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Lets kick off our new series on what to do on the first week of a new blog with the most obvious task. Once your blog is set up and functioning it’ll need some posts for it to be truly live.

Image by Brian Lane Winfield Moore

In many ways this task should have begun in the pre-launch stage of your blog as it is very handy to have a number of posts written and saved as drafts before you launch. This means that during your launch week you can free yourself up a little to focus upon other activities.

Types of Content for Your First Week of Blogging

The content that you write will vary depending upon the type of blog you’re running and it’s topic – however some of your early posts might include:

• an introduction to the blog and what it’ll be about – his could double up as your about page.
• your story – one of the best types of posts for establishing a relationship with readers is a post where you share your own story as it pertains to your niche. Again – this could function as a type of about page (or at least be linked to from your about page.
• pillar content – most topics have topics in them that could function as a pillar type article for your blog. By this I mean topics that are central to your overall topic that will contain solid advice that you’ll be linking to again and again. Getting these types of posts written early is important as they’ll both show that you are tackling the important issues in your niche and they’ll give you something to point new readers to. For example – on my photography blog I set about writing posts early on on the central themes of good exposure – shutter speed, aperture and ISO.
• epic posts/viral content – this can be hard to do when you don’t have a lot of experience with blogging but one strategy to get things kick started is to start off a blog with an ‘epic’ post that is written with the hope of getting attention. It’s hard to define this type of post but they’re the type of things that get passed around on Twitter, that do well on social bookmarking sites and that get emailed from friend to friend. These posts are often comprehensive lists, humorous posts, controversial topics or epic guides to topics.
• a short series of posts – sometimes having a series of posts at the beginning of a blog can be worthwhile as it helps to create a sense of momentum on your blog. Someone new visiting is immediately given incentive to come back or subscribe because they want to see what you’ll be producing tomorrow that relates to what they’ve just written.

As mentioned above – this content writing task should really begin before you go live.

I would normally suggest launching a blog with 2-3 posts already live and another 5-10 posts saved as drafts. Having a range of posts ready to go as drafts means that you’re free to do other stuff but that you’ve also got a range of types of posts ready to go as the need arrives.

Establish a Posting Rhythm

Related to this task is that of thinking about the frequency of publishing (something you’ll want to establish early also).

The frequency that you publish posts in the first week will vary from blog to blog but I’d normally start with at least 3-4. If something that you publish does get some decent traffic try to publish another post that follows it up in some way the next day as it’s important to keep the momentum flowing.

It’s also important not to push too much of your content out too quickly. The temptation after launching is to just publish everything you have at once. This unfortunately leaves you with nothing in reserve. Be patient and establish the kind of posting frequency that you’ll continue with when your blog has been going for a while.

Further Reading on Blog Content:

Writing compelling content on a blog doesn’t usually just happen – it takes time to find your voice and establish a style of writing that connects and engages. However a lot can be learned early on with a little reading and lots of practice. Here are a handful of posts that will help you to get your mind into gear on this crucial topic:

• How to Get in Tune with Your Readers Needs and Produce Compelling Content (first post in a series of posts)
• How to Craft a Blog Post (another series about taking ‘good’ content to ‘great content’ by taking a little extra time at each of 10 different points in the writing process
• 7 Types of Blog Posts which Always Seem to Get Links and Traffic
• 7 Tips on How to Write Sticky, Memorable Blog Posts
• How to Write Great Blog Content – a collection of post from the ProBlogger archives

What You Said about Blog Content in the First Week of Blogging:

Last week I asked readers what they advise bloggers do in their first week of blogging. Many of the responses so far have centred around this topic of writing content for a blog. Here is some of that advice from our readers:

“Have 7 or 8 posts written and scheduled posting for the next 2 wks.” – Rachel

“Write at least 10 blog posts – advice, lists, personal, a video – and add each one every day for the first 10 days.” – Andrew

“What we did right out of the gate was write out a series of post that all went with one theme for our first week, the 2nd weeks theme coat-tailed the 1st weeks theme and the 3rd week coat-tailed the 2nd… Next week we are going to be tying everything together…” – BrianJUY

“If you’re really serious about building a blog for the long term, I think the most important thing to do is create a posting schedule. Be honest with yourself and don’t overestimate what you can do, but do commit to a schedule. This has helped me through little dips when I lacked motivation.” – Peter

“In the first few weeks of a blog, I would suggest you concentrate on creating 10 to 20 awesome posts.” – Tee Riddle

“Post to your blog! No matter how excited you’ve made people about the launch of your blog, they’ll stop visiting if new content is too infrequent.” – Laurajr

“Create valuable content at the very beginning. Include several pillar posts and content that engages the reader and creates a impact.” – Mathew Day

“Before even you setup blog, create rough drafts of atleast 5-10 original posts you are going to write.” – Harsh

“My advice is to launch into writing a series of posts. Something with a timeframe like ‘every day this week I’m going to explore a different …’ or ‘every Monday I will put the spotlight on …’ or ‘every month I will interview a well known …’ and so on. It puts the pressure on a bit but it’s great for motivation!” – Kerrin

“Write something EVERY DAY. Writers write. You don’t have to *publish* everything you write – the ’save draft’ button is your best friend. But scribble in a notebook or keep a draft word processing doc; write something. Set aside some time – 15 minutes, a half-hour – and write something. Your writing muscles (and that elusive voice everyone keeps talking about) only develop if you use them.” – Pat

“Take your time to craft a couple of really great posts. And enjoy being able to do so without feeling pressured to churn out content (you’ll have those chomping-at-the-bit readers soon enough!) Never think that it’s a waste of time to produce your very best work at the start of your blog’s life: you can link back to these early posts as your blog grows.” – Ali

“Don’t burn off a lot of time writing a first post that basically welcomes readers. You’d figure the initial post — the hello, world! part — would be among the most important assignments you give yourself. You’d be wrong. Instead, put your energies into a brilliant on-topic post that’ll have great shelf life — a so-called tentpost article.” – Glenn

In coming days, as part of this series, we’ll talk a little more about content. In the mean time – feel free to add more of your own tips and experiences. What type of content did you publish in the first week of your blog?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Your First Week of Blogging – Write Compelling Content

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Your First Week of Blogging – Write Compelling Content

Over the last few weeks I’ve had three conversations with readers regarding different sources of traffic.

