SEO Hosting Blog

Almost once week I receive an email from a writer explaining that they can provide excellent content that will allow me to rank well in search engines. I am always open minded to evaluating what can be produce, so when I receive email from a writers trying to pitch their service, I typically respond back asking to have a 75 to 100 word example of their work sent to me.

Recently I was contacted by a writer and I asked the writer to provide me with a sample based around the keyword phrase “Cheap Bottled Water.” When I received the email back, my observations motivated me to write this post. Here is a copy of the content that was provided to me.

Cheap Bottled Water

Most people have turned to bottled water as an alternative to tap water since they think it is safer. Cheap bottled water has become a popular item in many people’s shopping carts. However, make sure that the cheap bottled water is up to the set standards before consuming it. There is cheap bottled water from various stores at comparable prices. Remember cheap bottled water may not be ultimately healthy compared to tap water.

Most people think that writing for search engines is nothing more then packing keywords into the writing. In the case of the writer who provided me with this sample above, he felt like he had to use the phrase, “cheap bottled water” constantly, and in fact, he did so almost in every sentence.

Search engines don’t like unnatural writing. The content provided to me was very unnatural. It was clearly and obviously written in a way to trick search engines. There was no pure and inner quality within the work. It was totally superficial and it will not do anything for the end user. In other words, and to put it bluntly, the content was garbage.

So the lesson to learn is when writing content for the purpose of ranking in search engines, there’s more involved than just stuffing keywords. In fact, stuffing keywords isn’t good at all. My advice to you if you are trying to write content for search engines, simply write about the topic at hand in a natural way. Write your copy in a way that is understandable to others, as if you were writing a letter to a friend.

Allow search engines to index the content, and then take some time to study results. Observe and make notes of the different keywords you’re ranking for. Also observe whether you’re ranking for the keywords you intended for. If results are less than what you desire, consider making some changes by editing or re-wording your content and possibly adding more rich content to the page.

Google published a post on the Webmaster Central blog today offering some tips on how to recognize and avoid duplicate content on your website. I wanted to offer some specific tips on how to recognize and remove duplicate content on your self-hosted WordPress blog and decided to create a video tutorial.

This video doesn’t cover all of the bases; however, it will help quite a bit towards the prevention as well as the removal of duplicate content from your blog. Keep in mind, there is a fear about duplicate content and often people say that having duplicate content on your blog is bad. I can’t say that it’s a good thing, but I don’t think it’s something that should be considered as being bad. The reason for that is simple. Google understands that many bloggers aren’t very computer savvy. Instead, they are people who simply enjoy writing about their day, or telling the world about their opinions and views, etc. In other words, most bloggers aren’t programmers, nor are they SEO experts.

That said, if duplicate content was really a BAD thing, then it’s very likely that Google would have display duplicate content in the results. Knowing this, I think Google does a really good job at automatically determining source content. And what I mean by that is this. With a WordPress blog, a copy of your post content is found in multiple sections Typically, a copy of a post can be found on the homepage, category page, tag page, and in yearly/monthly/weekly/daily archives; however, source url for a blog is the individual post page.

Overall, Google understands the linking structure of WordPress and other blog platforms and for the most part gets things right. However, there’s many situations when that doesn’t happen. And with that, there’s ways that you can totally control and prevent Google from indexing multiple copies of your blog posts. Take a look at this video to learn how you can prevent and remove duplicate content from getting indexed on your WordPress blog.

The first step is to recognize if your WordPress blog has duplicate content indexed in Google. You can do this by doing a site:query search as shown in these example image below:

The above screen shot illustrates this search: [site:garryconn.com "On SeoHosting.com I wrote an article offering"] or as shown below in this screen shot:

You’ll see that two listings appear in the above example. Google has a reference to my home page and the blog post page. Technically, this is duplicate content. However, this is what I call controllable duplicate content. In other words, even though Google has a record of the same content appearing on the home page as well as the post page, it’s a matter of time before the content will be bumped off the homepage due to the age of the page.

The problem that you may run into is when multiple sections of your blog are referenced to having the same article content such as the category section, archive section, and tag sections. Commonly people think that this is bad and that Google will crack a whip and ban your blog because of this, but really the only concern is that you’re allowing Google to make the decision on determining which version of your content is the source copy.

The easiest solution is to install two WordPress plugins. The first one is called XML-Sitemaps. The second plugin is called the All-In-One SEO Pack. In the video above, I quickly show you how to set these plugins up; however, you may have some questions regarding the configuration, so by all means ask questions if you have them. Drop a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out.

In the world of SEO, conversations always seem to focus on search engine rankings. I often hear SEO “experts” bragging about getting their clients top placement in Google, thus increasing traffic and exposure. While this sounds good on the surface, it ignores the only thing that truly matters: Are those high search engine rankings leading to more sales? Many times, the answer is “no.” Here are some common reasons why:

•    You’re stuffing keywords—Too much of what passes for SEO copywriting is nothing more than bland content stuffed with way too many keywords. Stuffing keywords might get you decent search engine placement, but it won’t convert search engine traffic into paying customers. Why won’t it? Because keyword-stuffed copy isn’t conversational, it’s difficult to read, and it just comes off as spammy. Include relevant keywords in your copy certainly, but do so in an unobtrusive manner.

•    You’re targeting the wrong keywords—Sure, you might have high search engine rankings, but what exactly are you ranking for? I’ve seen many cases of SEO companies (usually the ones that promise #1 rankings) ripping their clients off by targeting keywords that get basically no search volume. What’s the point of ranking for a keyword no one searches for?
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(image from DynamiX Web Design)

Although SEO may be on your mind all day, every day, for the average person, this acronym has no meaning. While the most common response you will receive when asking an average person if they have ever heard of SEO is a blank stare, in the event that they have heard of SEO before, they will probably say something along the lines of “oh yeah, that thing where you can put keywords in tags to get more Google traffic.”

It’s unfortunate that there is so much misunderstanding among the general public about SEO, but it should come as no surprise when you take into account the number of “SEO providers” who are still peddling some form of a SEO package that involves “search engine submissions” and “keyword meta tag optimization.”

Although I think it would be foolish to assume that people will stop using these worthless methods to sell their “services” to unknowing clients, I am glad to see that Google has finally put the nail in the coffin of the keywords meta tag. Yesterday, they made a post on Official Google Webmaster Central Blog titled “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.” Instead of beating around the bush, I was glad to see them come out with a post title that literally cannot be misinterpreted. Here are the key takeaways from this post:

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In this article we’re going to help answer the question: What is ALLINTITLE search. As you may know,  in my last article I explained about advanced and basic search operators in Google. I then explained how understanding these operators can help you have a better understanding of SEO. In this article we’re going to further this lesson by showing you some specific examples of search engine optimization and how these efforts are visible in the search results.

Most programs such as WordPress automatically generate dynamic HTML pages, so unfortunately, many bloggers don’t understand the elements that make up a web page. It’s very important for bloggers to know and understand HTML. If you don’t know HTML, don’t worry, it’s very simple to learn. But again, it is something that you should totally learn.

Doing so, quite honestly, will give you a huge boost towards understanding SEO. That said, one of the first elements we’ll look at is the HTML <title> tag. (more…)