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Archive for November, 2011

Some Useful Tips To Get People To Read Your Content

The reason we all write blogs and content for our websites is because we have something that we feel is important to say and we want to get that message out to the public and to our potential consumers for help visit www.feedreaderlinks.com. Unfortunately as my boss has pointed out in one of his posts that only 16 of people actually read blog posts and the rest of we simply scan them for pertinent information. I have to be honest as a reader and a writer I found this to be a shocking number and had a bit of a hard time accepting it. But as Jeff explained to me most of us are thrown so much information in one day that we simply dont have enough time to read it all.

I think thats only part of the reason though. Truthfully? There are a lot of badly written boring posts and articles floating around on the web and most of us cant be bothered to read them to get the information we need out of it. But the good news is that I do believe if something is truly well written or entertaining that people will read it. Therefore in order to get our message across we have to make our writing more appealing to our readership. Fortunately these few simple copywriting tips can be used to help you tighten your writing and reach further than that 16 percent.

1. Plan Ahead

Listen if you dont know where youre going with your writing than your readers dont stand a chance. Before you sit down and put fingers to keyboard think about what you want to say and what the logical flow of your thoughts should be. Your writing should be orderly and have direction for help visit www.instantblogandping.com. If youre looking for a great starting place try this simple adage: Tell people what youre going to tell them tell them and then tell them what youve told them. Itll help lend focus to your thoughts.

2. Know your Audience

It seems like common sense but youd be surprised. For example if you know that your travel site appeals to young urban professionals writing a blog post about retirement travel is probably not going to go over well. Think about your idea and spin it: Maybe your blog post could be about where to send your retired parents on vacation. Find a way to make your new product or service appeal to your existing audience.

3. The K.I.S.S. Principle

In other words ndash; Keep it Simple Stupid Hey dont blame me I didnt invent the acronym. Did you know that most newspapers write their stories for a grade seven education level? Writing for the web shouldnt be any different. And while its great that you have a PhD in entomology but if your readers dont know youre talking about bugs you arent going to get your points across.

4. N.M.A.P. No more acronyms please

Given the previous entry this one is a little ironic. But heres the thing. Just because you know what youre talking about when you mention a BOGOFF Buy One Get One For Free or Eamp; OE Errors amp; Omissions Excepted; doesnt mean that the people reading your blog do. Explain what your acronyms mean before you lose all your readers with your technical talk.

5. Mix it up!

Sometimes copy can feel really stale and boring but you cant quite figure out why. Its often due to the overuse of certain words in your copy so take a look over what youve written. If you see that every sentence starts with the word the then you need to make a change. This also applies to words in a paragraph if youve described something as good four times in the past three sentences its time to pick a new adjective.

6. Use Awesome Words Sparingly

Being overly descriptive with your writing is not necessarily a good thing. If you were writing a novel sure there might be room for more flowery turns of phrase. Web copy though should be more simple and direct. Dont over illustrate what youre trying to say just say it otherwise youll lose your readers.

7. Text Not

It doesnt matter how busy you are; text speak does not belong in proper copy. Take the time to write out each of the words you want to say otherwise youll turn off your readers. Because not only is text speak annoying it can also be hard to understand so resist the urge kwim? Oops!

8. Slash

Once youve finished writing your blog or article save and close the file and walk away from it. After youve taken a little bit of time 20 ndash; 30 minutes come back to it and start editing. Your fresh eyes will help you be able to see the mistakes and the unnecessary parts more easily. And remember if you think youve gotten a bit too wordy or it runs a little too long than it probably has.
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We write content for our websites or blogs because we want people to read it but appealing to readers in the information age is easier said than done. Writing should be tight direct and interesting to your readers. Following the above copywriting guidelines should get you on your way to improving your copy.

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Alexa Traffic Rank: What It Is And Why You Should Care Or Not

Alexa is an Amazon owned company that is famous for its public traffic ranking service via its alexa.com website. Website promotion guides often make a big deal about how to improve your Alexa ranking because a top position is often associated with high profits. As a new webmaster you must understand a few very important points about Alexa’s service. This article will explain what the data collected by Alexa mean and then describe why you should care or not.

There are three numbers that Alexa reports reach page views and overall rank. Reach refers to the percentage of all web users that visited your site. Alexa reports this number as “reach per million users.” For example if Alexa reports a reach of one it means that on average out of one million web surfers one visits your site. Page views simply measures the average number of pages a surfer examines when at your website. Those sites with a lot of content and targeted visitors tend to generate a larger number of page views. The overall Alexa rank is a combination of the reach and page views numbers such that the larger both of them are the lower the site’s rank will be; for Alexa a smaller rank indicates a more important website. Alexa reports these numbers for each day one week and three month averages and the overall change over a three month period. So how does Alexa gather these data?

On a daily basis Alexa collects statistics about the number of visitors and page views for every website on the Internet. Actually it does not have data for all the sites. You see data collection happens via web surfers that have downloaded and installed the Alexa toolbar for their Internet Explorer browser. When one of these users visits and explores a site the toolbar sends this information to Alexa’s servers. What this means for webmasters is that only those sites visited by users that have decided to install the toolbar will actually have data collected for them. In addition since only a rather small subset of all possible Web surfers actually uses the toolbar the ranking is a statistical average that is not necessarily a true indication of the quality and number of a site’s readers. In fact the number is really inaccurate for sites with a small number of visitors and Alexa admits that this is true for those sites not in the top 100000.