In each case I had a number of email exchanges with each blogger (all on the same day) and ended up laughing to myself at the common theme but extremely different opinions being expressed by each of the bloggers.

In each case the bloggers had strong opinions (and experiences to back those opinions up) on what type of traffic was ‘best’ and how to get it.

1. In one case the conversation started with a blogger telling me that I focus too much upon social media traffic and not enough on traffic from search engines. Their niche didn’t work with social traffic but with search traffic they did best.
2. In another case the blogger told me that they’d been told to forget about search traffic in their niche and work more on building traffic from other sites and to convert it into ongoing traffic with newsletters.
3. In the last case a blogger told me that in their opinion the best type of traffic was social media traffic and they didn’t see the point in newsletters.

I was reminded through these conversations just how many different valid approaches there are to blogging. I also came away with a few thoughts that I thought I’d jot down here on the topic of driving traffic to blogs.

1. There are Many Valid Sources of Traffic

The above chart shows just 8 of many sources of traffic to a blog. As I write this others are already springing to mind (for example some bloggers run paid advertising to drive traffic to their blog – others get it from banner exchange programs). The reality is that there are many potential sources of traffic.

2. The ‘Best’ Source of Traffic Varies from Niche to Niche

As I thought about the 3 bloggers I was chatting to above it struck me that each had found great sources of traffic but that they were each operating in very different niches.

The first blogger who had written off social media was in a niche that people were simply not using social media for (I won’t reveal the niche as I don’t have their permission but it was a very very niche focused blog). Perhaps they could have driven a tiny bit of traffic with social media but for them Search was a much better place for them to invest their time.

3. Different Sources of Traffic Will monetize differently

Another important factor to consider is that some sources of traffic will monetize ALOT better than others. I’ve found that search traffic can work very well with AdSense for example (it depends upon the niche and intent of the reader). People arrive on your site searching for specific information, read your content, see an ad that relates to their search term and click on it.

RSS readers on the other hand don’t tend to convert for AdSense as they tend to be loyal readers and many don’t even click through to your site to read your content. RSS readers (and social media traffic) however can convert really well for affiliate promotions or selling your own products to.

4. Traffic Patterns Change over the life cycle of a blog

As a blog matures its sources of traffic often quite naturally change.

There’s no typical one size fits all pattern to this but at first the traffic might mainly come from other blogs or forums where you comment – or blogs where you guest post – or articles that you write. In time you might start to see more traffic from RSS or newsletters as a few people subscribe. Perhaps then some traffic will come from other sites who link to you (people who subscribe via RSS might have their own blogs) and from social media. After a while your search engine ranking might kick in as a result of the links from other sites and your guest posting and article writing and you might start seeing Google traffic. Once your blog is more established you might start seeing social bookmarking viral events that spike your traffic.

Again – this is not going to be the pattern for all blogs but in time traffic will naturally start to come from different places – the key is to try to leverage it for ongoing good (trying to get your blog to be sticky rather than just having one time visitors) and to work out how to convert that traffic for the goals you have.

5. Bloggers should be open to different approaches

While each of the three bloggers had discovered great lessons and good sources of traffic for their niches and the life cycles of their blogs – I was left wondering in each case whether the bloggers were being a little too closed off to different sources of traffic that perhaps could have added to the overall mix of traffic.

I see a lot of SEO type bloggers write about the worthlessness of social traffic for instance. One common comment that I get from some SEOs (definitely not all) is that social media traffic can’t be monetized. The reality could not be further from the truth. It won’t always convert but it certainly can. For example I know in each of the E-book launches that I’ve done in two niches that I’ve seen significant conversions from Twitter traffic.

On the flip side of things I hear some social media focused bloggers write off SEO and say that it works itself out and you don’t need to optimise your blog for search if you just produce good content. While there is some truth in that (good content does tend to generate natural incoming links to some extent) with a basic understanding of principles of SEO and a few minor tweaks a blog can rank much better in search engines without compromising the integrity of the content.

I guess what I’m getting at is that if you get exclusive about the type of traffic you are after you could actually be limiting the potential of your blog’s incoming traffic.

6. Too many Eggs in One Basket Can Be Dangerous

I used to be very focused upon search traffic in my early days of blogging. I worked hard to optimise my first blogs for search and got to a point where I was making a full time living from the ad revenue I was getting almost exclusively from Google. As a result I got a little lazy in some of the other areas – I didn’t work to convert readers to be loyal with newsletters or with prominent calls to subscribe to RSS, I didn’t build too many relationships with other bloggers to generate referral traffic and I was very inactive in social media (although it was much more limited back then).

As a result when Google decided to adjust their algorithm one day and my rankings dropped (and almost completely disappeared) in their results I lost almost all of my traffic – and as a result almost all of my income.

I was lucky in that Google readjusted their algorithm a couple of months later and I regained a lot of (but not all) of that traffic but in the mean time I looked for and found a ‘real job’ – and more importantly learned an important lesson about the power of having more than one source of traffic.

That experience was the beginning of me doing a few things that included working harder on capturing readers as subscribers (email and RSS), networking more with other bloggers in my niche and getting more involved in promoting my blog in other places (mainstream media, social media etc). My hope in doing all of this was to build up other sources of traffic so that if Google ever switched off my traffic again (temporarily or permanently) I’d at least have enough traffic to survive.

