Entries from April 2007 ↓

1. Very Good Content.

If your content stands out as being particularly useful, then over time this will attract webmasters to link spontaneously. Ask yourself, “Is this content I would want to link to?”

2. High Traffic.

If your site is getting 1000s of visitors, you automatically increase the chance of gaining natural, organic links. Most really successful sites have a combination of high traffic and good content.

• The problem is to get high traffic, you need links, without links you can’t get high traffic. Therefore other strategies are also needed to get links.

3. Blog / Web Directories.

A good place to start off for one way inbound links. Some directories are selective, so make sure your blog is worth linking to. If a blog isn’t selective, I doubt the link will have much weight.

• Dmoz is less important, but it worth trying to get listed (don’t get mad if it takes 3 years though)

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1. Articles should be informative.

Offering a review of a film / book / product is a good idea. Articles that explain how to do something are also valued. If you give meditation classes, why not write about different types of meditation exercises. If you organise races you could write an article on “Things to remember for organising a running race.”

2. Have Reasonable Expectations:

Don’t feel you have to attain perfection in your writing. If you have the idea the article must be perfect, it becomes difficult to write and it will take longer than it should. In some respects, quantity has its own perfection. I have found that as you write more, writing becomes more fluent. See your first 10 articles as “warm up” articles. When you get into the rhythm of writing you will find that you can write 500 words in 20-30 minute.

3. Short Attention Span of Readers

Always bear in mind people’s attention span is often short. Therefore it is important to:

a) Write with clarity and simplicity
b) Breaking up an article into different sections is helpful
c) I often like to write an article by numbers. Top 7 tips for.. are always popular.

4. Write on What you Know.

Concentrate on writing articles on subjects where you have some specialized knowledge. A reader can tell whether you are re-hashing ideas from others, or whether you have something new to offer.
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1. Include Short biography and photo.

• People like to know who they are reading. It gives the blog a personal aspect. People are more likely to trust a real name and photo; it gives them something to relate to.

2. Make it attractive and easy to read.

Give people short pieces to read. If it’s a very long article you can link to the main text from your blog and just give a snippet. When you read a newspaper we all read headings and opening paragraph but how often do you read everything?

3. Try to stick to a regular publishing schedule.

Little and often, is better than all at once and then nothing for several months. However, don’t post for the sake of it. ( Not every one may share your enthusiasm for an in depth account of your recent visit to the local supermarket.) It is good to post frequently, but this should not be at the expense of declining quality.

4. Have some Focus to Your Blog

I started off with 1 personal blog and would blog about everything under the sun. But I don’t think any reader would share such an eclectic range of interests. It now means I have specialised blogs. This includes blogs on: Economics, Mortgages, Writing / SEO, and Spirituality. However, be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. If you start with 8 blogs you will probably feel overwhelmed. Some bloggers say it is better to do 1 blog well than struggle with several. It will depend on how much time and enthusiasm you have.

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These tips for writing essays are mostly aimed at students; however, the suggestions may be useful for some types of blog entries.

1. Answer the Question.

This is the first and most important suggestion. Answering the wrong question is a common mistake made by students. Unfortunately, it can be a real disaster for the grade you get in an exam. Make sure you understand what the examiner wants; it is highly advisable to refer back to the question, throughout the answer.

2. Good Introduction.

In an introduction to an essay, you should offer a short, concise summary of the main points to be raised. If appropriate, you could clarify key concepts. Introductions go wrong when students go into too much detail, and then repeat their arguments in the main body of the text. Generally speaking, it is advisable to start off with a couple of short sentences in your introduction. This is helpful for retaining clarity of thought.

3. Essay Plan.

A plan can help gather your thoughts, and make sure you do not forget to mention key arguments. It is an opportunity to brainstorm what you know about the topic. It is important not to get into too much detail; writing keywords and phrases are the best solution. However, it is worth spending 5% of your alloted time on creating a good framework for your answer.

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1. The semicolon is a useful piece of punctuation; it can be used for combining two related sentences into one.

By using the semicolon, you can give your writing a greater fluidity and maturity. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that it is best not to overdo the use of the semi colon; the semicolon can often be used for best effect at the end of a paragraph.

2. The semicolon can also be used to separate lists of internal punctuation.

There are several places worth visiting in the world; Buckingham Palace, England; Taj Mahal, India; and the great pyramids, Egypt.

Example of semicolon:

Take two sentences.

(1) Writing in English is difficult. (2) There are many different rules for spelling and punctuation.

These two sentences could be combined into:

Writing in English is difficult; there are many different rules for spelling and punctuation.

The semicolon came into popular use in the sixteenth century; for example, semicolons can be seen in the sonnets of Shakespeare.

See also:

When to use Commas

Using the semicolon

Blog of friends:

Ashrita - Guiness Record Breaker

Richard’s Blog - My old personal blog

Priyadarshan.org - “On the sunlit path with Sri Chinmoy”

Sensitivity to Things - John Paul Gillespie

Shane Magee

Shardul

Write Spirit Blog

Sri Chinmoy Blog

Sri Chinmoy Centre blogs

Sumangali.org

Tejvan - My new blog

Since starting some new sites on UK servers, I have been surprised at the % of traffic from google.co.uk, rather than google.com.

