A Good Time is Blog Time

So this is the dilemma, we all love to see comments on our blog posts. If you are saying you don’t then I don’t think you are being completely honest either with us or yourself. The reason is pretty obvious, blog comments mean attention, interaction with an audience and evidence that you are getting traffic to your blog.

The temptation then is to accept any old rubbish that is placed in your blog comments box and leave it in place. Looks good if every post you have published is showing multiples of comments; or does it? There are problems with allowing comment spam to sit on your blog posts.

The first obvious one is that they drown out the real comments by real people that are actually trying to interact with you and establish a sensible dialogue on the subject being discussed. Anyone visiting your blog and finding the comments filled up with comment spam are highly likely to assess you as someone who doesn’t care about their visitors or have a real interest in discussing the topic content. End result of that type of conclusion is that they leave your site never to return and all the hard work you put in getting them to read your post in the first place is completely wasted.

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Sorry about that, but I needed to get your attention and being downright rude is just one of the ways of doing it. Of course there are other much nicer ways but if you are reading this then it did the trick this time and makes my point. I once saw a sign outside a public house in the UK that said ‘filthy ale and awful food’ everyone welcome. You just know that at some point you are going to have to go in and find out what its all about and whether the sign is true or just a very clever marketing ploy.

Well blogging is about clever marketing as well, without marketing your blog in a way that people actually take the time to stop and read it you are never going to convey to them that you actually know what you are talking about or give them the chance to find out that you are actually producing some great content worth reading i.e. you know how to write a good blog post.

Assuming that your main objective is to gain readership for your blog then writing a good blog post is all about 3 things: (more…)

Link exchanging certainly can be a bit of a nightmare, I found this Link Exchange Scams explained site when someone tried to scam me with a fake PR. I couldn’t understand how someone was showing a PR6 when they were not even Google indexed. Hence my search and my arrival on this site. Clearly I am into SEO but had not stumbled across this scam before.

Basically what happens is that you get invited to link to a site in return for a link back to your site from a very high PR site. Looks great PR is showing to be genuine and you may be tempted to skip the usual checks. But as the site I found explains, the page rank has been hijacked from another source, and there are various means for doing this.

Bottom line is the scammer gets a good link back to them from a site with genuine page rank and you get a link back from a fake site that is likely to have its page rank disappear overnight, and is not Google indexed anyway. So anyone looking for that page in Google will not find it, and effectively the link is completely worthless.

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There are many ways to use Google search to find information, but a dedicated blogger needs to know which ones are likely to help him get the information he needs.

For basic tips and tricks using Google the Google’s tips and tricks pdf is as good a place to start as anywhere. But I was a bit surprised to find how little it actually tells you, OK it shows you how to find exact phrases, how to screen out unwanted results using a – symbol and a few other helpful modifiers. But if you are blogging and looking for ways to suss out the competition and find long tailed keywords that are highly audience targeted, then it doesn’t really help. So if you want some Google search tips and tricks that might help, then read on.

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The Google Traffic Estimator keyword tool is a tool that Google uses to display how many search enquiries have been made on a month by month basis for a particular search term (keyword or keyword phrase). Strictly speaking it is not a traffic estimator as it actually presents data collected from the previous month based on actual enquiries put into the search engine. It is fairly clear though that by using actual data collected on a month by month basis you can in fact make reasonable assumptions as to the popularity of particular keyword or keyword phrase and then of course use that data as a traffic estimator.

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Have you noticed when you do a search on Google, or any of the other search engines, how often the first few results are a mix of  images, Google maps and of course the usual text based links that we normally expect to see. The images and Google maps are also a completely different set of results to the text based ads that they get listed with i.e. they are not duplicate results for the text links.

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As I have been discussing this subject recently I thought it would be a good idea to publish this video which has been produced by Google who have also been discussing the same subject and advising on what to do about inadvertent production of duplicate content.

The video also covers the implementation of the new rel=canonical tag which can be used to identify content that has been duplicated deliberately on a single domain.

Most importantly though, it does confirm that the duplicate content penalty is a MYTH

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The answer to the above question is relatively straight forward and is a little like cholesterol. There is good and bad duplicate content.

So if you are going to be penalised or not depends on the type of duplicate content you are involved with and is why you need to understand which is which.

Bad Duplicate Content

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An effective article marketing strategy is widely considered to be one of the best methods for creating multiple back links to your blogs or websites, improving the page rank of your sites and subsequently attracting visitors to your sites.

To submit your article to multiple article directories however can be a very time consuming process particularly if you are trying to do everything manually i.e. finding article directories, registering with those directories, copying and pasting your article information to the individual directories and trying to keep a record of what and where you have posted your articles so that you do not accidentally get labeled as a spam submitter by inadvertently re-submitting to the same sites with the same information.

So what is the answer to these problems, in a word it is finding an using a reliable article submission software program that addresses these issues and provides you with the ability to quickly and effectively post your articles to multiple directories, in other words a reliable directory submission software package.

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You may have noticed that I have been a little quiet on the posting front for the last week or so, this is because I am in the process of evaluating a new article marketing strategy and have been tied up in posting all the articles I have written to lots of different article directories.

This process is likely to continue for a while longer yet because not only do I intend posting all of my current articles, I am planning on writing a bunch more and getting them posted as well. You could be asking at this point what is the big deal with article marketing and the answer is pretty simple really:

• You write a load of articles on the topics you have published on the Internet
• At the end of the article is a resource section where you can put 2 sometimes 3 links to a URL of your choice
• You post the articles with as many article directories as you can
• Webmasters and bloggers go to the directories for content for their websites and blogs
• If they like your articles they post them on their websites or blogs including the links to your URLs
• Gradually your URLs gain more an more back links from all the posts that are made
• Backlinks = popularity = page ranking = traffic = sales and or readers

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