Google still does send me around 40-50% of my traffic (it varies a little from blog to blog) but I’m in a position now where I could survive for an extended period if it all disappeared (not that I’d like for that to happen).

7. The Importance of Personality and Being Yourself

I’m sure there are other factors that are at play that might be worth considering when looking at traffic. One of these (that I’m yet to fully think through) is personality type.

For example a lot of my my technically thinking friends seem to enjoy the challenge of SEO a little more. They love experimenting with and testing what happens when they make small tweaks to different aspects of their blogs. They’re constantly testing different setups and do quite well from it. I am not technically minded and find their attention to detail very very unusual (and so far from where that I’m at that I feel like I’m from another planet).

Other friends are perhaps a little more social by nature and as a result seem to do well on Twitter.

Others seem to do better by applying their freakish ability to write blog posts that get tonnes of links from other sites and which do brilliantly on social bookmarking sites..

Others are networkers and spend a lot of time interacting with other bloggers and site owners and tend to get links and traffic that way.

Others just seem to be brilliant at building community on their blog and as a result retain almost everyone who ever comments and build new readers from those people telling their friends.

I guess the lesson here is to be yourself and work with your strengths. Of course you don’t want to let your strengths dominate so much that you ignore or become lazy in areas that you’re not as strong in – but do follow your natural abilities and leverage them as much as you can.

Remember that there is no wrong or right way to generate traffic for a blog. If you were analyze the sources of traffic on many top blogs you’d find quite different factors at play!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

7 Factors on Generating Traffic to Your Blog

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7 Factors on Generating Traffic to Your Blog

An increasing number of social media websites are finding that the only real way to structure advertisements so that they have any significant ROI for sponsors is to integrate them into the social nature of the website itself. StumbleUpon did this through the use of “paid stumbles” where they charged $.05 a visitor from the StumbleUpon toolbar and Digg rolled out a similar program soon after showcasing “sponsored stories” amongst the other submissions on the home page.

If you are going to pay to advertise on social media websites, this is the way it is to be done. This is the only way to force readers to seriously consider clicking on your “advertisement” as it is essentially part of the content, essentially being the key word. To retain any sort of credibility, any social media website adopting such advertising forms will display a visible, although often times discrete, “sponsored post” message to let users know the link is an ad. However, since the ad is part of the content, users can’t help but to take notice of it and thus if intrigued they will click. This is a far cry from traditional sidebar banner advertisements which many users will glance over without any consideration.

The key to successful social media marketing through the purchase of paid advertisements is discretion. Simply getting users to read your ad isn’t enough, you need them to click through. This is especially true for sites like Digg where the ad is featured in a list of links people are looking to click on. The traditional 5% click through ratio does not apply here. Social media users hate advertisements so how does one go about promoting a product in this form? Through NOT trying to make a sale.

The moment your social media submission focuses to discussing prices or making a purchase, you have lost the potential visitor. Instead, you need to focus on what value you can add to the visitor assuming they won’t buy anything, while EDUCATING them about your product so that they can if they are interested.

The best way to see this is through an example so take a look at two recent sponsored posts on Digg. One, an advertisement for Virgin Atlanic airlines reads, “Bubbly Low Fares from $49” with a description that says, “Fly in style with WiFi, movies, on demand food and drinks, and more–all for a fabulously low fare”, while another for the HTC Google phone reads, “Who Knows You Better than your Phone” with a description that says, “See you from the perspective of your phone”. The Virgin Atlantic post has amassed 250 Diggs, while the HTC ad has done twice as well, generating over 575 diggs and 360,000 views on YouTube.

Why? Simple, Virgin Atlantic was simply trying to sell its product and even with the popularity of the brand in the tech community, its ad was not as highly rated as the HTC ad that took the reader to a cleverly put together short video on YouTube which served as the video advertisement for the company’s phone. The HTC ad also allowed the user to interact with the brand on two social media sites, Digg and YouTube, where the user could view and subscribe to the official HTC channel.

Here is more information on the most effective marketing techniques for start-ups .

This post was written by Aditya Mahesh, founder of AMBeat.com, one of the web’s most popular entrepreneurship blogs.

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What Bestselling Authors Know About Writing Titles

They vary by genre, but the majority of bestselling authors and editors return to the same hooks time and again to routinely sell obscene amounts of books. On the recommendation of Clayton Makepeace, a celebrity in the web’s direct response copywriting world, I decided to visit a bookstore and peruse the titles on their shelves and take note of what titles grabbed me.

As Makepeace explains:

“Just step through the front doors and take a deep breath: Can’t you just SMELL the money?

“This year, we Americans will spend considerably more than $30 BILLION on books and magazines.

“For the numerically challenged among us, that’s thirty thousand MILLION dollars!

[...]

“As they’d say here in North Carolina, ‘That’s some powerful BIG binnus!’

“Now, with that many shekels at stake, you’d expect the competition to be ferocious. You’d be right.

“Take a look around the store. How many book and magazine titles do you figure you see? 10,000? 20,000?

“Guess again, oh Prescient One. This is one of the bigger temples.

“You are in the presence of nearly 200,000 titles! Lay one copy of each end-to-end, and they’d stretch out for some 25 miles!

“Imagine being the marketing guy or gal whose product is only one of 200,000 competing for your prospects’ attention …

“… AND being limited in your quest for A-I-D-A (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to a single thought that will fit on a book jacket – or worse – on its spine!”

(I’d just like to point out, for those of you self-conscious about pumping schlock by the barrel, that there are at least 5 different writing style tactics used in those few lines.)

