Content Magician, Freelance web content writers
Content Magician adds magic to your website content…
No SEO without standard
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008One of the biggest movers and shakers in the SEO world is Ron Jones who is a resident blogger (perhaps more) on www.searchenginewatch.com. If you know what you’re worth in the world search engine optimization, then you should put a note down in your journal or diary to catch a bit of what’s inside this guru’s mind.
As we’ve mentioned time and time again, tirelessly yet exhausted, that the standard for SEO must be set. There cannot ever be a pluck and stick method of writing because it corrupts of the article writing standards! Nobody ever wants to buy anything because of an article that doesn’t make sense. But as with anything else on the planet, they moment something works, the moment word gets out, everyone tries to fast-track everything and forgets about the quality of things.
It’s almost like when people figure out there are gems in an area, everyone flocks to it, people talk about it, everyone wants a piece of the pie and nobody slows down to see if the rocks are actually gems. Some would even fabricate tales and try to make top-quality gems out of complete rubbish!
That’s what’s happening to article marketing and the SEO marketing world.
Some of the articles that people are writing in the name of ‘traffic’ is completely rubbish! It makes us here, at www.contentmagician.com, ashamed to be associated with the activity that we used to be so proud of, article marketing.
*** *** ***
VALUABLE INSIGHT BY RON JONES from SEARCHENGINEWATCH
In our last two installments, I raised the question whether we should concern ourselves with, focus on, or even want SEO standards. I received many responses in the form of feedback, e-mails and thoughts posted on Sphinn. Here’s what I heard:
The Response
Overall, people were positive about standards. Most people agree that there should be some standards in place for various reasons. One important reason was brought out by Terry Van Horne, founder of SEOPros.org, when he stated, “Standards would be one way to get over the ‘credibility’ hump.”
Another reader echoed similar sentiments, effectively saying that without a standards, without a reference, it’s difficult to sell the service to skeptical people, and it’s nearly impossible to convince them that what they’ve heard from their buddy, who read some article, isn’t necessarily “best practices.”
Registering Alternate Domain Extensions - A Good Move?
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008Note: Although this article rings of MARKETING, MARKETING, MARKETING and ADVERTISING, ADVERTISING, ADVERTISING….seriously, some of the stuff mentioned here are true. So, read it as it is. (-ed)
*** *** ***
In the early days of the Web, businesses and individuals wishing to register a domain had three options: .com, .net, and .org. As the Internet has expanded, many new domain extensions have become available.
You’ve probably seen some of them - .tv, .info, .ws, and .biz are good examples. In addition to these extensions, dozens more have become available. And with the explosive growth of the domain name industry, many useful domains have been registered by resellers who will often demand an unreasonable price.
Domain names are important, especially for a small business trying to create an online identity. Let’s assume that a small business, Rare Antiques, finds that rareantiques.com has already been registered. The business owner has two options - find an alternative .com name such as rareantiquesstore.com, or register an alternate extension such as rareantiques.net, or rareantiques.ws.
The best option depends on your long term goal for the site. If you choose to register the same name in a less popular extension, there are some things you should consider:
- Alternate extensions are not as popular with users. Most people will only remember the name of your domain, and not the extension. If you register rareantiques.net, many potential customers will mistakenly visit rareantiques.com out of habit. (more…)
SEO and the law of averages
Saturday, May 31st, 2008If you want to succeed in your online business, the first thing you’d need to understand is this….search engines will bring you tons of traffic ONLY IF you know how to work the game. You can be standing at the front doorstep of a local mall handing out brochures or call cards for weeks and you don’t get the same results or success rate as selling yourself or your online business through the search engines.
I’ve dabbled a little in network marketing before and even though it didn’t work out for me (time concerns), I still believe in their principles and the concepts. People selling through people, networking amongst each other, leveraging on each other, you win I win…you know, all those success talks.
Well, with an online business, it’s pretty much the same thing! Getting the word out and getting to as many people as possible is an important part of SEO and it’s an important part of your online business.
How does the law of averages come in? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out so I won’t pretend to be a really good thinker or a genius of any kind. You don’t have to own an online business to know this – in business and in SEO, it’s all about the numbers. In network marketing, they tell you that for every 100 people that you talk to, one would say ‘yes, I would love to explore that idea of yours’. (more…)
Power Up Your Web Presence With Powerful Copywriting
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008Web copywriting is carried out keeping in mind two audiences: search engines (which can index your site and pull up your page rankings), and prospective human visitors (who can buy your products). Sometimes the right density and positioning of keywords is enough to make search engines happy, and get you near the top of search results.
But when people visit your site, they read your content and if they find every paragraph a medium to stuff keywords, it spoils your impression, definitely a bad idea. You need to get a copy that can please both digital as well as human readers.
There is no point in getting high traffic when your visitors abandon your page before you can get them to click on a link, read more, or make a purchase. Although you have “cheated” your way into the search results, you just lost any chance of getting bookmarked, or recommended to another user, or getting visited again by the same user.
On the other extreme, you could get content writing services that churn out good copy–lively prose, no bluffing, no padding, just informative and persuasive copywriting–but if the keywords are not strategically placed and repeated when they count, you won’t be making search engine spiders happy.
Your site might read well but is just not spider-index-friendly. But then, with word-of-mouth recommendations, your site has a source of traffic not directly related to search engine results. The problem is your site might be reachable by any online search using keywords.
