7 Web Content Writing Rules Everyone Should Know

Web content writing has its own challenges. Good writing skills alone will not make you a good web content writer. Along with good content writing skills, one should also have reasonably good SEO backing. For those who are planning to venture into web content writing, here are seven important rules.
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#1 Write for the audience not just for the search engines

Most often beginners in their enthusiasm to make the content search engine friendly totally forget about the audience for whom they are writing. Google, the search giant continually emphasizes that you should write for the audience and not for the search engines. This does not mean that you should completely ignore the SEO basics such as incorporation of keywords and proper positioning of the keywords, etc. Whatever you are doing do it tactfully keeping the audience in mind. Keyword stuffing is an absolute no-no.

#2 Understand your audience

If you are going to write for the audience, obviously you first need to understand them and this should be a no-brainer. Yes, before you set out to write anything, make sure that you understand the audience that you targeting. You need to take into account factors such as the age group, geographic territory, gender, etc., to get started with. Your writing style and your vocabulary should connect with the audience.

#3 Understand the competition

The content that you post in your website virtually plays the role of a sales person and it has to sell your products, services, cause or the brand that you are trying to promote. When we say competition, we need to take into account two types of competition:

·         Search engine competition – Here you will be concerned about getting good traffic to your website. You deal with this factor by using industry’s best practices on creating search engine friendly content. This of course has to be handled without forgetting Rule #1.

·         Niche industry related competition – Here your task is to impress the visitors that you have managed to attract to your website. Tell your visitors how you are different from the hundreds of other competitors that are just a single click away.

#4 Keep it succinct

Internet users are the most impatient lot (no offense intended). Internet users have too many distractions and hence have a very short span of attention. You need to keep things short, including your sentences. Bulleted lists work the best if you want to get something across to your audience quickly.

#5 Never churn out off-hand statistics

Just to support your point do not present any off-hand statistics because today, readers can verify the authenticity of your statistics in just minutes. Any inauthentic data that you present will only act against your credibility, something that you could not possibly afford to risk especially when you are trying to fight stiff online competition.

#6 Challenge the readers to act immediately

Make sure to craft strong call to actions. The challenge here is that you have just one chance, if you fail to make your audience act immediately, then you are likely to lose them forever. Therefore, powerful call to actions should be an integral part of your web content. 

#7 Never upload anything before proofreading

Make sure that you have a proofreading checklist and some of the key factors to be included in your checklist include:

• Spelling mistakes
• Typographical errors
• Grammatical issues
• Redundancy of ideas

If you are just getting started with web content writing, give yourself enough time to learn the nuances of web content writing. Abiding by the above rules will take you long way in terms of making you a successful web content writer.

Doorway Pages Google Update Do Not Let Your Blog Suffer Penalty

Doorway Pages Google Update Do Not Let Your Blog Suffer Penalty

Google has very clearly stated in its post on Monday, March 16, 2015, that it will be making adjustments to its ranking algorithm targeting doorway pages. According to the post, doorway pages are those landing pages that add no real value to the web and pages that affect the user experience as they are created solely for the purpose of directing the visitors to a specific page, product or service. This update when it happens will affect not only the websites but also the blogs that fall under this category.

Here is the excerpt taken from Google’s post on doorway pages for your quick reference:

[Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html]

“Sites with large and well-established doorway campaigns might see a broad impact from this change.

To help webmasters better understand our guidelines, we've added clarifying examples and freshened our definition of doorway pages in our Quality Guidelines.

Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages:

Is the purpose to optimize for search engines and funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site, or are they an integral part of your site’s user experience?

Are the pages intended to rank on generic terms yet the content presented on the page is very specific?

Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic?

Are these pages made solely for drawing affiliate traffic and sending users along without creating unique value in content or functionality?

Do these pages exist as an “island?” Are they difficult or impossible to navigate to from other parts of your site? Are links to such pages from other pages within the site or network of sites created just for search engines?”

Just make sure that your blog does not suffer door way pages penalty.

Quick Tips For Choosing The Best Time To Blog - When To Blog?

Quick Tips For Choosing The Best Time To Blog - When To Blog?

In one of my earlier posts, I was talking about the power of consistency in blogging and how you can build a powerful blog by blogging regularly. One of the questions that you are likely to have as a blogger that is just starting:

“What is the best time to blog and will my choice of time have any influence or effect on my consistency in blogging?”

Yes of course, creating a powerful blog needs consistency and to be consistent you need to be disciplined. If you lack discipline, you cannot expect your blog to go no where. One of the factors that will help you maintain consistency in blogging is to select a specific time of the day or night for creating your blog posts. This will increase your chances of creating regular blog posts.

