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Bad Idea: Companies Quit Blogging to Go With Facebook

April 23, 2012 By

The number of companies that maintain blogs dropped by nearly 25% from 2010 to 2011.

That’s not a very smart move.

But it’s a growing trend. According to an article in USA Today, more companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead, the percentage of companies on Inc. magazine’s fastest growing 500 dropped from 50% in 2010 to 37% in 2011. And only 23% of Fortune 500 companies had a blog in 2011.

Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, the UMass Dartmouth professor who wrote the report, and world-class social media academic, told USA Today that blogging may not be the panacea that businesses thought it would be.

“Blogging requires more investment. You need content regularly. And you need to think about the risk of blogging, accepting comments, liability issues, defamation,” she said.

The problem is, the companies are taking their energy and efforts to Facebook instead. That’s not a dumb strategy. After all, at 800 million+ users, you have to fish where the fish are. And there’s a whole lot of fish on Facebook. [Read more...]

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    Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2012  •  Headline : Bad Idea: Companies Quit Blogging to Go With Facebook  •  Keywords : business blogging, corporate blogging, social media marketing, Facebook,  • 
    Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Corporate Blogging, Facebook, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Tools Tagged With: , , ,

    5 Changes to Make to Your Blog After Google Panda 3.3

    March 9, 2012 By

    Google Panda 3.3 has caught some people off-guard and made a lot of SEO professionals freak out. After perusing SEOMoz’s discussions on the matter — these are the guys who do SEO for a living — it seems no one really knows what Panda 3.3 has done to their sites. I just know a lot of people aren’t happy about it.

    There was one particular change, out of 40, that has everyone freaked out: “Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.”

    Now, no one knows for sure what it means, but chances are, if you have been relying on a backlinking strategy to increase your search engine ranking, or you’re painfully agonizing over your anchor text’s keywords, that may become a problem for you in a few days or weeks. We’ll have to see.

    In Wednesday’s post, I discussed four changes Panda 3.3 is bringing to bloggers.

    • Improvements to freshness: Google can put fresh content in their results more quickly. Newer posts, articles, and pages are found more easily. This means the quicker you are in hopping on a trending topic, the more likely you are to win search.
    • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: They can see when a new topic is spiking in popularity, and makes it easier to identify in realtime. If you search for breaking news, you’ll be able to find it sooner, and start writing about it.
    • Improved local results: They can more easily detect whether search queries and the results are local to you. If you search for “Topeka plumber,” and you’re sitting in Topeka, they’ll make sure you see those results first.
    • Link evaluation: This is the big one that’s freaking SEOs out.

    Based on these four important changes, what kinds of changes can/should you make to your blog to take advantage of the Google Panda 3.3 update, as well as past updates over the last 12 months? These are five long-term changes you need to start making right now, and make as a part of your regular blogging habit.

    1. Focus on local content whenever possible.

    If you own a local business, or you’re a local businessperson, you need to write about your business in your city whenever possible. If you’re a real estate agent, write posts about real estate in your city. “How to Stage Your Minneapolis Home Before a Showing,” “Five Things To Fix Before Your Next Minneapolis Home Inspection.” Be sure to use the name of the city in the body copy too.

    Learn the html schema code for your particular data types, and tag the appropriate content. (More on schemas in a minute).

    2. Use the rel=author tag in your Author bio, point it at your Google+ profile.

    First, make sure you have a Google+ profile. (There’s plenty of stuff out there about why you should be using it, so I won’t go into that here. Just know that it’s especially important to SEO now.)

    Next, make sure that every blog post you write, whether it’s your own or a guest post, links back to the Google+ profile, and uses the “rel=author” tag. Here’s an example:

    <a href=”http://bit.ly/xyLk6s” rel=”author”>Erik Deckers</a>

    Hint: By shortening your Google+ profile link with Bitly, it gives you another analytics measurement point. If you really want to get creative, use campaign codes with each article you publish or guest publish, and you can see what kind of click-through traffic you’re getting from a post to your profile.

