Article Writing Tips: Top Five Tricks
Written by admin
Content is king for every website or blog. Yet, not many writers know what is engaging and attention grabbing content and how to create it.
Article Writing Tip #1: Keep it Simple, Error-free and Easy to Follow
Many writers fall prey to temptation. They end up writing heavy, boring stuff, full of big words and false claims. This is an absolute “No! No!” with most readers.
Instead, write simply. Avoid big words. Maintain flow. Bear in mind that a reader will be driven away if he has to check the dictionary every few minutes, because you gave in to the temptation of wanting to show off your language skills and ended up using big and bombastic words.
Also, ensure that your article is clean with few spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. Typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical and punctuation errors can be off-putting to readers. They may just surf away from your website or blog, never to return.
Some may even conclude that you can’t possibly know much, if you can’t even manage language.
Article Writing Tip #2: Write for the Reader
Many writers tend to write for their pleasure. They tend to select topics that interests them, oblivious of the reader’s taste and requirements.
This is a strategy, which will drive readers away instead of helping you retain them.
Instead write for the reader, putting yourself in his position, trying to understand what he is looking for when he visits your site rather than what you want him to read.
Article Writing Tip #3: Talk to the Reader, Instead of Talking Down to Him
Many writers assume a superior position and talk down to the reader instead of talking to them as an equal. This can be very irritating for many readers, who may be looking for additional information but that does not mean they lack knowledge or abilities.
While writing requires skills, writing in a way which will leave the readers satisfied and fulfilled requires even greater abilities. Always bear in mind that your first interaction with the reader has to be such that it will pave for many more in course of time.
Don’t pontificate. Don’t brag. Don’t use your blog to show off, advertise and blatantly promote products. Instead create user experiences, where your reader is an equal partner, who comes to your website to hear your views and share his experiences with you—the interaction of course being facilitated through your writings and his comments in your comments column.
Article Writing Tip #4 Don’t Plagiarize. Instead, Write Quality Content
Blogs and websites are like steam engines! You have to keep feeding them with content constantly to keep them at the top of search engines results.
When large amount of content is needed, there is a tendency to plagiarize or modify content marginally and pass it off as your own.
This approach may fill the pages but is self-defeating in the long run. Search engines like Google tend to penalize duplicate content. Thus, instead of ranking high, your content may be pushed to the bottom of the pile of huge piles of web content that gets created online on a daily basis.
Instead, create value for your readers. Write on things that would interest them. Provide information. Generate enough interest and curiosity to bring the reader back to your website time and again.
Article Writing Tip #5: Research! Research! And More Research!
Many writers believe that just because they know a subject fairly well, they no longer need to read or upgrade skills.
This is a fallacy.
The world around us is constantly evolving. New developments have been taking place at a phenomenal pace in every subject and every field.
Even if you are an expert, you need to update knowledge and skill sets from time to time. Otherwise, you will end up churning out the same content time and again under different headlines. This will not attract readers. Instead, it will drive them away to competitors who can provide unique and readable content.
High Site Speed for High Page Rank
Written by admin
Why high site speed:
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of anti-spam team, recently indicated to at Pubcon, a search marketing conference, the general direction in which the world’s most popular search engine was likely to go in 2010.
Speaking to Webpronews , he made two points. The New Year would see the rolling out of Google Caffeine, the company’s much-discussed new technology for indexing infrastructure. He also made the point that perhaps, time had come to reward the more efficient website owners, who had faster loading website and web pages.
Since, then site speed has come in for a lot of discussion.
What is high site speed:
From Google’s perspective of course, faster sites mean greater customer retention, and greater customer retention would translate into higher revenues through Google Adwords, which generates over 90 per cent of the company’s income.
However, having said that, it is also undeniable that a high site speed is also good for Internet users and the small businesses that Google supports. These are the small businesses that have websites on the Internet. As a search engine company which searches and indexes information on the Internet and as a major advertiser, Google helps these businesses increase their visibility, optimizing their marketing costs and assists them in tracking returns on investments.
From a user’s point of view, a high site speed is something that makes the Internet experience worthwhile.
Companies may spend millions on the back end of their businesses, but as far as the customer is concerned, as the end user, bulk of his time he spends at a website may be the time he spends staring at the screen, while he waits for all the components on the webpage to load. These components include the images, style sheets, scripts, Flash etc.
Some web pages load slowly, others load faster. The speed itself may be dependent on the contents of the page, the speed of the user’s computer and the very nature of the Internet connection itself, such as a dial-up or a broadband connection.
However, the average user himself is neither aware of these things nor is he even willing to apportion responsibility equally to whatever mars his Internet experience.
Instead, he would gravitate away from the site that loads slowly to those that load faster—thus rewarding those site owners who have a user-friendly website as compared to those who don’t.
Such natural selection already exists from the user’s end, but Google would also like to give weightage site speed while determining a webpage’s ranking on its search engines.
How important is high site speed:
Site owners cannot influence the speed of the user’s Internet connection. He also cannot possible decide which generation computer a user uses. However, what he can do is analyze the components that are on his website. This can be done in consultation with web designers or it can be done using several of the free and paid resources that are available online, including Google’s code for page speed and Yahoo’s Yslow to run site speed tests.
What site owners also need to remember is that while site speed is going to be important, it will be one of the 200 factors that the Google spiders use while determining page rank. Hence, all changes must be made, bearing in mind that while site speed will matter, both from Google’s and user’s perspective, it will not be the sole factor which determines traffic to a website.
Free Keyword Research Tool: SEO Book
Written by adminSeo industry veteran Aaron Wall’s Seo Book Suggestion Tool has been around for sometime. Unlike Google’s Adwords Keywords Tool, this tool, including Seo Book’s free keyword research tool, combines the strengths of several search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN to provide you with a daily estimate of traffic generated by the term you are interested in, as well as related terms.
The net result is that Seo Book’s tools can provide you with the combined search results of several search engines for the targeted keyword you are researching and its synonyms, or it can provide the same information for one search engine at a time.
The combined traffic estimate is useful, convenient and time saving, as you can take an informed decision on your daily budgets that you may need to allocate if you decide to embark upon pay per click campaigns to drive targeted traffic to your website.
Seo Book Suggestion Tool is able to provide these functionalities as it has an interface with Woodtracker and UK’s Overture. It uses Google Trends for targeted keywords and Google Traffic Estimator to arrive at the daily cost for advertising for the terms in question
Additionally, it makes use of GoRank Seo Tools and Ontology Finder to check the top 1000 Google results for the term you are interested in, as well as its synonyms.
Like WordTracker, Seo Book offers both a paid and free keyword research tools.
Even though it is free, you have to register in order to use the free keyword research tool. Registration has been made a must after the free keyword research tool provider found that some users were scrapping information far too heavily.
Registration requires an opt-in, but it may be worthwhile, since Seo Book throws in freebies which the company claims is worth over $300. The freebies include the Seo Toolbar, a rank checker, video tutorials and an email guide to Seo basics.
Also, a calculator is available to calculate the value of your website—or that of the websites you may want to promote based on your keyword research using the paid and free keyword research tools available.
Both the Seo Toolbar and the Rank Checker have to be downloaded and installed. The former allows you to get an estimate of the traffic and ranking attracted by the websites indexed by the search engines. The latter, on the contrary, allows you to check the rank of your domain on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
In case you opt for the premium product, you get access to additional tools such as Website Health Check, Competitive Research Tool, a Duplicate Content Checker, a Hub Finder and access to the Seo Community.
However, these tools do not come cheap. They were priced at USD $300 a month at the time of writing, which the additional assurance that membership can be cancelled anytime.