Now, if you have to ask whether morning or noon or night which is the best time to blog, then there is no such thing as best time to blog. All times are good times when it comes to blogging as long as you are creating useful posts for your readers. When you are deciding the right time for blogging it is important to review your daily schedule and find a time pocket during which you are least likely to be disturbed. This as you can guess will vary from person to person.

If you can wake up an hour early daily for your blogging activities, it will be one of the best choices because, this way you will not be taking away time from any of the other daily activities. Your other activities also will not suffer due to your new found blogging interest. This will go a long way in helping your remain consistent with your blogging efforts. 

7 Things That Will Increase Your Blog's Social Media Mileage

7 Things That Will Increase Your Blog's Social Media Mileage

When you are setting up your blog or deciding your blog posts, you need to ask a few crucial questions.

Is Your Blog Fetching You Social Media Mileage

What is your blog’s social media mileage?

No Life Outside Social Media – Is Your Blog Social Media Worthy?

What is your blog’s social media worthiness?

Generation Y is so social media conscious they resist to do anything that will bring them social media mileage. Yes, if you want them to attract to your blog you need to give them the social media worthy. What is social media worthiness? A blog, website or any information is said to be social media worthy when posted in the social media sites, they should fetch likes, shares and comments. In other words, posts that interest the audience in the social media sites is called social media worthy posts.

When your blog or blog post that you share in the social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc., gets you excellent visibility through shares, likes and comments then it is said to have good social media mileage. Blogs with high social media mileage or blogs that are highly social media worthy are blogs that are destined to be successful. You should try to increase the social media mileage of your blog and blog posts. 

Here are 7 things that you can do to increase the social media mileage of your blog post.

#1 Include Images – Images are one of the baits for improving your blog’s social media mileage. People like to share images. If you include images in your blog, when you share them in the social media sites, those images act as the placeholder for the post that you shared. Of course, images grab our attention and your social media mileage will increase tremendously when you post a relevant image. If you can summarize the content of your post in the image, it will help further than just sharing a baby smiling.

#2 Include Lists – Lists have amazing social media mileage. People like to read top ten lists, create interesting lists and share them in the social media sites. One of the reasons why lists are popular is because they are very light and make an easy read.

#3 Create controversial topics but you do not get into the controversy – People love controversies. Identify controversies in your niche industry. Avoid moral policing when you create controversial topics. Avoid everything relating to religion, gender and ethnic background. Do not create topics that can hurt people’s feelings and sentiments. Even if you do not intend any such things anticipate discussions that can have such results. If it is within your blog, you can moderate the comments but when you share in the social media sites, you cannot possibly have complete control over the comments.

#4 Ask questions to your audience when you share your posts in the social media sites. It just needs someone to get started and once it starts comments will start flowing.

#5 Time your posts and shares with the peak social media activity time – Not all times are suitable for posting in the social media sites. You need to time your posts. Run a few test posts to see what is working for your niche because this will vary from one niche to the other so you will need to know what works for your niche to increase your blog’s social media mileage.

#6 Compile or share statistics that are relevant to your niche – Who doesn’t want to take a peek into how many babies are born every minutes, how many spouses cheat and how many hours people spend on Facebook.

#7 Write about topics that you are passionate about and see how you can give valuable information to your audience without and not waste their time. Everything boils down to your interests and your passions. You need to be passionate about what you write and it will be easily seen through in your posts. So do not just create random posts. You should blog only when you love the topic. When you find such topics you cannot but write and you cannot but share. Passion is the key to success.

3 Goals Of Blog Post Titles - How To Create Titles That Work

3 Goals Of Blog Post Titles - How To Create Titles That Work

Do you know that 90% of the blog readers click on your blog listed in the search results only if they find the title appealing to them?

Human minds have such a great weakness for titles and that is why successful authors spend a lot of time in creating exceptional titles for their blogs. Even if you are going to publish your blog post in a rush, I insist that you spend considerable amount of time in creating blog post titles that achieve the following three most important goals. By the way, do your blog titles have any goals to meet? Set goals for your blog titles, yes then you will see how your creativity in writing outstanding blog titles improves within a short time.

1^st Goal – SEO – Your first goal is to be found on the internet when people are searching for information relating to topics that are relevant to your blog. Don’t you think so?

What fun could there be if your blog post remains a secret that is yet to be found? Don’t you want your blog to be found and your blog articles become a great buzz in your niche market? Of course, you do and that is why you are reading this article right now. So what will make your blog to be found easily by your target audience? It is SEO, if you want your blog articles to be easily accessible to your target audience, you will need to make not only the blog articles search engine friendly but also the titles of the articles search engine friendly and in particular Google friendly. The next question is how do you make your blog article titles Google friendly? For this, you should first know Google’s goals. Yes, what are the goals of this search giant? What’s in it for Google to list your blog article in the top ten? Very often people including SEOs and search engine marketing experts fail to realize the importance of “What’s in it for me?” factor for Google. Every search engine including Google is a business organization with its own set of business goals. The whole SEO game is about helping the search engines meet these goals. One of the goals of Google is to serve the best and the most accurate results for its users. Here again the search engine is dependent on you. Only when you tell Google what your blog post is about, it will be able to serve its users. If your blog article is about selling flowers online but your blog article title is going to be “How to spray paint your car in 30 minutes” then you are going to confuse your readers as well as Google completely. So Google would not like to take chances with your blog article.