To make matters worse the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer. Of course IE is the browser used by the majority of Internet users with data showing that it is used by about 83 of them onestat.com. This is not a problem unless your audience is more likely to be in the other 17 of surfers i.e. those that prefer to use Firefox Safari Opera or another alternative browser. For example slashdot.org is a technology news site with an audience that is known to be very antiMicrosoft; Slashdot’s motto is “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” One expects that most of its users would use any browser other than IE and in fact it was recently posted that an estimated 65 of Slashdot’s readers use a browser other than IE. As of this writing July 12 2006 Slashdot’s ranking was 176 with a reach of 5450 per million surfers. Slashdot is known for something called the “Slashdot effect” that is when a story on the front page links to a site it receives so many visitors that the servers often are not able to handle the sudden increase in traffic. In other words I would expect that Alexa’s rank is actually an underestimate of Slashdot’s true rank.

From a statistics point of view Alexa’s rank cannot be thought of as an unbiased statistical measure. The sample of people used by Alexa for collecting data is not a randomly selected set but rather it is biased towards users of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer as well as those who are willing to install the toolbar and submit to Alexa information about their browsing behavior. If your audience is similar to Slashdot’s then don’t expect accurate results. Anticipate the same if your audience includes people who are proprivacy and would never install a toolbar that calls home making their browsing behavior known to a large corporation.

So if you really want accuracy in terms of your site’s number of users and page views then you are better off using analytics software for example Google Analytics rather than Alexa. However many advertisers use Alexa’s ranking as a neutral third party estimate of a site’s popularity; they consult Alexa in order to determine how much advertising space is worth on your site. This is the reason why many webmasters display their Alexa rank on the front page. If you happen to be on the upper end of Alexa’s ranking then you should be able to benefit from it; if you are not then you probably shouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. Focus on adding fresh content to your site; this way you will be able to drive more traffic to your site via the major search engines and also keep your visitors coming back.

About the writer:  Peter E. is the creator of The Dollar Factory a portal for webmasters with articles news items website spotlight and forum. If you are a new or old webmaster join our growing community at The Dollar Factory http://www.TheDollarFactory.com

Trick Or Treat…Beware Of The Black Hat

I thought it might be a really good time to about White Hats and Black Hats so lets start off with some oldfashioned definitions:

White Hat Practices: Ethical SEO practices. White Hat refers to honest abovetheboard SEO techniques used by wellmeaning industry experts to help optimize a website and its pages and to realize higher search engine rankings and drive more qualified traffic to that site. These practices are wholeheartedly approved by Search Engines and the SEO industry at large.

Black Hat Practices: Unethical SEO practices. Black Hat refers to deceptive SEO techniques employed by companies looking to trick the search engines into realizing higher engine rankings. These practices are not acceptable in any form to the engines and industry.

Black hat techniques are often employed by companies looking for a quick fix and aiming to temporarily spike search engine rankings for a given site. These practitioners are fully aware that their success will only be fleeting because that site will be blacklisted or banished altogether from the major search engines once their unsavory methods are uncovered. Companies caught using black hat techniques will immediately suffer a sharp drop in engine rankings and longterm damage to their brand and reputation. Companies seeking SEO support need to better appreciate how damaging black hat techniques can be to the reputation of their company their brand and/or their website. They are advised to steer clear of companies practicing these methods.

There are many black hat techniques so lets identify some of them. This list is by no means exhaustive but at least it will encompass some of the more wellknown methods:

1. Cloaking also referred to as sneaky redirects this technique features to programs that send search engine spiders to website pages never viewed by users.
2. Doorway pages also known as crawler only pages these pages are created just for search engine eyes. They try to artificially achieve high search engine rankings for a certain search term by repeatedly incorporating the same keywords and phrases in the body of text. This technique is related to keyword stuffing.
3. Hidden Text this method involves the placing of keywords on a page which match the background color of the actual site thereby rendering this text completely invisible to the human site visitor.
4. Hidden Links similar to hidden text techniques this method involves placing links that are specifically designed to be spidered but cannot be viewed by the user.
5. Duplication the creation of multiple pages domains or subdomains which essentially contain duplicate content. Creating multiple copies of the same page under different URLs is an example of this. Many sites provide textonly or printerfriendly versions of pages which feature the exact same content as the corresponding graphicrich pages. If you do have duplicate pages you are advised by the engines to employ a robots.txt file to at least block duplicates from being spidered. Duplicate content is usually unintentional such as a standard web page or print friendly page but sometimes it is by design such as when a site recycles content to artificially increase its traffic.

There is no doubt that black hat methods often used in excess can lead to shortterm gains but invariably at the expense of longterm pain. These underhanded techniques pose such a serious and pervasive problem for the SEO industry that search engines such as Google and Yahoo dedicate large parts of their Webmaster Guidelines to discussing them. If these engines somehow catch you practicing black hat stuff you might be kissing your online reputation goodbye. You might be blacklisted and/or banned altogether and it could be years if ever before you could once again gain engine respect.

A final word on black hats: the industry does not talk about these practices that much which for some only lends to their mystique appeal. Sometimes the temptation to wear black hats is too great for SEO practitioners and has actually led to the development of grey hat methods. As you might expect this compromising approach is not as honest as white hat but not as dishonest as black hat. Lets use an example from duplication to illustrate. An ethical white hat SEO expert would be inclined to establish just a single site whereas an unethical black hat SEO expert would devise hundreds of mirror sites to link to the main site thereby artificially exaggerating that sites importance to users and tricking the engines. A grey hat SEO person might establish secondary sites that are not duplicates of the original one have some unique content and dont lure users into visiting an irrelevant place. This practice might actually add some content value and optimize the original site without raising the ire of the search engines. As in life there is always a middle ground in the SEO world.

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Robin Dale is the publisher for www.teeky.org we offer useful quality articles and news about Search Engine Optimization Internet Marketing Dedicated Server Hosting Windows VPS Hosting UK Linux VPS Hosting UK ecommerce hosting cPanel Hosting hosting tips UK Web Hosting.For More Articles Visit Us UK Web Hosting Blog