    3. Use schemas whenever possible.

    Schemas are a new web classification system created by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Among other things, this is going to help with local search, as well as personal branding, because you can add your city and your name to your blog posts. This will help Google and the other search engines identify you and your town. You’re going to get a boost in local results and a boost on searches for your name.

    There are a few hundred schema types, and you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to learn and use them all. In the meantime, there are plugins to use, and you can also identify a few useful schema tags for yourself to use on a regular basis.

    For example, if you’re using the PostalAddress schema, to tell Google “this is my local address,” you would write:

    <span itemprop=”streetAddress”>5348 Tacoma Ave.</span>
    <span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Indianapolis</span>,
    <span itemprop=”addressRegion”>IN</span>
    <span itemprop=”postalCode”>46220</span>

    We’re starting to use schemas here at Pro Blog Service, but we’re still learning the best ways to use it, and are limiting ourselves mostly to the SchemaFeed plugin for WordPress. Suffice to say, schema is a giant, complex system, and by using it only for blog posts, it’s like using a race car to drive down the block. Still, we’re just bloggers, so what do you want?

    We’ll have more about using schemas for blogs in a future post. For more information in the meantime, visit Schema.org.

    4. Fix your grammar and punctuation errors

    One of the changes that Panda has wrought, starting back when it was first introduced was, that it even started looking at grammar and punctuation errors. While Google has not said they are evaluating pages for grammar and punctuation quality, we have discussed in the past how they are looking at user-generated indicators — time on site, bounce rate, click-through rate — to determine the quality of a blog or website. If your page is filled with errors, and visitors don’t like reading what you wrote, they won’t stick around for very long, and Google will determine that your page must not be a good one.

    The same is true for the quality of your writing. If you’re a good writer, or even a fairly passable writer, you have nothing to worry about. If your writing has all the quality of a 10,000 word conspiracy theory manifesto that was written at 3 am in someone’s parents’ basement, then you’re going to have problems.

    5. Don’t worry so much about anchor text and backlinks

    Like I’ve said, no one is sure exactly what Google meant by “we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.” Some people think it means anchor text is no longer a factor, other people think it means they have devalued backlinks. Google already devalued backlinks when they first released Panda, but others have tested this and found that links still carry some weight.

    We do know that Google has been seriously knocking many of these link farms and poor quality sites that did nothing but create thousands upon thousands of backlinks. Any SEO strategies that were built on this tactic are now (or soon will be) on the scrap heap, completely useless.

    If you have been knocking yourself out trying to earn backlinks and you agonize over anchor text, you may want to pull back a little on it. Don’t give up on it yet, because until someone knows for sure which indicator has been shut off, it’s still a viable strategy. All we’re saying is don’t give yourself an aneurysm trying to figure out exactly the right keywords and placing all the right backlinks in all the right places.

    While these five changes are rather involved, they’re going to be important in the coming months as Google continues to force us to focus more on the quality of our writing and content, and less on the automated SEO strategies that many people have been employing as a way to game the system.

    If you’ve already been writing good stuff, and earning your links organically, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re good to go. Keep up the good work.

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      Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Four Changes to Make to Your Blog After Google Panda 3.3  •  Keywords : Google Panda, SEO, search engine optimization, blogging, schema,  • 
      Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Tools, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

      Four Important Changes Google Panda 3.3 is Bringing to Bloggers

      March 7, 2012 By

      Google Panda has been the bane or boon of every serious blogger and SEO professional, provided they can remember the difference between bane and boon (bane = bad; boon = good). While most regular bloggers and web people were unaffected, it was the power SEO users (and spammers) who were greatly affected by the changes. Many of the professionals saw their analytics and search engine rankings plummet after Panda was introduced.