So pay attention to the three important SEO rules in creating your blog title:

The first SEO rule for creating your blog title

Create titles that are an accurate reflection of the article content.

The second SEO rule for creating your blog title

Include the most important keyword in your title. These keywords should be words, terms or phrases that your internet users will be using to make their searches.

The Third SEO rule for creating your blog title

Let your blog article title not exceed 60 characters. This is a safe character count when it comes to blog article titles. Why is this so? When your blog article is listed if the title is too long it will be truncated and the internet users will not get the complete picture, which will leave them guessing. It has been observed that the readers are more likely to click on titles that appear complete and meaningful in the search results when compared to titles that are not complete or titles that are not meaningful. Search engines have their own limits on the number of characters that they display as the listing title when they are listing your blog article or blogs. So titles that are contained within 60 characters make a safer bet.

2^nd Goal – Usefulness & Hence Clickable

The next important goal that your blog post title has is to tell your readers that the blog post will be useful to them. Here again, the what’s in it for me factor plays an important role. Only when the user sees clues or hints that your blog post will be useful to them, they will click on the listing. Unless your titles are going to convey this message loud and clear to your readers, it is not going to work. Here are some title ideas that will get you started:

“How to select your hosting company?”

“Wedding planning is easier than you think –Top Tips”

“3 things you should know while hiring your Houston plumber”

Each of the titles above is clearly conveying to the readers how the reader will benefit or what the reader will achieve after reading the article. The titles also meet the SEO rules. The titles are less than 60 characters, they include the top keywords in the above cases, hosting company, wedding planning and Houston plumber respectively. You just need to put in a little bit of thinking into your blog title creation. Titles that are catchy but with no SEO value will jeopardize your blog’s online visibility.

3^rd Goal – Shareable – The Social Media Generation Need

We are a social media generation. In particular, those who are born after 1990 exhibit very strong traits of the social media generation. One of the typical traits of this social media generation is that they do tailor their lifestyle based on what will bring them the highest likes and shares in social media sites like Facebook. So if you want your blog posts and blog in general to be popular among this generation, you will need to feed them with posts that will meet this goal. Are your blog posts shareable or if your readers share, will the posts fetch them likes and shares? If not, then you might want to rethink your titles. You will have to use your positioning skills too here because each product or service will be targeting people with specific needs or interests so the titles should cater to those needs and preferences of that specific target group and make them shareable. In other words, you are playing within very tight boundaries. However, it is good as long as you know your boundaries. It will be a problem when you do not know the boundaries within which you are supposed to be playing.

So go ahead and create winning titles for your blog articles based on the above principles and see your traffic rate increase gradually. Never forget the power of consistency when you are working on improving your blog traffic.

My Writing Skills Stink - How To Be A Blogger

My Writing Skills Stink - How To Be A Blogger?

6 Useful Tips That Will Save You!

One of the key skill sets required for blogging is some decent writing skills. Unfortunately, not all of us are blessed with good writing skills, so does that mean that blogging is only for award winning writers? What if my writing skills should stink? How to be a successful blogger even if your writing skills stink?

Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a Booker Prize winner of the year to be a good blogger. All that it needs is some decent capabilities to put together grammatically correct sentences. Is blogging that simple? Probably not, you need little more than the ability to construct grammatically correct sentences. You should be able to express your ideas and what you are thinking clearly through writing and not just make people understand what you are trying to say but to WOW people with what you are saying. Tough luck, hey! There should be some way around it and some way to get on to the blogging band wagon without needing to have exceptional writing skills.

Let us look at some of the ways to go round your limitations.

1. There are different blog writing styles. You should look for writing styles that will hide your limitations. For example, people love statistical data. Rather than writing thousands of words, you can bank on your ability to source statistics and compile them meaningfully and impress your readers. Just make sure to present the statistics with the right references and never, never make up the statistics because if you do, you will lose your credibility.
2. Make use of screen shots to create your story. This way, you can minimize the number of words that you have to write. However, you will have to remember the big brother Google and Google’s requirements. Google is not going to be too happy with skimpy content. Of course, you can leverage from the images by optimizing the image titles for getting better visibility in Google’s image search.
3. Try using bulleted text whereby you keep the text length short. This will help you camouflage your stinking writing skills.
4. Hire a writer to take care of your handicap. You share your ideas with your writer and give the pointers to build upon, the writer that you hire can take care of your blog writing needs professionally and give you an irresistible post developed from your seed idea. As the idea is yours, you can post the article in your own name without feeling guilty. You can use this method not only when you have limited writing skills but also if you have limited time. If you need assistance in writing your blog posts, you can get in touch with me and I will be happy to assist.
5. Today people are recording their voice and uploading it online. They are better talkers than writers and such people prefer to bank on their talking skills. You can try it to create your blog, then you can just create the transcript of what you have spoken word for word to leverage the content benefit. You can even hire a transcriptionist to handle this task. This way, you will be able to become a popular blogger without really writing.
6. Another popular strategy is to make use of video blogs. You can take a video of the topic that you would like to discuss and post it in your blog along with the transcription of the video.