In the UK, like other countries, there are 3 ways of searching google.

1. www.google.com
2. www.google.co.uk
3. www.google.co.uk - pages in UK

Quite often, google.co.uk is different to google.com. Searching only pages in UK, can give very different results.

The % of people searching pages in UK is quite low, as a % of total search traffic. However, it rises for UK specific searches. For example, if you are searching mortgages in the UK, there are many advantages to limiting your search to just UK web pages.

The implications of this are that:

• There are advantages of having a site hosted either, in your country, or having a suffix like co.uk
• It is easier to rank for country specific sites, because you have less competition. This is important if you are trying to enter a very competitive keyword market. For example, my site Mortgage Guide UK is getting most of its traffic from co.uk. It is very hard to enter the .com mortgage search results
• If you have a .com site and host it in America, you will lose the chance to get country specific traffic.

The same theory applies for co.nz .de, .com.au e.t.c

The good news is that having a co.uk suffix will be liked by google.com

For a big site, it is advisable to set up domain mapping and redirects. For example, bbc.com redirects to bbc.co.uk

A full stop indicates a complete end to a sentence; a comma indicates a slight change in direction of the sentence. A comma can also be used to break up a sentence into different sub clauses.

When to Use a Comma.

1. Linking main clauses.

Keynes was an economist. Keynes was intelligent. Keynes was born in England

Each of these 3 sentences is grammatically correct, however, it makes for stilted reading. We can combine these 3 clauses into one sentence.

• Keynes was an intelligent economist, who was born in England.

2. After an introductory element of a sentence.

Monetarism is the study of Money supply. We could add an introductory sentence to this.

• Popularised by Milton Friedman, Monetarism is the study of Money Supply.

These introductory phrases are often known as prepositional phrases; it literally means, “to go before”.

• One more example: In many different countries, economists often fail to predict recessions.

3. Adding a subordinate clause at the end of a sentence.

A subordinate clause is a phrase that couldn’t make a sentence on it its own.

• Economists are very bad at predicting the future, although occasionally they get it right.

The first phrase is a sentence on its own, the last phrase adds to the initial statement, and so is a subordinate clause.

4. Parenthetical Elements in a sentence.

These involve words like “however”, “in fact”, “of course”, and “for example”. These words help to link a sentence together; they need a comma before and after.

• Economics is termed the dismal science, however, occasionally it can be fun to study Economics.

A common mistake, however, is to only include one comma after the “however,” and not before.

• The latest inflation news was disappointing, in fact, the Bank of England was very concerned.

5. Appositive.

This is a term used to rename a noun.

• John Maynard Keynes, Britain’s most famous economist, died in 1946.
• Economics, the study of scarcity, is growing in popularity.

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Over the past couple of years, I have accumulated a variety of blogs from Mortgages to spirituality.
In this blog I intend to post about writing and blogging. The blog will also feature some SEO advice that I have found useful for myself.

At the moment, I am very interested in learning grammar and proper punctuation. I do not claim to be an expert - far from it! But quite often, to learn about something, it is helpful to write on the subject for yourself.

This entry is from Guest Blogger: Shane Magee 

Here are some good practise guidelines for ensuring that your foreign-language pages on your website are more visible to search engines:

• To rank in a country specific Google (i.e google.ie or google.de), you need one of two things: you need to have a country specific domain name, or the server where your site is located needs to be located in that country. If you have a multi-language site on a server in one country, then you need to buy domain names for the countries. You can then use 301 redirection to direct the user to the particular section of your website. All the major companies do this and it doesn’t seem to do them any harm SEO-wise.

• One topic of debate is whether all pages with country domain name qualify for inclusion in the ’search pages from (country)’ option in Google, or whether your server needs to be located in that country. I haven’t yet been conclusively able to find that out. In any case the percentage of traffic coming from these searches is quite small, 7% according to one estimation.

• Keep different URLs for different country pages, rather than using language negotiation. This enables you to ensure that URLs for pages in a different language contains at least some words in that language, which is definitely good practise.

• Search engines are very good at identifying what language a page is in using NPL (Natural Language Programming) but it is still a good idea to specify the language using, the tag. For example, in the German case you would use . (For sites running on Plone, this means you have to manually select the Language in the Properties tab. However, LinguaPlone translations will automatically take care of this for you.)

• There are people who say that if you are linking to a page in another language, the anchor text (or at least part of it) should definitely be in that language: for example if you want to link to a Spanish version of your English page, you should use Espanol instead of Spanish. Hopefully in the near future we’ll be able to verify the truth or otherwise of this claim. If space allows, the best practice for good user experience when linking to a page in another language is probably to include the anchor text in both languages - for example Spanish/Espanol.

  You can also use the HTML attribute hreflang to tell your browser the link language if the link anchor text has to be in English. However this attribute is not supported in IE6; it is supported in Firefox and (I think, correct me if I’m, wrong!) IE7. Here is an example:

German

• Try not to have too much of a mix of languages on a page you are specifically trying to promote for a particular country. In particular, make sure the headings, tabs and titles are in the specified page language. The usual guidelines for good SEO also apply here e.g alt tags for images in the specified language ect.