      Several days ago, Google’s newest algorithm update, 3.3 (codename: goddammit so much!), has given us 40 new changes for the month, ranging from improved local search results to improving SafeSearch results to tweaking the Turkish weather results.A panda bear

      Some of the major developments that affect us as bloggers — Turkish weather results notwithstanding — are:

      • Improvements to freshness: We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
      • Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
      • Improved local results: We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
      • Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

      (Note: these are just four of the 40. I borrowed their descriptions, and you will have to look through the entire list to find them. The one on Link Evaluation is near the bottom.)

      Some basic implications I can see right off the bat:

      • Freshness = regular updates. Once a week is barely going to be enough to move the needle. You may need to publish 2 – 3 times a week.
      • Spiking topics means if you can stay on top of, and write about, trends the day they happen, that would help you be a big part of the conversation. Read David Meerman Scott’s ebook Newsjacking (affiliate link) for more information on how to that.
      • If you have any kind of local focus, start writing about your city and naming it when you can. Taht tells Google your content is locally specific.
      • Don’t knock yourself out on linking strategies. It’s important, but it’s a whooooole lot less important than it was two years ago.

      This last improvement is what has a lot of people worried. We don’t know what exactly the link analysis was (Google never tells), whether it affects backlinks by shutting them down completely, turns of title tags within links, or whether they’re going to send a flaming bag of dog poo to your house if your anchor text and <H1> title tag don’t match. But you can be sure that a lot of SEO pros will be checking it out.

      Tomorrow we’ll discuss five ways these four changes will (or should) affect your blog.

      Photo credit: jlantzy (Flickr)

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        Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Four Important Changes Google Panda 3.3 is Bringing to Bloggers  •  Keywords : Google Panda, SEO, search engine optimization, blogging, backlinks  • 
        Filed Under: Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Tools, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

        How Google Caught a Plagiarizing Newspaper Editor and Ended His Career

        March 1, 2012 By

        I’m baffled at the fact that, when we live in a day and age where you can find anything — anything! — on Google, people will still try to plagiarize and steal your stuff.

        It just happened to me yesterday, when I was alerted by a fellow humor writer, Dave Fox, that 28-year newspaper veteran, Jon Flatland, had stolen at least two of my past humor columns, word for word, and passed them off as his own.Photo of a raccoon on a trash can

        To make matters worse, Flatland had done the same to Dave and four other writers, including a friend of mine.

        Flatland didn’t just paraphrase our ideas, or copy a joke or two. He copied-and-pasted entire columns, changed a couple of details, like replacing his wife’s name for my wife’s, or changing the name of a city where an event took place.

        Dave immediately got in touch with the publisher, as well as a state newspaper association who had given the writer an award for best humor last year (I’d love to know whose columns actually won the award for him).

        One of the writers also called Flatland up and confronted him. Flatland said he didn’t believe he had plagiarized, but that he had found the stories in an old folder, thought he had written them, and published them as his own.

        I’m not buying it. One of my stolen stories, ‘Twas the Month Before Christmas, was written in the exact same rhythm and rhyming pattern as the original Night Before Christmas. You don’t forget writing something like that, as much as I’ve tried.

        Apparently Flatland knew something was about to hit the fan, because he sent an email of resignation to the publisher — admitting to only one column, even though we have proof of eight — and was gone before the publisher ever got into work. The publisher has since removed all of Flatland’s columns, and has notified his state’s newspaper association about the incident, blackballing Flatland and preventing him from working in newspapers ever again.

        That all went down yesterday. I heard about it at 11:30 am, and by 11 pm, it was done. A career died in less than 12 hours.

        What’s sad about this is Flatland was a 28 year veteran of the industry. He’s someone who knew better. He was one of the people who was supposed to teach young writers all about journalistic ethics. Flatland has had a long and impressive career in the community newspaper business, and has been the president of at least two state newspaper associations. So his name has carried a little weight in his corner of the world.

        And he ended his career in disgrace, because he violated the one rule, the one foundational principle, the entire media business is built on: don’t steal someone else’s shit. In fact, Rule No. 9 on the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics is never plagiarize.

        I feel sympathy for Flatland. His career has ended in the most embarrassing manner possible. Former colleagues and association members will be talking about him, shocked that he would do the one thing that journalists are never, ever supposed to do.