I selected the following titles for their brass-knuckles-in-your-face aggressiveness in calling for attention. They’re augmented by some selections found on Amazon’s 2009 Best Seller List.

Self-Help Category – Hook: Improve Your Life

- How To Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons On Finding Hope In Unexpected Places

- How To Talk To Anyone – 92 Tips

- Finish Your Old Year Wrong! Hangover Survival Guide

- Eat Out & Still Lose Weight

General – Hook: Curiosity About The Unknown

- Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

- Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, SuperAthletes And The Greatest Race The World Has Never Seen

- The True and Outstanding Adventures Of The Hunt Sisters

- Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story Of A Band Of US Soldiers Who Rode To Victory In Afghanistan

- The Cure: How A Father Raised $100 Million And Bucked The Medical Establishment In A Quest To Save His Kids

This category particularly fascinates me, so I thought I’d add in my grain of salt as to why these titles work. I don’t know that you can generalize to all books in this category, but the following traits stand out to me at least in the above set of titles.

1. We love stories. We grow up with them, science has proven we remember them better and so on. These books promise a story (or several)…

But not just any story!

2. These books promise a remarkable, quirky or otherwise unexpected story, often explicitly – with words like “outstanding adventures,” “extraordinary story,” and “quest”.

What really strikes me though is the variety of  implicit ways the titles make the promise of such a special story.

• “Patriotic prostitutes” makes me think, “Huh? That’s an unusual adjective to associate to prostitutes… “Global cooling” and “suicide bombers” buying life insurance are equally quirky. The book Spunk and Bite that I referred to in my previous post on schlock explains that to achieve this stylistic element you just need an unusual adjectives noun-pairing. The trick is to find a pair that isn’t contrived.

• “Hidden” and “the world has never seen” plays on our near-universal desire to know secrets, as any unimaginative marketing salesletter-page guru will tell you.

3. There seems to be a thread of ‘belonging’ or what Maslow’s hierarchy of needs addresses as “social needs” – the human desire for relationships with others.

Patriotic prostitutes belong to a nation.

A hidden tribe – well, that’s pretty explicit.

Sisters have family bonds.

We see a ‘band of soldiers’. Not just a group – an organized team with links between themselves.

The father was out saving his kids.

4. This may just be me, but I think there’s a bit of self-actualization (the peak of Maslow’s pyramid) hinted at or made explicit in each title. I’ll let you guys look them over and figure out the details.

Politics – Hook: Prove What They Believe

- Hot, Flat And Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America

- Liberal “Victims” And Their Assault On America (by Ann Coulter, naturally)

- The War On Success: How The Obama Administration Is Shattering The American Dream

- Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You And Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists And Union Bosses

- An Invonvenient Book: Real Solutions To The World’s Biggest Problems

Essentially, these titles just repeat back to people what they believe or are concerned about. The right wing titles (which outnumbered the left wing books in the store I visited) also aim to boil readers’ blood.

The Obamanomics title repeats back the following widely held views. Many people are disgusted by the bonuses Wall Street paid itself from the average American’s taxes, which anger just boils even further when these same people hypocritically argue for fiscal restraint as concerns other Americans e.g. in terms of providing health insurance to the poor.

Thomas Friedman’s title does the same sort of preaching to the choir (“we need a green revolution”), and adds in the national-aspirational bit in a way that seems to simultaneously strike the ‘belonging’ and ’self-actualization’ chords.

Miscellanea:

- The Long Shadow Of the JFK Assassination – I liked the shadow image

- Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road From Glory To Disaster – I think this addresses our curiosity and incredulity at the near-failures of the Big Three.

- Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer – And How To Prevent Getting It In The First Place – This seems to be another hook targeted at incredulity, combined with a self-help hook. “Cure” cancer? Prevent it? Awesome!

Conclusion

If you’re ever rocking away in your chair trying to knit up a title to fit your piece, a trip to the bookstore might be just the inspiration you need!

Gab Goldenberg wrote this post on behalf of Red Fly Marketing, an online marketing company in Dublin offering savvy search engine optimisation and web design.

photo credit: Jean & Nathalie

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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When I first started Copyblogger in 2006, I was almost militantly against on-page search optimization. Seems strange, since I’d been a successful student of SEO since 2000.

It was because I saw all these people fretting over keywords like it’s 1999, and yet they had no links. Their content was weak. Their sites weren’t trusted.

You can’t optimize something that’s dead in the water. So my initial goal was to get people to focus on content that attracted attention and links first. Only then do you have something you can make better (that’s what optimize means, naturally).

Fours years later, it seems things have swung in the opposite direction for some. Social media “experts” maintain that SEO doesn’t matter because search traffic just “happens.”

Yes, search traffic “happens” if you produce unique content and don’t make it impossible to find. But the “right” search traffic doesn’t just happen, not unless you’re lucky (which simply means you don’t know what you’re doing).

This article is designed to help you know how to tell search engines what you’re talking about is the same as what people are looking for. That’s all SEO really is.

And yet . . .

I feel compelled to quickly discuss the things you need to focus on first. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz gives us a quick list of the stuff that must come prior to on-page optimization, so I’ll repeat those here with my own commentary:

Accessibility – If search engines can’t see your content within the code, your page can’t be indexed and ranked. This is why Chris Pearson created the Thesis Theme for WordPress, and why he obsesses over making it better. Code matters.

Content – Now that the code structure is right, we come to what people actually want. Create great content and the people, sharing, and links will follow. And then you hit the bonus round: Google gives you even more goodness.

User Experience – The easier your site makes it to consume and share your content, the better you’ll end up doing SEO-wise. People don’t consume or share content that creates barriers, sometimes even if only a little.

Marketing – To paraphrase Rand on this one, spreading the word is often more important than being right, being honest, or being valuable. I like to say promoting your content is a virtuous necessity. Whatever works for you, but do get the word out.