These are some of the ways to get around your limitations. It is also not a bad idea to work on improving your writing skills. It might not improve overnight but, if you keep reading online resources like Blogxical and other resources on building blogs, you will get a hang of it and you will be able to create stunning blog posts of your own without having to go around your ears to touch your nose. When you do improve your writing skills, you will be even more versatile blogger believe me because you will be now well versed in using other content formats and not just the written text. You will be able to use statistics, audio, video, image, etc to spice up your blogs. Your blogs will stand out from the rest of the blogs that just limit themselves to textual content. In the world of Google, textual content has a very important role to play but using multiple content platforms will certainly have a decisive impact on your blog.

Must Know Truth About The Power Of Consistency In Blogging

Must Know Truth About The Power Of Consistency In Blogging

We have been talking lately a lot about blogging success in this blog. As a new blogger, you should know something very important about the “Power of Consistency.” There is no secret plot to this post, you have probably already guessed how I am going to conclude this post, yes, you are right. If you want to be a successful blogger you need to be consistent. If you are that kind of a self starter, you can quit reading this post to go ahead and do what you are supposed to be doing to make your blog a great success rather than wasting time reading what you already can accomplish on your own without any assistance. On the other hand, if you think that you can do with a little motivation pill, here I am happy to serve you that.

Etymology Of The Word Consistency

The word consistency comes from the 16^th Century Latin Word “consistentia” which denoted “firmness of matter” or “permanence.” When we say that consistency is key to success in blogging what do we mean? When you start as a blogger, you will have all the enthusiasm that you need to succeed but as days pass by, you will not know where that enthusiasm went and your blog will die a natural death with dwindling to no traffic. This is the plight of hundreds of blogs, I have gone through these phases, I have started countless blogs based on ideas which I thought are very bright and that they will certainly succeed. However, my mistake of the past was that I did not seek shelter under the power of consistency so those blogs were shelved. The consolation is that they can be resurrected anytime though they are dormant now! Well, coming back to enthusiasm and consistency, the issue here is that your enthusiasm was not permanent, it was only temporary so you let it droop to nothing. I would like to emphasize here that, that is why I keep emphasizing about the importance of having to choose the right topic or theme for your blog. If you have selected an area that you are passionate about, despite all the challenges on lack of time, work pressure and other commitments you will always find a way to connect back to your passion because passions are irresistible. So do not follow a fancy idea but always follow your passion so that you can achieve that consistency and permanence that is required to make your blog into a success.

What exactly can consistency do to your blog?

When you are consistent in your blogging efforts it means that you are committed to making certain number of posts every week. If you were to write just one blog post per day leaving aside Sunday, the math will work out like this…

6 days a week … 1 post per day… end of week 1 = 1x6 = 6 blog posts

52 weeks per year…6 posts per week… end of year 1= 6x52 = 312 blog posts

In 3 years of blogging…312 blog posts per year… end of year 3 = 3X312 = 936 blog posts

In three years time you would have built close to thousand blog posts.

Let us say that if you are going to do the same thing as a full time job. You write three quality blog posts per day. You will have 2808 posts in your blog… this is a considerable number for a beginner. You can take this even up to 3500 posts within three years given that you make the best use of the days where your enthusiastic level is really high.

To start with, you work with a humble goal of one blog post per day and keep 1000 posts in a three years time. As time goes by, your expertise level will automatically improve and your ideas get will get sharper day by day, soon you will be considered an expert in your niche market. You will start getting invitations from other blogs to create guest posts for their blog and people will be ready to pay beefy prices to get your post on their blog.

All these will happen only when you commit yourself to a certain goal and be consistent in your efforts. If you are going to leave your efforts to temperamental mood swings then you cannot possibly achieve any of your blogging goals.

The best part is that the momentum of your blog will increase significantly. The pressure exerted by thousand posts on your target audience will certainly be much higher when compared to just forty or fifty posts. You should know that it is totally within your control to achieve this goal, why leave it to uncertainty. One blog post is certainly a digestible goal for someone that wants to make thousands of dollars from his or her blog.