SEO Tip number 1: Write Better

Okay, like what I said the last time, here we are again telling you what I know about SEO. Like the title indicates, to get ranked high in your favorite or any other search engine, you must learn how to write better. By better, this means writing something with quality and of value to your readers and visitors. Write with the intention that your readers will pick something up from your post after they’ve read it. Also, your writing frequency must not be so sporadic (like what I’m doing) leaving your readers clueless about when you’ll be posting next.


Write quality content

By writing articles that people will want to read, it’s easy to get inbound links from other people, especially bloggers like you, without actively asking them. It’s like flowers in the park, the more colorful and attractive it is, the more it steals the passerbies’ attention. By having other sites to refer you, the more your blog’s profile will be picked up and crawled by search engines. By writing quality content, the possibility of referral links from other blogs (especially high-profile blogs) and websites (what more if it’s the front page of well known social bookmarking sites such as Digg) is high.


Write niche-focused posts

Make it a habit to write tightly focused posts relevant to your blog’s theme or topic. Try to avoid posts that have a very wide coverage that it even goes beyond what your topic asks of you. Smaller more focused pieces will help search engines index your posts into a more specific keyword related to your blog. Also, the more streamlined your blog becomes at a particular niche the more search engines will find keywords in it which can help you get higher page rank on searches based on those keywords and the more search engines will find you as an authority on that same topic.


Write regularly

Don’t even consider writing something like 3 posts this day and then write again on the next month. Besides losing your loyal readers that way, it will also be bad for search engines’ indexing frequency on your blog. If you keep on doing that, instead of having them crawl your site every time you post something, they might index your new post on the following month. Of course it’s only in theory but it’s a possibility. After all, search engines work based on your blog’s update behavior. Without a fixed schedule on when you’ll be updating your content, the more unlikely and unexpected indexing patterns you’ll get from them.

The best way to avoid this is by writing at least three or four times a week; of course there will be some bloggers who’ll be disagreeing since they have their own share of successes in search ranking without doing the same. Okay, it might be true for them but I believe that it’s always best to play it safe.


Tagging and Pinging

Okay, it’s got nothing to do with writing better but what’s wrong with a hefty helping from a few tricks to help your hard-work get indexed faster. Tagging and pinging is a technique used by many marketers and SEO experts (black, blue, or white) to keep their content served fresh to many organic visitors (“organic” means those visits referred directly by search engines).

How is it done you may ask? It’s simple actually. First, after you’ve finished writing and proof-reading your post, place tag/tags beneath the post by means of Technorati. A tag is a keyword or anything significant which you think best describe, categorize, or represent your post. From what I remember back in 2006, people insert this code in their posts html before they publish it: <a href=“http://technorati.com/tag/tagname” rel=“tag”>tagname</a> (just replace the instances of “tagname” **without the quote** with your desired keyword). Today, I still see people use this; you can also see me using one under this post. Technoratti use it to categorize your post so when a person searches for a tag such as “love”, if your post is also tagged the same then you’ll end up in his search results. The built-in labeling or categorizing system which your blog platform provides is also used by Technorati to tag your post in case you’re not using their tag code.

Okay, enough of that. After you placed the technorati tag and published your post you can tag it further through the social book-marking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. You can use the same tags you used on technorati here. It’s best to keep your tags similar to your keyword or topic since search engines will also consider indexing your post through these tags.

After that, you’ll have to ping. Pinging is something like sending a message to the search engines and blog searches that your blog has updated already and they are free to crawl and index it. Blogspot (Blogger) blogs ping Weblog.com and Google when they publish. Wordpress has plugins to ping also. Feedburner also offers a service which lets you ping search engines and blog searches. If you’re still not satisfied, go to http://pingomatic.com.

How does these all work? Basically, it’s spreading your message in the right places that your blog is already serving new content. The tags serve as links that will point back to your blog, a sort of technique to give the search engines a hint where they should be crawling since your trails are scattered in all directions. The pinging on the other hand tells the search engines that you have a fresh content and they must index it. So tagging + pinging equals an opportunity to get noticed and ranked by search engines.


Before I go finish this post, be advised that tagging and pinging, if abused, may lead to disastrous and dire consequences. Your rankings will drop, search engines will stop indexing you, etc. all because they will consider you as spam because you’re showing irregular behavior characterized by a spam site. Don’t overdo the tagging such as signing in using different accounts in Digg or other social bookmarking sites to Digg and tag your site just to get high traffic and higher page rank. It’s always best that your traffic and search engine ranking boosted because you deserved it not because you forced it.


technorati tags: SEO tips, better writing

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