Okay, now let’s move on to the five areas to focus on with your web page, blog post, online press release, whatever . . . they’re all the same in the eyes of Google.

Five SEO copywriting elements that matter

Before we get into this, let me share a few strategic considerations.

When I’m building an authority site, I don’t care about optimizing everything I write. I use a lot of metaphors and pop culture references instead of keywords to get people reading and linking to build the overall trust of the domain. Then when I want to rank well for something, like copywriting, or seo copywriting, or landing pages, my job is much easier.

If you’re a news blogger (or newspaper), things are different. You want to optimize everything as best as possible up front, then move on. Different strokes for different folks.

That said, here we go.

1. Title

Whether you optimize up-front or later, you at minimum need to know what keywords you’re targeting and include them in the title of your content. It’s generally accepted that the closer to the front of the title your keywords are, the better. But the key is that they appear in the title somewhere.

You’ll notice that the title of this post contains the keyword phrase “SEO copywriting,” but it’s positioned at the end of the title. That’s because I go with the more compelling headline first and foremost. But I can serve an alternate title in the title tag (which is the snippet of code Google actually pulls the title from) thanks to a post feature in Thesis (also available with the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress).

So, I can always enter a more search-optimized alternate title later, such as:

SEO Copywriting: The 5 Essential Elements

The emphasis on keywords in the title makes practical sense from a search engine standpoint. When people search for something, they’re going to want to see the language they used reflected back at them in the results. Nothing mysterious about that.

Having keywords in your title is also important when people link to you. When your keywords are there, people are more likely to link to you with the keywords in the anchor text. This is an important factor for Google to determine that a particular page is in fact about a particular subject.

You should try to keep the length of your title under 72 characters for search purposes. This will ensure the full title is visible in a search result, increasing the likelihood of a click-through.

2. Meta Description

SEO copywriting is not just about ranking. It’s also about the presentation of your content in a search engine. The meta description of your content will generally be the “snippet” copy for the search result below the title, which influences whether or not you get the click.

It’s debatable whether keywords in your meta description influence rank, but it doesn’t matter if they do or don’t. You want to lead off your meta description with the keyword phrase and succinctly summarize the page as a reassurance to the searcher that your content will satisfy what they’re looking for.

Try to keep the meta description under 165 characters so the full description is visible in the search result. Again, you can create a meta description in WordPress right in the posting area with Thesis or All in One SEO.

3. Content

Unique and frequently updated content makes search engines happy. But you know that part. For search optimization purposes (and just general reader-friendliness) your content should be tightly on-topic and centered on the subject matter of the desired keyword phrases.

It’s generally accepted that very brief content may have a harder time ranking over a page with more substantial content. So you’ll want to have a content body length of at least 300 words.

It might also help to bold the first occurrence of a keyword phrase, or include it in a bulleted list, but I usually don’t get hung up on that. It’s also debatable whether including keywords in subheads helps with ranking, but again, it doesn’t matter – subheads are simply a smart and natural place to include your keyword phrase, since that’s what the page is about.

Which brings us to . . .

4. Keyword Frequency

Keyword frequency is the number of times your targeted keywords appear on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of those keywords to the rest of the words on the page.

It’s generally accepted that keyword frequency impacts ranking (and that makes logical sense). Keyword density, as some sort of “golden” ratio, likely does not. But the only way to make sense of an appropriate frequency is via the ratio of those keywords to the rest of the content, so density is still a metric you need.

In other words, the only way to tell if your repetition of keywords is super or spammy is to measure that frequency against the overall length of the content. A keyword density greater than 5.5% could find you guilty of keyword stuffing, and your page could be penalized by Google.

You don’t need to mindlessly repeat keywords to optimize. In fact, if you do, you’re likely to achieve the opposite result.

5. Page Links

Linking is the fundamental basis of the web. Search engines want to know you’re sufficiently “connected” with other pages and content, so linking matters when it comes to search engine optimization.

Here are some “rules of thumb” for linking based on generally accepted best practices:

• Link to relevant content fairly early in the body copy
• Link to relevant pages approximately every 120 words of content
• Link to relevant interior pages of your site or other sites
• Link with naturally relevant anchor text

Again, these are guidelines related to current best practices. Don’t get hung up on rules; focus on the intent behind what search engines are looking for – quality search results for people.

Yes, there’s other stuff . . .

There are other elements as well, such as URL structure and keywords, keywords in image alt files, tags and categories, and various other minutia (here’s a list of on-page elements and their varied importance). If you focus on the five areas above, however, you’re covering the vital elements of effective on-page optimization.

I know there are a lot of SEO ninjas out there who might be reading. What would you add as a vital on-page optimization element? Let us know in the comments.

Up next: Does Writing for People Equal Good SEO?

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and CEO of Unglued Media. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

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Five Areas to Focus On for Effective SEO Copywriting

Google has long been an advocate of “build great content”; however, in reality, it’s turning into “build great content … and if we like it we’ll take it from you, put it on our pages, and deprive you of that traffic. Without compensation.” Strong accusations, sure, but I’m willing to step up to the plate, put my money where my mouth is, and show you how it’s being done.

Let’s say you live in the Miami area or are thinking of taking a vacation there. You might want to bring your family to the Miami Seaquarium, and it might be a good idea to find out exactly where they are and what hours they are open. So what do you do? Fire up your browser, head on over to Google, and search for [seaquarium miami]. You should get a result that’s something like this:

So what’s the problem? First of all, Google gives away the hours right in the SERP. There’s no need for the people to visit the website. While I don’t know for a fact that traffic growth is a success metric for the Miami Seaquarium, I think it’s a safe assumption. By denying the Miami Seaquarium that traffic they deny them the opportunity to upsell visitors to the upcoming aquarium programs. Now Googlers might counter by saying that it’s all about “providing a better user experience.” Maybe at the next conference I’ll improve the movie going experience of some Googlers by telling them the surprise ending of the latest movie before they see it. I mean, I saved them money and two hours of their time, right? That’s gotta be a better user experience.