        But what makes it so stupid and senseless is that WE CAN FIND THESE THINGS OUT! Holy sweet jebus, it’s so freaking easy to find anything on the Internet! There are entire companies that have built multi-billion dollar empires by making it possible to do exactly that.

        Want to see Portlandia’s “Put a Bird On It” video? Google it.

        Want the lyrics to Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida? Google it.

        Want to see if a phrase you used in a humor column in 2006 has been used anywhere else? Google. It.

        Enter a unique or uncommon phrase from one of your posts or columns, and put quotes around it. That tells Google to look for exactly that phrase, with all those words, in that particular order.

        If the phrase, along with most of your words other words, shows up without your name on it, it was stolen. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t.

        It truly is that easy. And why Flatland didn’t know that or couldn’t figure it out is probably the most staggeringly disappointing part of this whole mess. He didn’t think he would get caught. He didn’t think that people might/could/would look to see if any of their stuff was appearing anywhere that it shouldn’t be.

        And now, because Flatland didn’t know that one basic fact — that, and he’s a column-stealing thief who benefitted financially from my years of hard work, while I got nothing — he’s ended his career in the worst possible way, ensuring he’s never going to work in that industry again.

        If you get nothing else from this column, please burn these two lessons into your memory forever.

        First, don’t steal people’s work.

        Second, if you do steal, please know that there are giant f—ing search engines that will find you out, no matter what tiny part of the globe you’re in.

        Just write your own stuff, or don’t turn it in at all.

        Photo credit: Adam Thomas (Flickr)

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          Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : How Google Caught a Plagiarizing Newspaper Editor and Ended His Career  •  Keywords : plagiarism, newspapers, Google, journalism, traditional media  • 
          Filed Under: Blogging, Citizen Journalism, Newspapers, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Traditional Media, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

          Search and Social: A Partnership for the Ages

          October 19, 2011 By
          Robbie Williams

          Robbie Williams is an SEO Consultant at Slingshot, and wrote this guest post in exchange for a guest post I wrote for their website.

          Robbie Williams

          Robbie Williams. I love his version of 'Somewhere Beyond the Sea' from Finding Nemo

          What grabs a social media guru’s attention faster than mentioning the term “social media guru?”

          The answer: Providing data-driven ROI statistics for their industry and, better yet, doing it in conjunction with SEO.

          Worked, didn’t it?

          Now that I have your attention, I want you to dabble in my thoughts for a moment.

          I’ve often pondered how a social media practitioner would address the topic of “Search and Social” as they are the two dominating powers on the Internet. Now I know. They turn to the SEO professionals to address it.

          As we all know, the Google algo is one of mankind’s best kept secrets. So I’m not going to come out and tell you that I know anything in my industry to be a 100% fact — aside from what Google tells us directly (which often keeps me up at night). However, I can back up my opinions and observations with the experience of day-in, day-out SEO practice, where dealing with rankings for an array of keywords is my entire world.

          Within this digital domain, I’ve had first-hand experience with the algorithm and how it responds to certain human signals; e.g., social signals. However, (drumroll please….) social signals alone have yet to produce an identifiable, data-proven effect on rankings in the majority of SERPs. So yes, given the access to the data streams of Twitter and Facebook, there has been a trace amount of evidence where social media has had a noticeable effect on rankings in certain keyword search queries.

          Now, back to proving ROI for social media with search. We all know how powerful social media has become and it’s not unreasonable to think that Google doesn’t realize it too. As a matter of fact, it has attempted to gain access to the Twitter and Facebook “fire hoses” (the full feed of information behind their massive firewalls) but to no avail … yet. As soon as this happens, you better believe that social media is going to have a significant effect on rankings, and it’s only a matter of time.

