as that. Believe me, non-fiction writing is no less creative than great works of fiction. It takes all the creativity a writer’s got to write well and to entertain an audience.

My marriage is suffering since now our respective schedules keep us totally apart for much of the week. I am no longer at liberty to rush to the aid of any of my adult children should they run into difficulty; something that truly saddens me. Let’s not even begin to mention my dearest friends, who have been so patient while I’m away exploring a world I’d thought I was done with forever.

The real trouble though, is that I miss the unfettered creativity of working as a consultant. Not just that. My inner child is pining. In fact she’s fairly wasting away. I can no longer switch as the mood takes me from serious and focused, to silly and game-for-a-laugh. Some days it’s as much as I can do to prevent Miss Inner Child from romping forth in the corporate setting, linking the laser printer up to the coffee machine, and parachuting gleefully to a damp landing in the fountain on the ground floor…all the while screaming ‘free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.

So this is what I want to know. What do you think I should do? Do you think I should keep going and anticipate the promotion that’s almost certain after I pull off the next few successful projects? Or should I do what I dream about most nights, and let my inner child escape the bonds of the corporate world? Should I return to my old self-employed stomping ground, despite the fact that it might be difficult to get the SEO gigs coming in at the required pace again? If you leave a comment it’d be great to discuss this wouldn’t it?

Alan Bleiweiss Forensic SEO Consultant

When I saw that Forensic SEO Consultant Alan Bleiweiss was bringing out a book on SEO content writing, I instantly made a mental note to keep track and read it as soon as it was available. Having been in SEO for 8 years, I don’t get that excited about most of the ‘new’ stuff that comes up on SEO anymore, but I do know just how good Alan is from interacting with him online and reading as much as I can of his writing. I know enough to identify really great sources, and I’m an avid fan of all Alan’s work.

The most striking thing about Alan is that he’s modest: he doesn’t go about telling everyone what a highly-accomplished SEO he is (unlike so many other SEOs). In fact, he’s a really nice guy. The truth is, unless you watch him for a while you might miss what he has to offer. So the opportunity to finally ‘take a look under the hood’ and see how this accomplished SEO’s mind works was one that I wasn’t going to overlook.

Accessing Alan’s ebook, The Site Owner’s Guide to SEO for Content Writing for the first time was intriguing.

I wasn’t disappointed. As I knew he would, Alan has come up with a well-written, highly detailed account of what you need to do to create the content that will get your website noticed–and in the right way–by Google.

No gimmicks, and no hit-and-miss junk. This is solid, well-laid-out information that you can use, time and time again, no matter what your niche and no matter what your level of SEO understanding. I am certain that there are SEOs all over who will be using Alan’s little book as a reference.

The best part? He’s making it one of a series–I can’t wait!

Dealing with negative feedback

STOP! Don’t delete those negative comments!

A week-or-so ago, I was perusing my Twitter feed when I saw a tweet accusing someone of deleting negative comments from a blogpost. I’m not going to name names because that argument is totally irrelevant here. What I want to talk about is how deleting negative comments from your blog, however instinctive that reaction might be, is actually a waste of a great branding opportunity.

Most people speedily delete negative comments because they think that if someone sees them, word will be all over the place about how bad their product/service/blog is. Truth is, had the person who triggered this blog post not deleted that comment, chances are only a handful of people would have even noticed. As it turns out, his action went viral because a few people tweeted about it. Not what was intended, and in the event, probably did huge damage to his brand–and quite the opposite of what I call ‘Mindful branding’.

Dare to think differently

First, everyone has negative reactions to their service or products at least some of the time. That’s life. So for most people, seeing a little negativity merely alerts them to the fact that this product or service is pretty normal. And if this is all there is, then chances are what’s being sold isn’t so bad.

More importantly though, if you take the time to address someone’s negative comments you can even turn a bad situation around. You may be able to explain convincingly why a certain event/situation happened, along with what you’re doing to make sure it never happens again. Or you may be able to recommend a different product that would meet the customer’s needs more specifically.

Turning negativity around

Mindful Reputation Management

It is a huge reputation management mis-step to behave as if negative feedback doesn’t exist. There is no way it can be considered effective damage control. It makes a lot more sense to face criticism squarely and do your best to win over the dissatisfied customer. You come across in a much more credible way by confronting the person who is criticizing you (in the nicest way possible of course). When the person who wrote a negative comment sees that you’ve deleted it, your sort of confirming what they felt: telling them they were right all along.

I know that some will disagree with me over this–and that’s alright. Healthy debate can help us all understand more about the complex subject of branding, don’t you think?

Google's Farmer Update-too real? Or not real enough?

