Your Blogging Services Portal

It’s important when you work with a professional writer that you can communicate and end up on the same page. That’s how you’ll get exactly what you envision with your writing projects. The writer you deal with should feel like an extension of your business; a virtual team member. If not, you might want to look for a new website content provider.

When you deal with a professional copywriter, they should be ready to ask and answer questions. Some of the questions they may ask you could include:

What is your goal for your website?

If the writer knows what you want to accomplish, this can help them determine what type of call to action to include in the writing.

Who is your target audience?

A writer should know what demographic they are writing for. If you have several demographics in mind you might choose to write more than one piece. Writing online content for the teen marketplace is very different than writing for businesses or for stay at home mothers.

Where will the articles be posted?

If the writer can see the context of the work, they can learn more about you and your line of business. This can help them write according to the existing voice and style of your website when you are ordering more content to be integrated into an existing website. If your articles are being posted on your site they might be written differently than if they are on an article directory pointing to your site or a news service, etcetera. Seeing your existing keywords and your layout can help substantially.

Managing the Relationship with a Writer

In terms of managing a relationship with your writer, it’s important to discuss things such as deadlines, payment terms and payment methods. If you are working on a larger project together, you might consider interim discussions so you can see the project as it is coming together and reduce the risk of not hitting the mark by the deadline. You’ll also want to discuss how many rewrites or revisions are included in the pricing as well as discussion of future projects so the writer can help you with your business planning.

Having a communicative relationship with anyone you outsource work to is especially important when you’re dealing with someone through e-mail and not face to face where communication can be a less challenging.

When you decide to hire a professional writing company or individual copywriter to do business with it’s wise to deal with someone who you feel comfortable with, who responds promptly to your queries and who is receptive to learning about the big picture. The more the writer knows about your business and your goals, the more likely you are to get written content that will help you reach those goals.

As fancy as the term “blog” sounds, it’s actually just a website that uses a content management system. While most blog software is more search engine friendly out of the box than many web sites, the opportunities for blog optimization are readily available.

Here are 10 tricks that will increase your visibility in search engines and eventually drive more traffic to your blog.

Example: “10 SEO Tricks to Attract More Traffic to your Blog – Search Engine Journal 
Search Engine Journal is included on every blog post title tag automatically.

• Optimize your blog categories - When you create categories for your blog, be sure to use keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate. This will create a “SEO-friendly” url for each post you make.
• Syndicate your blog - Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog. Sign-up with a free service like Feedburner and then create a “syndication” area on your site.
• Offer RSS to email - Anywhere from 10% to 40% of your blog traffic can come from individuals that perfer to read blog posts via email. RSS readers and aggregators can be confusing. Adding email services to your blog isn’t. There are several free services available for this including: FeedBlitz, Squeet, and Zookoda.
• Ping blog search engines - This can be configured with blog software such as Movable Type or WordPress to work automatically. If you’re using Blogger.com, then you can do this manually with Pingomatic.com or Pingoat.com.
• Make comments on other blogs - Your name will be linked to the blog url that you enter. Don’t make comments that offer no value to the blog post. Don’t use keywords in the field for your name, use your name or blog name.
• Submit your blog directories - Also submit the blog to regular directories such as (DMOZ, JoeAnt, GoGuides, Google Blog Search, etc) that have categories for blogs.
• Targeted advertising – Now this doesn’t really drive traffic to your site but will make you money. It’s possible by using Google AdSense to display highly targeted ads on your blog. Once you’ve setup an account and placed the ads on your site, just sit back and watch the cash come in. Cha-ching.
• Snatch up hot keywords - Now before you place ads on your blog, be sure your keyword density is good for the right terms. A VERY helpful tool to improve your traffic for high-paying keywords is called Keyword Elite (http://www.seojuice.com).
• Use track backs - If there is a blog that you refer to or quote and it is highly relevant to your subject, leave a track back. It increases your link popularity and may even score a few interested readers from the linked site. A TrackBack is a mechanism used in a blog to show, around an entry, a list of other blogs that refer to it.

Summary

The important thing to remember is that no matter how many optimization tactics you employ with a blog, there is no substitute for quality content. Blog optimization is only as effective as the quality and usefulness of the content you’re optimizing. So do not limit yourself to tips and lists. Use your imagination and you will come up with thousands of ways to drive traffic to your blog!

Blogging is extremely popular these days. And the most popular stand-alone blog engine isWordPress. It is flexible, has many useful featires and there is a lot of eye-catching templates for it. But those who have a WordPress blog must be aware of a serious problem that can cause your blog to be removed from Google’s search results. The problem is: Duplicate Content.

WordPress content management system which, when used with the default configuration, is not duplicate content proof. In fact this CMS is capable to render almost 100% of your content duplicate. As usual the fault of the system has roots in its advantages. WordPress has many features facilitating blogging and linking, such as RSS feeds to posts and comments, trackback URLs, monthly archives and so on. In the same time this variety of URLs returning similar or identical pages represents a clear case of duplicate content.

WordPress And Duplicate Content

The first evidences of duplicate content produced by your WordPress CMS can be found in your sidebar. They are category pages and monthly/daily archives. Category pages store your articles posted under the same topic — a category. Such pages have no unique content; they are just a collection of your previous posts. Monthly and daily archives also simply group your previous articles by the date of posting. Sometimes when you have only one post in a given day, the archive page for the date and your post are totally identical.

The next case of duplicate content is even more prominent. It can be your home page itself. If it contains not excerpts but the full text of your posts, then it duplicates your post pages. This also applies to the “next/previous entries” pages — those accessible via /page/2, /3, /4 etc.

• Feeds. Search engine spiders crawl all the content they can reach and of course this includes RSS feeds too. The additional problem with them is that Google may choose to display your RSS URL in the search results over the link to the original post. In this case the user who clicks this result will see an XML formatted page which is not “human-friendly”.
• Trackback URLs. Many WordPress templates add trackback links after posts. This links enable authors to track who links to their posts. Usually, if your post URL looks like “www.yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/” its trackback URL will be “www.yoursite.com/2006-11-30/yourpost/trackback/“.
• Identical meta-description. By default WordPress doesn”t provide a tool to add unique meta description tags to your posts, and they either have none or share a single site-wide description. Having no meta description at all is a disadvantage, as a properly written one can make your snippet stand out in a SERP. Having an identical description for all your pages is a threat, as Google might get them filtered out as too similar.

Because of the duplicate content Google search can return less desired URLs (such as feeds or archives instead of original posts); your pages can be moved out of their index, or placed into the supplemental results, which are rarely displayed to users.

For tips how to get rid of the duplicate content in WordPress please refer to my tutorial: Making Your WordPress Blog Duplicate Content Safe