Now you know that man cannot live on search engine optimization alone. You need good copy. So you either get people who are good in SEO copywriting, or you can learn it and do it yourself. (more…)
How To Write Kick Ass Sales Letter
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Despite what people think of sales letters today, as a writer, here’s what I think of them….they work! Sales letters work provided that you get the right writer to write the sales letter for you. Some of them are totally off-the-hook, long-winded and ludicrous and present some of the most ludicrous claims ever…but they work. Sales letters, though, like to beat around the bush and tell life stories. These works are produced by sales letter writers who are unfamiliar with how these things work on the Internet. Along the way, the writer forgets that the purpose of it all…and it’s to sell. Nothing turns buyers off more than a web page that appears to be nagging at them.
The one way to sell someone something, in particular, the target market, we need to zoom in on THEM. They have a problem, they have a pain and through the sales letter, we remind them of that. Then what the writer should do is to tell them that we understand their problem and can relate to how mind-numbing their pain is….and we have the solution! We want to tell them that with that solution, we can change the way they function and live completely. If it applies, the sales letter projects that the solution will bring them the kind of happiness that they’ve been hoping for!
And not tell them that your grandfather’s smoking killed him. (more…)
SEO, life on the fast lane – how to fast track exposure
Friday, May 9th, 2008“It was just there last week!” screamed my client over the phone as I held the receiver as far away from me as possible. “Why isn’t the listing there anymore? Why isn’t it on the first two pages? Why has it fallen off the face of the earth? I thought I did the right thing already!”
The thing is that I write some stuff for this client, some search engine promotion related stuff and he’s been pumping his blog and website like mad now. Before that, when he first started his website and blog, he had some SEO guys come in and do some SEO work for him. All was fine and dandy; I have to say the SEO guys did a pretty neat job. But this is more than half a year ago we’re talking about – things change, Google change, criteria change and the website and blog needs to change too.
And SEO is a darn stressful industry – quite like the share market, really. This time, we’re not fighting for money, we’re fighting for ranking with the top SEO tactics we know and hiring of some big time guys to come in to sharpen our websites and blogs for us. And we’re watching and watching and watching….and watching, go to sleep, wake up and watching and watching. (more…)
Blog business – is this thing for real?
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008The blog business is for real, I assure you. Listen, I reside in Malaysia and after years, no, more like decades of suffering in silence under a manipulative government, the Internet and access to blogs changed the way people think, hence, Malaysians started realizing that they have a voice through the Internet and they can say whatever they want through their own personal blogs.
And one fine day, the blogsphere became Malaysian’s platform or stage – and it changed the Government.
If it can change a whole country, it can change your business.
Listen, if you’re looking for ways to expand your wings, widen your coverage, strengthen your branding, building your own business blog is definitely the way to go. I am pretty sure most of you would have known how important it is to let your readers, your potential customers interact with you…now, this is something you can do with a business blog.
Furthermore, through the business blog, what you can do is to hire a blog content writer (or a bunch of them if you can afford that) to pump your business blog up for a bit and then start promoting the business blog to every single living thing that crosses your path. I am serious.
The blogging world have changed the world and if you run a business and still scratching your head over all this ‘blogging’ thing, you’d better get someone to come in and help you build a simple yet credible blog where fans of your products or services can come in for updates.
Don’t be left behind, start your blog and pump content into it now!
Search Engine Optimization Gone Askew
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008It’s painful… to have a website and be sitting there waiting for people to find you and consider the stuff you have to offer there. The process of waiting can be shortened with extensive search engine optimization done to the website. This process involves working some articles into the website, tweaking the META tags of each and every one of the pages, researching on the keywords related to your industry that you think your potential customers or clients will or might use to find your website, exchanging links with others in the industry and doing some social networking.
SEO is essential to every website on the Internet
Sounds like a lot of work? Well, I won’t kid you. It’s a lot of work and some people give up simply because it takes too long. But this is the way internet marketing works. If you’re expecting a magical climb towards the top, you’re in for a sordid find. SEO is good and it’s essential to every single website; and it’s a constant thing too. You don’t stop when you get to the top. There’s monitoring work to do, researching, and changing the pages and home page time and again to make sure it appears ‘active’. Spiders don’t like ‘dead’ things, you see. (more…)
Making Your Customers Buy From You Without BEGGING
Monday, March 3rd, 2008Admittedly, I’ve done a lot of begging in the past. Begging for business, then begging for payment, then begging for more time. But this is business and things can get even rougher when your business is online. Ecommerce is a huge and profitable business – but only if you know how to take advantage of human emotions. One of the things that successful online business owners take advantage of is impulse purchases. We have to know which hot keys to press in the potential buyer. There are no hard and fast rules to selling successfully online so I’m not going to take you for a walk around the park and say that you’re going to be a multi-millionaire within months without having to do anything. Starting an online business if really hard work and it takes a lot of time for your online business to become an established one.
Make suggestions to the customer
This is an extremely powerful marketing tool for you as a small internet business owner and I am telling you that all those huge International websites have been using it for ages! And you can capitalize on the consumer’s weakness to make the money you deserve. If the customer was looking at a pair of pants and have purchased it, why not make a suggestion to them and say something along the lines of , “Hey, saw that you bought this really cool zebra print pants. I think you’ll really fall in love with this zebra-print purse as well”. (more…)
Article Marketing Secrets - How To Write An Ebook Every Single Week With Your Articles?
Thursday, February 28th, 2008By Franck Silvestre
If you wrote and submitted more than ten articles, then you have what it takes to write a short ebook on your topic and offer it to your list. All you need to do is to download the free open office suite and write in their word processor tool called writer.
With open office, you can create your own pdf for free.
Then, you need to quickly create an outline for your articles and this shouldn’t take you more than thirty minutes. It’s good to work with a timer to boost your productivity and avoid procrastination.
Here is how to do it step by step. Do not over complicate the process. (more…)