See that review and link to “more information”? Click either of those and, instead of being taken to the Miami Seaqurium website, you’re taken to the Google map listing page. Google stole the information they wanted from the Miami Seaqurium, hijacked the traffic for themselves, and put them on a page with contextual advertising that puts more money in Google ’s pockets. The only person that gets a better user experience out of that is someone whose paycheck directly results from that advertising. Really this is nothing more than a scraper adsense website designed to hijack traffic away from place it should be going. Because Google controls the SERP’s they make sure they are at the top, guaranteeing clicks, traffic, and revenue from that page.

This is almost the exact behavior I described in my debate with Danny Sullivan a few weeks ago on Sphinn. I stand by my position that giving Google the copyright to the information for free right out of the gate is the same as giving them permission to steal and develop a money making operation based on your labors without giving you any of the action.

Want another example of Google stealing? Sure, here we go …

Let’s say I decide I want to go to nice steakhouse for dinner. I know there’s a Bryant & Cooper here on Long Island. I wonder if it’s still any good, so I type in [bryant & cooper steakhouse long island reviews]. Here’s what I get:

So it’s got four out of five stars based on 48 reviews. That’s pretty good. I can call and make reservation right away and my mission is accomplished.

So what’s my beef here (pun intended)? Another long-standing Google suggestion is to build a website, service, or product that people want to use and place value on. This is what’s called a Point of Differentiation or POD. One way to do that is with user-submitted reviews. I wonder where Google got those 48 reviews? Let’s  check it out.

Let’s see…there are some reviews from Google, but the majority are from Zagat and CitySearch. Let’s review. Google says build great content and a service people want to use, which Zagat and CitySearch did. Then Google went and stole that content from them and put some adsense advertising next to it. If we go back to the original SERP and scroll down a bit … yep, we’ll find Zagat and CitySearch. Google hijacked that traffic, and those two sites got nothing to show for it.

What you need to do is ask yourself a question. Do you think Google is going to use less information or are they going to take more? Are they going to decide they can better serve the customers in your market by stealing your best content and putting it on their servers, where they collect the ad revenue, while they kick you to the curb faster than a no-good, two-timing, philandering spouse? Do you feel confident betting against the all-consuming data borg? Well do ya, punk?

The problem is that, as SEO’s, we’re the canaries in coal mine. We’ll notice trouble before it happens. Probably a few of us are going to have our websites killed by Google before the main stream press and Government notices. But the sooner we see the truth for what it is and stop burying our heads in the sand, the sooner something will happen to change it.

You may have friends who work for Google, but Google is not your friend. Google is like the feudal lord who grows rich off of the peons, serfs, and indentured servants who labor in the fields. No matter how hard you work you will always serve your digital master.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Is Google Stealing Your Content and Hijacking Your Traffic

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Is Google Stealing Your Content and Hijacking Your Traffic

As we continue to explore principles of successful blogging I want to turn our attention to a matter at the heart of the topic – content.

Much could be said on the topic but in the presentation that sparked my principles of successful blogging series of posts I spoke at length about the idea of ‘crafting content‘.

The idea of of successful bloggers displaying ‘craftsmanship’ began to strike me after meeting a number of pretty high profile bloggers at the SXSW interactive conference a few years back. I remember sitting down at that conference with a number of bloggers who’d build great blogs to pick their brains and having the realisation that their blogs had not ‘just happened’ but that they’d really put time, energy and thought into shaping them over the years.

This ’shaping’ of their blogs happened on two levels – it happened on a daily basis in the posts that they wrote – but also over time as their blogs grew and matured.

Crafting Blog Posts

My own experience of blogging is that in my early days of experimenting with the medium I would tend to sit down at the computer on any given day and then put up on the web whatever I was thinking about at that moment and within seconds of punching out a first draft the post would be live online.

• little thought went into the planning of posts
• no more time than was absolutely necessary was put into the writing of posts
• no consideration was really ever given to improving posts before they went live
• it was rare that I gave thought to how to time, launch and promote posts

My blogging was very impulsive and minimalistic in terms of how much effort I put into the most important factor of blogging – the content on it.

I got away with this to some degree, perhaps partly due to the fact that the blogosphere was in its infancy – but look back on that time now wondering how much more I could have achieved early on if I’d just given more time to ‘crafting’ my content.

Don’t get me wrong – I still sit down some days to impulsively write – but over time I’ve found that I get better results if I take a more craftsman-like approach to blogging.

One of the factors that changed my own approach to blogging was out of the experience of beginning to write series of posts on my blogs.

I don’t even remember what the first series was (or why I did it) but I do remember the realization of how much better my writing was when I put some time into planning what I would write ahead of time.

Setting oneself the task of writing a series of posts ahead of time mean you need to consider what you’ll write about (in general terms) but knowing what topics you’ll be covering in the future means that your ideas begin to marinate ahead of time and that by the time you come to write your posts you’ve given the topics thought, you’ve got ideas on how to explore it on a deeper level and you’ve hopefully got some creative ides of how to introduce and explore the topic in a way that makes the post stand out a little.

