Entries from July 2007 ↓
July 5th, 2007 — blogs
Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
~William Safire, “Great Rules of Writing”
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July 5th, 2007 — Blogroll
1. Grab people’s attention.
When blogging, you have to stand out from the crowd. Firstly, titles have to be interesting, intriguing, or at least descriptive. Which post would your rather read?
- “Writing for your Blog”
- “Why your first Sentence will make or Break you article”
Never underestimate the power of your first sentence. It will determine whether people keep reading or stop. The point is that bloggers face a lot of competition, and you need to be able to differentiate yourself and your blog. The internet doesn’t really need yet another article “how to get more links”. If you are writing on material that has been covered many times before, at least, try to look at it from a different perspective. If you make it interesting, it will grab people’s attention.
Related:
2. Your Writing Can Improve.
If you want to be a successful blogger, you have to change your mindset. Everybody has the potential to become a good writer. Whatever your current standard, it is always possible to better. However, don’t expect to improve without making some effort.
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
~Joseph Heller
How You can Improve your Writing
- Don’t expect perfection from your first draft. Go back and give yourself chance to improve your article.
- Spend half an hour learning when to use the comma
- Read other writers for inspiration.
- Spend time on some key articles, don’t always go for quantity over quality.
- Keep practising.
3. Good Writing is Simple and Clear.
Good writing is effortless to read. Write for the benefit of your readers and not for yourself. Try to use the minimum words necessary to explain your point in a clear and concise manner.
I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
~ Elmore Leonard
Articles that get promoted on sites like Digg, usually offer something informative and are written in an easily digested manner.
A few tips on How to Make writing simple.
- Avoid Double negatives. “You shouldn’t not complicate things” – instead use: Avoid complication
- Use lists and bullet points. Write on one point per bullet point.
- Get straight to the point. Avoid – “I haven’t been inspired to write much lately, but here is an article on ….”
- Use a mixture of short and longer sentences. If every sentence is short, your writing will feel stilted and basic; however, used in small doses, short sentences can have a power to emphasis key points. Try it yourself. Short sentences also make it easier to clarify your ideas.
Useful Links
This post is part of Blog Project 3 at Blogging Tips. I would recommend entering, there is a good chance of getting an increase in backlinks and traffic. There is also even cash prizes!
July 3rd, 2007 — google
The Google 950 penalty is no joke. Overnight all your search engine rankings can fall by upto 950 places. Search terms where you used to rank number 1 or 2 will suddenly appear at the end of the search results, e.g. number 950.
Some webmasters report a slightly less severe penalty of 30-40. But a fall of 30-40 places is nearly as good as a fall of 900.
This seemed to happen to biographyonline.net on 27th June. Suddenly traffic from Google dried up. Bizarrely, rankings on MSN and Windows Live, have been booming in recent weeks.. On Yahoo and MSN rankings are quite high for some keywords. But, fortunately or unfortunately, it is Google’s search engines that matter. Google has at least 50% of search engine traffic, if you can’t rank on Google it is a real disaster.
There are several possible explanations for a penalty like this:
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July 3rd, 2007 — google
One of the big problems facing the internet has been the enormous number of splogs. Google is increasingly trying to stop this. One of the main motivations has probably been its desire to clean up its adsense program. Basically, advertisers don’t like seeing their ads appear on “made for adsense sites”
Definition of a splog.
A splog is a blog / website that does not offer original content, it only copies content from other sites. Often splogs are specifically designed to gain revenue from the google adsense program. They are often bracketed with Made for Adsense sites - MFA.
In the past ,Google was quite poor in distinguishing between websites that offered unique content and websites that just duplicated from others. Often Google would (and it still does) give a higher search engine position to sites that only copied the article from another site.
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July 3rd, 2007 — SEO, selected posts
It is good to eat food. If you don’t eat food you will have no energy. However, because it is good to eat food it doesn’t mean you stuff yourself with 10 meals a day.
Similarly, it is good to get inbound links with your preferred keyword anchor text. However, if you get too many in a short space of time, it can be bad for your blog. Google is increasingly viewing “over optimisation tricks” in a bad light. Basically, Google have never liked people who try to artificially inflate their rankings with clever SEO tricks.
Also, what worked in the past doesn’t mean it will work in the future. If you are not careful, overzealous SEO techniques can lead to severe Google penalties, like the 950 penalty. This means your rankings drop 950 places for every keyword on your site. It can and does happen overnight - and it hurts.
Case Study: John Chow
John Chow is a top A List blogger. He made $12,000 dollars in June 2007 alone. John started a scheme where you could trade links. You review his blog with the keyword text “Make money online” and he would link to your blog. Nearly 1,000 people participated giving John’s blog 1,000 inbound links with his target “Make Money Online”.
1,000 inbound links, from a variety of blogs, with his preferred keyword anchor text. Pretty smart SEO? But, how did Google respond?
They kicked him off all search engine rankings. Even searching for his name “John Chow” doesn’t return his blog. And this is an A list blogger, who is in the technorati top 100. Personally I think this makes Google looks stupid, if I search John Chow I want to see johnchow.com as number 1. So I doubt this penalty will last forever. However, it shows that Google want to really try and hit people who are gaming the system.
Does this Mean SEO Is dead?
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July 2nd, 2007 — Blogroll
Which is more important. Writing 10 articles, or writing 1 that is actually worth reading?
In one respect, the Internet encourages quantity. The more you write the more chance you have of getting internet search engine traffic. The bigger your archives, the bigger the potential for traffic and adsense earnings. Furthermore, search engines can’t easily distinguish between average content and great content.
However, on the other hand, search engines can determine the number of links. If you write only quantity, it is difficult to attract in bound links. People will only link to good quality content that stands out from the rest. One, excellent article, which gets to the homepage of Digg, can be worth any number of inferior articles.
Advantages of Quantity
1. More pages give you a greater chance to get traffic from search engines.
2. Visitors from search engines are more likely to click on your ads. This is because a search engine visitor might not find what they are looking for, (which is especially true, if your article is poor quality)
3. More articles give a chance to increase your readership.
4. Through writing more articles you have the opportunity to exploit the long tail of your target keywords.
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