Tag: search engines

Premium Series: Scribe SEO Plugin Review

In my Premium Series I’m taking a look at Premium WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that I personally use, either for myself and for others. All opinions are my own and not influenced by affiliate commissions or anyone connected to the product.

WordPress software is already known for being highly search-friendly. The templates are structured in a manner that’s easy for spiders like the Googlebot to read, and it’s super easy for even non-techie users to integrate some basic keyword optimization using the tags, categories, and permalink management features. Most bloggers looking to get paid for their efforts prefer WP for these reasons.

Continue reading Premium Series: Scribe SEO Plugin Review

The Top Five Reasons Why Blogging Increases Your Business

In today’s internet-led world, a blog can increase interest in your business on a daily basis. Forget about advertising or marketing (well, not entirely!), a well-presented and well-written blog can be your ultimate advertising department, without costing the earth.

Reducing the costs of advertising

Whichever way you look at it, creating and maintaining a blog is cheaper than splashing out on a costly advertising campaign. However you choose to go about starting, whoever you decide to use, there is no other package that is as cost effective as using a blogging service.

Enhancing communication capabilities

Probably one of the greatest advantages is its ability to reach thousands of people all over the world instantaneously. There is no other media currently in circulation, which can be as effectively accessed as a well built and well maintained blog. Newspapers and magazines are all bound by geographical locations, where as blog has the potential to reach anyone, anywhere in the world. By using effective tags and keywords, within seconds, you could be placed at the top of search engines across the globe.

A website can offer the same coverage, but it tends to lack the interaction that a blog can offer. A blog offers your client an informal, but direct, place to chat with your company in a real-time situation. You are also able to keep your clients updated with the latest company information and products, without making them feel that they are under any hard sale pressure to buy – an important factor that puts many people off approaching companies.

Improving research abilities

With a blog, potential clients are able to research your company and see the latest products you have to offer on a daily basis. There is nothing worse than looking for something and having to trawl through mounds of useless information. It is able to present information in an ordered and concise way, a valuable tool for any company.

Generating valuable and targeted feedback

Are you worried that you are not stocking the right merchandise or that you need to improve certain areas of your business? If you are, just ask! Within the blogging culture, feedback plays a huge role and this can be used to your company’s advantage. Whenever something comes up that you are unsure how to handle, turn to your blogs visitors. It is the one place where you will get an honest and swift response.

Enhancing your online reputation

Many companies have a big corporate personality that surrounds them. By creating a blog, this can be translated into a one-to-one, hands-on image. If you let your clients see how you regard their opinion, you will certainly start seeing the benefits. There is nothing that can hook a customer quicker than openness and honesty.

Blogging for your business is simple and cost efficient. It has the potential to build the reputation of your company on a global scale and is a fun and easy way to promote openness and trust between you and your customers.

What more could you want from an advertising department?

What are the other advantages of blogging for business? Let me know if you have any!

Blogging To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

Understanding and factoring in Search Engine Optimization when you’re posting articles can be a bit daunting. However, there are organizations out there that provide data to help which can help your search engine ranking. Every two years, SEOmoz survey 100 of the industry’s top SEO minds.

In 2009, 72 SEOs participated in the data gathering process, answering survey questions that consumed hours of time. The resulting document was a useful aggregation of data about how search engines rank documents.

This data is useful when we are trying to work out how to optimize our sites to improve our search engine ranking. It looks at the factors used in search ranking by major search engines, and outlines what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.

It’s worth looking at the data to apply it to your own blog, bearing SEO in mind when you post:

Factors that support good search engine rankings:

1. Anchor Text with Keyword from External Links
2. External Link Popularity (Quantity & Quality of External Link)
3. Diversity of Linking Domains
4. Keyword in Title Tag
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains.

Once you understand the principles behind these positive factors, it’s easy enough to bear them in mind for search engine ranking when you post articles. Search engines respond well to well-chosen keywords, quality links to good sites, and a wide variety of diverse links.

Negative factors which lower your ranking:

1. Cloak with Malicious/Manipulative Intent
2. Link from link brokers/seller
3. Link from spam website
4. Cloaking by User Agent
5. Frequent Server Downtime & Site Inaccessibility.

These are pretty easy to understand – if you are using your site to spam, cloak malicious software or be badly behaved in any way, you’ll lose your credibility. Similarly, badly-built sites with broken links are going to be low-ranking.

Top 5 most contentious factors that put people off:

1. Cloaking by Cookie Detection
2. Cloaking by JavaScript/Rich Media Support Detection
3. Hiding Text with same/similar colored text/background
4. Cloaking by IP Address 15.3% moderate contention
5. Cloaking by User Agent 15.2% moderate contention.

If you don’t know what these are, then great! This report shows that there was very little change from the 2007 search ranking factors. The primary factors in SEO have not changed very much according to SEOmoz, despite the fact that search engines improve their features and technologies continuously.

Hopefully these search ranking factors will help search engine optimizers who are serious about managing positive changes in their sites. By sticking to the rules of good posting, using keywords and links effectively, and steering clear of spam or scams, you will be able to gradually climb up the ladder of the search engine page ranks and get to the top!

A high search engine ranking helps to bring your business to the attention of the people that matter – your existing and potential customers, and service users. SEO data provides us with the information we need to understand how search engine page rankings work, and what we need to do to enhance our own.
(source for data: www.seomoz.org)

Scribe SEO – 5 Ways To Improve ScribeSEO Plugin

First, Scribe SEO is a brilliant tool. It’s a premium (aka paid-for) WordPress plugin that will help with SEO for your blog posts. It attempts to make SEO copywriting much more simple than it is now, and while you still need to pay attention to creating good headlines and interesting content, it may help with the final optimization steps that you’ve been missing.

One of my clients called it “one of the best tools I’ve ever bought” and I wholeheartedly agree. It’s not often something as easy and useful as Scribe SEO comes along. If you haven’t checked it out yet, there is a free trial on the website. Like with anything great out there, I think it could be even better, so there are a few things I would do to improve it.

1) Have the Review window open in a new browser window/tab. The hover over window is no good to anyone, it opens up over the content you’re editing and areas that you need to alter, so you need to close it to alter then go back to it for the next section and so on – I end up opening the post in another window so I can edit it there without switching back and forth. At least give me the option.

Scribe SEO Review window

2) When it tells me I need my primary keyword near the start of the title, it should tell me what my primary keyword is and say “Move Primary Keyword Scribe SEO to the beginning of the Title”. Otherwise I have to look it up to see if it’s different to what I think it should be. Lazy of me I know, but it’d be a time-saver of at least 5 seconds.

3) The Tags page/tab of the Review window should allow me to edit tags right there with the list of suggested tags. Even an “Add all tags” button would be nice and handy.

4) The SEO Best Practices page is the same on every review. I know that’s not a criticism, it’s a comment, but it is. Why it bothers me I have no idea as it’s a gold mine of useful info, but perhaps it could be linked to and stored on the settings page or something. I won’t lose sleep if that one is never addressed though…

5) The Scribe Settings page tells me how many evaluations I have left as of today, but when do they expire? So having 20 evaluations left as of today is all very well and good, but will that need to last me 25 days or 5 days? [Side note: For those wondering if evaluations rollover to the next month, they don’t.]

Yes, some of them are picky and personal, but when a tool (and an SEO tool at that) is this great it’s the little things from using it that can make it that little bit greater.

You can watch my quick video of Scribe SEO here, or take a look at the Scribe website here.

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