Crafting Content can happen on many levels and depending upon the type of blog you have you might not find them all to be relevant to every blog post you write – however here’s a series of posts that I wrote on the topic in 2008 that was designed to help bloggers consider ways that take a little extra time could improve their blogging:

1. How to Craft a Blog Post – 10 Crucial Points to Pause
2. Choosing a Topic – take a little extra time defining your topic and the post will flow better and you’ll develop something that matters to readers.
3. Crafting Your Post’s Title – perhaps the most crucial part of actually getting readers to start reading your post when they see it in an RSS reader or search engine results page.
4. The Opening Line – first impressions matter. Once you’ve got someone past your post’s title your opening line draws them deeper into your post.
5. Your ‘point/s’ (making your posts matter) - a post needs to have a point. If it is just an intriguing title and opening you’ll get people to read – but if the post doesn’t ‘matter’ to them it’ll never get traction.
6. Call to Action – driving readers to do something cements a post in their mind and helps them to apply it and helps you to make a deeper connection with them.
7. Adding Depth – before publishing your post – ask yourself how you could add depth to it and make it even more useful and memorable to readers?
8. Quality Control and Polishing of Posts – small mistakes can be barriers to engagement for some readers. Spending time fixing errors and making a post ‘look’ good can take it to the next level.
9. Timing of Publishing Your Post – timing can be everything – strategic timing of posts can ensure the right people see it at the right time.
10. Post Promotion – having hit publish – don’t just leave it to chance that your post will be read by people. Giving it a few strategic ‘nudges’ can increase the exposure it gets exponentially.
11. Conversation – often the real action happens once your post is published and being interacted with by readers and other bloggers. Taking time to dialogue can be very fruitful.

Crafting Blogs on a Big Picture Level

The other level that I think bloggers could do well to apply the idea of craftsmanship to is thinking about the big picture of a blog and seeing the blog, in its entirety, as something that needs crafting.

Over a time as a blog grows and matures it takes on a certain shape and form.

The accumulated body of content, the voice and personality behind the content, the visual design of the blog and even the interaction with readers and emerging community are all things that go into how a blog is perceived.

Some blogs manage to evolve without much thought in a good direction – but behind the scenes of most successful blogs there is a person or team of people who are shaping the blog, plotting its course and making sure that it stays on that course.

I spoke once with a museum curator who told me about her job and it reminds me on some levels of what I do on my blogs.

Curators do many tasks to get an exhibition together – good exhibitions don’t just happen. Their work starts with careful planning, research, study and sourcing of exhibits well before an exhibition takes place.

They are not only involved in deciding what to exhibit but they’re also involved in what to leave out of exhibitions (avoiding clutter and confusion for those attending).

Once they’ve sourced the exhibits they’re involved in arranging them and making sure that they are presented in a way that draws people in and takes them on a journey.

As I spoke with this curator about the care in which she put together an exhibition (a process that took a lot of detailed thought and energy over considerable time) I was challenged to apply some of what I saw in my own blogging.

Great blogs don’t just happen – they take thoughtful consideration, planning and shaping. They too are not just about what you publish but about what you don’t publish. They too take thought as you consider the journey you want to take your reader on.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Craftsmanship – Principles of Successful Blogs #9

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Craftsmanship – Principles of Successful Blogs #9

There is a myth that you need to be a very good writer in order to make any money online. If you take a look at someone like John Chow, you’ll quickly realize that having perfect grammar may be nice, but it’s not a requirement in earning a substantial amount of money through the Internet.

What if you don’t want to write anything at all? Can you still get away with some content that requires minimal investment on your part? If you were to ask the people behind PLR eBook Club, the response would be a resounding yes. Over the course of this review, we’ll take a look at what you get by joining the club and whether it is worth your while.

What is PLR and Should I Use It?

As you may or may not already know, PLR content stands for private label rights. These articles and other forms of content come with a completely open license, so you can use them however you’d like without attribution. With or without modification, you have full resale rights, selling them as if they were your own.

How Much Content Can I Expect?

With the PLR eBook Club, you gain access to a huge range of new products each and every month, ensuring that your websites and other online presences are constantly restocked with new content. This can be useful for landing pages and blogs, for instance, among several other applications.

You do have to bear in mind that the quality of the content for most PLR articles will leave much to be desired. The usual formula involves a single article being translated to another language and then being translated back into English, resulting in less than stellar grammar and some strange word choices.

As you can probably suspect, you’d probably get better content by hiring a freelance writer, but that can be much more expensive than taking the PLR route instead. With PLR eBook Club, you get over 50 new products every month. That’s a lot of content.

What Does the Members Area Look Like?

Upon signing into your account, you will be granted access to the members area.

From this page, you can add or renew your subscription, review your payment history, change your password, access the affiliate area, and — perhaps most importantly — access that PLR content that you paid for in the first place.

The links to the content can be found along the left side and you’ll likely be focusing on the PLR eBook Club Gold area. Clicking on this link brings you to a blog-like interface, showcasing the newest content available for download.

While looking at the PLR eBook Club, you can see the most recent content, browse through the archives, and read the “random PLR tips.” For the content, you get written material, as well as audio and video features.

The first item in the screenshot above is the Article Master Series and it contains 200 articles across 13 different topic areas. These articles cover dating, personal finance, editorial services, real estate brokering, and running shoes, among other subjects.

How is the Quality of the Articles?

What can you expect in terms of quality? Here is a brief snippet from a coffee feature from the Article Master Series:

Smelling the coffee first thing that you should do when comparing coffee beans. It can help you to better understand the full flavor of the coffee. It will also show you the smell that you will be waking up to when you make your coffee. While all of the other aspects of coffee are important, this will help you to choose the better coffee.

What is the Monthly Subscription Price?

If you’re not too concerned about having completely original content or articles that are perfectly grammatically correct, the PLR eBook Club may be a viable option for you. There is a special 14-day trial for $4.95 and this comes with a money-back guarantee. After that, the regular membership is $27 a month.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP WITH PLR EBOOK CLUB

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Want PLR Articles? Join the eBook Club

A Guest Post by Warren Davies from GenerallyThinking.com.