Google’s Latest Algo Update Held Some Surprises!

Google isn’t rolling out as many dramatic updates as they did several years back: but my, when they do a big one nowadays is there major fallout!

First of all, a quick note on the name of the update:  we already know that the name Farmer Update is alluding to the fact that this update targeted so-called ‘content farms.’ But I think the major surprise this time round was just who Google considers to be a content farm. Yes, there were some major surprises.

Here’s what the official Google blog says about the update:

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

Before we move on, and in answer to a question so many are asking: there are many opinions on what, or what isn’t, a content farm. Suffice to say that it is a website that contains a large amount of content that Google considers to be of poor quality. In most cases humans are in agreement with that view.

Scrapers–the Lowest of the Low

The worst of poor quality content sites are what’s known as ‘scraper’ sites. These collect content from sites around the Web, and simply lift it for their own purposes. They are generally despised by all. It seems that due to an earlier update back in January, we should now see the site that the content was pulled from, rather than the scraper site. This is great news for me because Wellwrittenwords content is continually pulled for use on scraper sites.

The Algorithm Update that Brought Some Highly Successful Sites to Ruin

However, the Farmer Update seems to have left us without such happy consequences. A number of websites that had previously generally been considered to have quality content were greviously affected. In fact, with the update now a little over a week old, there are some devastated site owners out there.

You can get a pretty good list of the sites involved over at SEOmoz where they have a pretty comprehensive list of the Farmer Update’s winners and losers.

The algorithm update was so drastic for some commercial websites that they have had to make immediate changes to their business model. Mahalo, for example, was forced to immediately lay off 10 percent of its employees and take drastic measures to cut expenses.

The good news, if there is any good news about the Farmer Update, is that Google seems to be trying to fix the damage done to previously succesful sites–a few of them like Mahalo, hugely successful suddenly felled by the unseen hand of the mighty Google bot.

My Take

Personally, while I applaud any effort on the part of the search engines to reduce spam and spammy sites, I deplore the stress and personal anguish caused to the owners of some of the sites that were unfairly affected. I feel that Google’s updates should adhere to the doctrine that ‘better a guilty website owner go free, than an innocent one suffer for crimes he didn’t commit.’

I am obviously expressing personal opinion here, rather than providing an analysis of the Farmer Update. If you want more analysis, then I highly recommend Search Engine Land’s post on the subject.

Agree? Disagree? Please feel free to express your views on this.

Google expert Vanessa Fox

Vanessa Fox on Search:

These days, your search strategy is your business strategy, whether you realise it or not, because that’s how potential customers are trying to find you. Search is the new Yellow Pages…

That was  from her book, Marketing in the Age of Google.

It goes without saying that Vanessa is right. Ask yourself how often you rush to the Internet to look up a product or service you’re interested in. How often have you seen someone pause to look something up on their mobile phone browser before buying? How often have you done that yourself? Yet there are still business owners who look at us (SEOs) as if we’re deranged when we say that you can no longer have a marketing campaign that doesn’t include SEO and a social networking strategy.

Search is Changing

The shear volume of search queries is increasing exponentially as everyone discovers the benefits of researching and buying online. In fact search grew by 46 percent in 2009 alone, according to Comscore.com, and while the results are not out yet, it looks as if that trend continued in 2010. And the new boy on the block, mobile search, is set to capture our hearts, having grown by a breathtaking 400 percent-plus during 2010. This means that almost every person who might be looking for what you or I have to offer is likely to want to find us through a search engine.

It is a business-owner’s prerogative to opt out of the search marketing game, but if you choose that route you do so at your own peril.

Opting out of the trend could mean you’re opting out of your business!

If you’re not taking your SEO strategy seriously, you are literally endangering your business, because other savvy business-owners, your competition, well they’re not slacking. They’re doing everything they can to remain at the top of their game and that includes hiring an SEO consultant, or at the very least a PPC expert.

Opting to stay with paid search is an answer for some businesses, but in the business we look at each other and ask ‘for how long?’ Statistics show that paid search does not pay off at anywhere near the rate of organic search. What this means is that for the most part, an organic ranking will do more good for your business in the long term than a paid listing will. And this will only become more true with the passage of time, if trends continue.

Vanessa also says:

Searchers are typing longer queries that trigger fewer paid search matches, and they are increasingly recognising the difference between organic and paid results…

This is a statement that could influence your whole online strategy, if you’d let it. It means that with the right tracking, and with a little understanding of keyphrases, and a few judicious tweaks to your website, you could easily come to dominate your market online.

So now you know: if you haven’t been working at improving your organic ranking, then maybe it’s time you did.