          ***Disclaimer: As an SEO professional, I am required to mention the discussion Correlation vs. Causation when discussing this topic. So here it goes: a page/brand/keyword will typically have social cues surrounding it because it’s a good page/brand/keyword and it will rank accordingly because of this. The reverse is not true, a page/brand/keyword will not rank only because it has social. In the world of SEO, it’s never that simple.***

          Imagine a graph illustrating the respective positions of traffic-driving, conversion-producing keywords in individual SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Now overlay it with another graph of social media activity that’s been strategically produced around the same SEO keywords.

          What do you see? Positive correlation (not necessarily causation). Additionally, imagine a Google Analytics graph showing increased conversion, increased on-page time and click-through rates, as well as a decrease in user bounce rates for those same keywords and their associated pages, overlaid on top. (I’m drooling at the thought of this, I don’t know about you…)

          Boom. professional search engine optimization company. Aside from work, he loves being outside; running, mountain biking, adventure racing, etc. Robbie’s current motto: If you keep life full, you never have time to worry about tomorrow.

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            Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2011  •  Headline : Search and Social: A Partnership for the Ages  •  Keywords : social media, search engine optimization, websites, SEOmoz, Slingshot SEO, Robbie Williams  • 
            Filed Under: Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Social Media Analytics, Social Media Experts, Social Media Marketing, Social Networks Tagged With: , , , , , ,

            How to Help Google Identify Authors of Content on Your Site

            September 19, 2011 By

            Google is changing the web again. This time, they are asking webmasters to begin identifying authors in a way that allows:

            • Google to track who is the author of content
            • Google to track about the author pages (called profiles by Google).
            • Authors to authenticate their profiles (author pages) on multiple websites.

            If you are an author, this is fantastic… and if you are a content publisher, it’s even better because Google is now starting to look at who writes, not just the cold math behind an article.

            To acknowledge an author, you use the HTML5  rel attribute in a link pointing to an “about the author” page on the same website like this:

            Article written by <a rel="author" href="../authors/mikeseidle">Mike Seidle</a>

            Because most authors have profile (about the author pages) on multiple websites, Google has a way to link them together. The first step is to put a link to the author’s website on the profile with a rel=”me” attribute like this:

            <a rel="me" href="http://mikeseidle.com/about">Read more about Mike</a>

            On the page mikeseidle.com/about, we have to insert a recriprocal link back to the above about the author page (profile)  with the rel=”me” attribute:

            <a rel="me" href="http://problogservice.com/authors/mikeseidle">How To Help Google Identify Authors of Content on Your Site</a>

            Before all you search engine optimization experts get your hair on fire about reciprocal links causing bad things to happen to your page rank, here’s the link on Google’s Webmaster Tools that shows that it is required by Google to do a reciprocal link.

            As of the time this post was written, most blogging software does not support the new author tagging features yet, so you’ll either have to write a plug in or embed your own links. I would expect to see support for author and profile tagging to be included in future versions of WordPress soon.

             

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              Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2011  •  Headline : How to Help Google Identify Authors of Content on Your Site  •  Keywords : blogging, blog writing, Google, author  • 
              Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization Tagged With: , , ,

              Copywriters, Use the Words Other People Use, Not the Ones You Use

              September 12, 2011 By

              Do you know what audio theater is? Does it make you think of something to do with speakers at a movie theater? Or maybe it’s a subset of home theater equipment. Or maybe you’re supposed to go to a play and shut your eyes.

              It’s none of those. It’s what we used to call radio theater. (Or radio theatre, if you’re Canadian or British. Or a snooty purist.)

              Decoder Ring Theatre cast

              Cast of Decoder Ring Theatre, an audio theatre company in Toronto.

              You know what radio theater is, right? Remember when Ralph and Randy sat in front of the big giant radio and listened to Little Orphan Annie? We all know what that is, even the people who only hear about it from their grandparents.

              But the people who actually do radio theater want to call it “audio theater” instead. Why? Because people don’t listen to the plays on the radio anymore, they listen to them on CD players, iPods, computers, car stereos, etc.

              So in order to be more accurate, they changed the name of the art form to more accurately reflect what it is that they produce.

              And lost out on a large portion of their potential audience.