It’s pretty clear that if we want to be pro bloggers, we can’t rely purely on producing fantastic content. We have to optimise our pages for search engines, build backlinks from relevant sources, as well as putting our heart and soul into our content to make it as valuable as possible for the reader.

But what if the reader gets what they want from the post and then leaves? Well, that’s nice of us to solve their problem, but it’s not going to help us earn the money and freedom we want!

We need to entice first time visitors further into our blogs, expose them to its different areas and articles, make them feel like a kid in a candy store when they see all the information inside!

One way we can do this is through a landing page analysis – to see which pages people are landing on, checking the metrics for these pages, and then optimising them so that they are better placed to convert first time visitors into regular readers. Here’s a 4 step plan.

Step 1 – Identify Problem Pages

This is easy to do with Google Analytics – just go to Content -> Top Landing Pages, and check the chart at the bottom of the page. These are the pages that visitors are most likely to enter your site through. Now check the column to the far right – Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without looking at another page on your blog. They hit the landing page, get what they want (or not) then leave.

If you have any high bounce rates in this section (80%+), you’re missing out on further page views from these first-time visitors. This is vital; pulling readers further into your site is essential to converting visitors to subscribers and/or sales.

Step 2 – Analysis

Before we start optimising the page, we need to do some more research. Here are the two main things you can do:

• Click on the name of each post, and look at the Time on Page. Is it significantly lower than the time it takes to read the article? If so, it’s likely that the reader is not finding the answer to the question they had when they clicked through.
• Ask them. Set up a Poll on the page, entitled “Help me improve this article: What information were you asking for?” Give a few options, and don’t forget to add ‘something else’ as an option. Alternatively, a simple “Did you find the information you were looking for?” can be useful. Experiment with putting it at the top and bottom of the post, to see if people are reading the whole article before bouncing.
• Check the entrance sources for the post on Google Analytics. Are people mostly finding the article through Google images? This might account for the high bounce rate.

Step 3 – Optimise

You should now have some ideas on how you might optimise the article. Perhaps there’s more information you want to add, maybe you want to shorten it, or then again maybe you want to make it more appealing and add more images. Then again, maybe the site design is unattractive, or there are too many ads or other annoying things on the page. Whatever you do, don’t assume; test.

Also, do ensure that there are links and pathways to other content on your site! This is essential. Maybe your related posts plug-in and category list are not effective – you might have to tell/coax your reader into looking deeper.

If you have several ideas on how to optimise the page, you may want to use Google Web Optimiser to run several new versions of the page. Each visitor will be randomly directed to one of your test pages, and you can compare the metrics against each other at the end of the test.

Step 4 – Check Results

One week should be a good enough time frame to compare the before and after effects. Going back to Google Analytics, bring up the Content Detail page for the entrance article you’ve been playing with. Set the date for the week leading up to the day you edited the page (but not including that day). Copy and paste the stats into a text editor or Excel; the main ones you’re interested in are Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and Exit %. Then set the date for the seven days after you optimsed the article. Again, copy and paste the results, and compare.

How did you do? If you were successful, you may have seen an increase in the Time on Page – although maybe not – but certainly a decrease in the Bounce Rate and Exit %. This would indicate that more readers are looking further into your site – congratulations!

What if there was no difference? Then go back to step 2. Conduct further research on how you might improve the page. Ensure you have links to other content on your blog, and that the wording of your article makes these links seem like essential further reading.

What’s a ‘good’ bounce rate?

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a one-size-fits-all figure to aim for. It depends on many factors. A bounce could mean the visitor literally only wanted one piece of information, and left because they got it. The ambiguity of the keyword you’re targeting will be important. If you’re getting a high bounce rate from an 8-word keyphrase, it’s probably a worse situation than the same bounce rate for a 2-word keyphrase. Your domain name could play a role too – ‘Problogger’ is pretty clear, but would an article on, say, ‘marketingtips’ be specific to blogging, or to offline marketing? Maybe you’d have to read it to find out.

Having said that, bounce rates over 80% generally mean there’s work to be done.

Landing Page Analysis – A Case Study

I performed a landing page analysis analysis on GenerallyThinking.com, my psychology blog. My top landing page by far was my post on personal strengths and weaknesses. This article proved hugely successful with search engines, and accounts for 25% of the overall traffic of the site! However, the bounce rate and time on page were dismal, as you can see below:

• Time on Page – 00:01:35
• Bounce Rate – 86.67%
• Exit % – 82.98%

I ran a WP-Poll asking what people were looking for at the bottom of the page, and got no results. I put it to the top of the page, and got a few replies, but still not many. Clearly, people weren’t reading to the bottom – there was a need unfulfilled. The data I collected from the poll indicated that people wanted more information on strengths than I was offering – the article was too focused on weaknesses.

So, I ripped out the section on how to manage and work around your weaknesses completely, and posted it as a new article. Then I re-wrote the post as a portal, giving a basic overview of personal strengths and weaknesses, including how and why they could be identified – but not giving too much away. I preferred to point to other articles on my site that cover these topics in depth.

I uploaded the new page, waited, and then tested the results as described above. Here they are:

• Time on Page – 00:02:31
• Bounce Rate – 66.67%
• Exit % – 66.20%

Fantastic! Time on Page increased by a minute, bounce rate reduced by 20% and Exit % reduced by nearly the same amount. A little more tweaking and playing with images might improve things further.

(By the way, if Darren will forgive the flagrant self-promotion that article’s worth a read actually – what successful entrepreneur would say personal development is not an important part of their craft?)

How much could you improve your site by performing an entrance analysis? Remember – don’t make assumptions; test and measure everything!

Warren Davies is a positive psychology student at the University of East London, who runs a psychology blog at GenerallyThinking.com.

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Perform a Landing Page Analysis on your Blog

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