              There are still plenty of people who used to listen to radio theater with money to spend, but they don’t spend it on the entertainment form from their childhoods because they don’t know it’s called “audio theater” now. Companies like Decoder Ring Theatre have worked hard to overcome this hurdle by being one of the most progressive and dedicated audio theatre troupes I’ve ever seen, embracing social media and Internet marketing, as well as podcasting. (Full disclosure: Decoder Ring Theatre produced and aired six of my Slick Bracer radio plays this summer.) But a lot of other companies have only seen a fraction of this success, and I believe it’s primarily because of this language disconnect between what is “correct” and what is “best.”

              How many times have companies harmed their marketing efforts by insisting people call a term by what they want to call it, not what the customers want to call it? How many times have government agencies lost the respect and credibility they worked for, because someone who knows nothing about public communication insisted the agency use the accurate term, not the best term? How many news programs get laughed at because they try to change the commonly accepted term to something that better suits their political biases?

              • An agricultural equipment company I know calls its products by the term they want to use, rather than the more common term their customer uses. This is evidenced by the 1,200 Google searches for their term, and the 20,000+ searches for the common term. While they may rank well for their chosen term, they don’t rank at all for the term their potential customers are using nearly 8 times more often.
              • When the H1N1 epidemic flu first started, the public was calling it “swine flu,” but the media managed — with a lot of work — to get people to start calling it H1N1, because it was harming the pork industry. But the government agencies wanted to call it the human flu, and flu pandemic. Regardless of what they wanted to call it, the media ignored them
              • Fox News’ insistence on calling suicide bombers “homicide bombers,” as per the Bush White House, made them a laughing stalk among journalists and news watchers.

              If you’re not sure whether people are using your terms or theirs, go to Google’s Keyword Tool and put in your term and any industry terms you can think of. See which terms have the most global (worldwide) searches and the most local (US) searches. The ones that win are the ones most people are using, and the ones you should be focusing on.

              Update: Deleted “Audio” from “Decoder Ring Audio Theatre” above, because despite being a loyal listener for 5 years, and now a contributor, I still can’t get their name right.

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                Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2011  •  Headline : Copywriters, Use the Words Other People Use, Not the Ones You Use  •  Keywords : writing, copywriting, language, search marketing, internet marketing  • 
                Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Communication, Corporate Blogging, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Analytics, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

                Three Reasons Why Your Blog Needs to be Well-Written

                August 17, 2011 By

                If you can’t write, you won’t show up on the search engines.

                That’s because Google is now looking at user experience as its primary ranking factor. That means, they check whether people are sticking around on your site, reading the great content you provided.

                They also know when people leave your site because it sucked.

                According to a Google employee, Wysz, on the Google Forums, Google uses a number of different signals to find low quality sites, including shallow or poorly written content. Here’s what Wysz says:

                Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful. In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole.

                This can be a bit of an ego blow if you actually create your own content. I mean, it’s one thing to try to trick Google with a bunch of crap copy that got puked out by an article spinner. You shrug your shoulders, say “it’s a fair cop,” and then figure out another way to peddle your penis pills.

                But if you’re not trying to trick Google, it has to be the worst feeling to find that Google dinged you because your writing was shallow and poorly written.

                While Google isn’t getting into the literary criticism business or making moral judgments about you as a person (that’s what Facebook is for), Google wants you to write good copy that uses proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Here’s why:

                • People spell and use grammar correctly when they search. That’s because Google will correct their spelling in a search. “Did you mean _____” appears at the top of the search engine if you typed in a word incorrectly. Or if they think you’re really stupid, they just ignore your word choice and do a search for the correct spelling, giving you the option to click the less desirable, incorrect choice.
                • People share awesome. Scott Stratten said this once, and I’m stealing it. If you write some great stuff, people are more likely to share it. That means people are more likely to link to it in their own blogs, which builds backlinks, which helps your Google juice. But, more importantly, Google is starting to tailor your search results, not with the “official objective” results, but with the results you are more likely to be interested in. For example, you Google “Moleskine notebooks.” Instead of getting the regular search results for Moleskines, you’ll see a blog post I wrote about the little black notebook in your results. You’ll either see it because we’re connected socially, or because someone in your circle shared it, tweeted it, or even left a comment.
                • Google is getting better at semantic search. That means, Google knows what you meant, rather than what you said (see #1). Combine that with the fact that programs like Microsoft Word can check your grammar, and I can see a day where Google uses a grammar checker in their indexing to weed out not only the shallow, poorly-written copy used by spammers, but start dinging the poorly-written copy from people who just can’t write to begin with. After all, Google is about providing the best user experience. So that may start including ranking “good” writing higher and “bad” writing lower. While I can’t see them using an Amazon.com review system to rank sites, I can see them pushing all the lunatic ramblings, misspellings, and drunken love poetry off the top pages.

                If you’re a writer, this is one more reason to work on improving your craft. If you’re not a writer, this is a great reason why you need to improve. And if you’re a business trying to rank high in the search engines, this means you need to consider hiring a ghost blogger or other professional copywriter who actually knows what they’re doing.

                Photo credit: Leo Reynolds (Flickr)

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                  Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Why Your Blog Needs to be Well-Written  •  Keywords : writing, blogging, business blogging, ghost blogging  • 
                  Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Corporate Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

                  Google Wants You to be a Better Blog Writer

                  August 9, 2011 By

                  The days of schlocky web copy and $1/post off-shore blog writing are over.

                  Thanks to Google’s new Panda update, your writing can no longer suck. You can’t just get by on 8th grade writing skills, or by hiring an off-shore blog writer for a buck a post anymore.

                  The new Google Panda update stresses usability and the user experience over whether you have the right keywords in your title and body copy, and over backlinks. Oh sure, they’re still counted, but Google is not putting as much emphasis on those as they once were, thanks to the recent JC Penney backlinking scandal.Photo of a panda

                  As a result of this, and other Google gaming-techniques that were being abused, Google said, “You know what? That’s it. No more trying to trick us. Now we’re going to start looking at what your users are doing.” (Watch the Rand Fishkin video at the bottom of this post for a much better explanation than I just gave.)

                  Now, Google is starting to pay attention to the user experience: Do they visit more than one page, which means they like what they see? Are they on for a minute or more, or do they bounce out after 10 seconds, which means you didn’t captivate them? Did they even visit your page when you were at the top of the search engine (i.e. did your page even look interesting)?

                  The short of it is, if your site sucks, people won’t visit. If they visit, they won’t stick around. And they certainly won’t subject themselves to more than one page of it.

                  So how do you get them to stick around? You’d better have great content. Not just good enough, not barely readable. Not “meh.” It needs to be awesome.
                   
                   
                   

                  Wistia

                  Photo credit: peromhc (Flickr)

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                    Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Google Wants You to be a Better Blog Writer  •  Keywords : blogging, Google Panda, writing, copywriting, blog writing, copywriter  • 
                    Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Corporate Blogging, Ghost Writing, Search Engine Optimization, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

                    Social Networking to Play a Bigger Role in Google Search

                    July 9, 2011 By

                    I recently heard on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast that Google is starting to pay a lot more attention to who you’re connected to socially, and letting that influence your search results.

                    For example, if you’re connected to me, and I write frequently about ghost blogging, and you do a search for “ghost blogging” on Google, results to my page will show up higher on your search results than if you’re not connected to me.

                    As a marketer, if you want to promote your particular product or service, it makes sense to start connecting to people who are likely to look for that product/service on Google. Not so you can spam them — we are not, nor will we ever, advocate spamming — but so you can continue to provide them with valuable information. Then, if and when they ever have a question about your particular niche, your solution will be more likely to show up on their search results page.

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                      Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Social Networking to Play a Bigger Role in Google Search - Professional Blog Service  •  Keywords : blogging, Google, Marketing Over Coffee, search engine optimization, SEO, social media  • 
                      Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,
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