Why Blog - Fresh, inspiring content

Blogs present a great way to keep your site fresh, informative and evolving as a resource. Also the interactive nature of blogs means that you can communicate with your constituency to share, gather and showcase expertise. Blogs can be enormously powerful pieces of Internet publishing - Just ask Robert Peston

Blogs, whether simple site blogging or blog outreach (the submission of blog content to third party sites), can play a critical role in any SEO strategy. Well conceived, well crafted blogs based around specific topics and delivered in natural tone with integrity can generate additional traffic, brand awareness, and especially new linking opportunities. Blog outreach when applied intelligently exchanges high quality content, perhaps an article or an exclusive audio stream for high value links. Website owners are always looking for high quality content. If you have it, flaunt it, share great content for links – it will help your optimisation no end.

At Top Page we fully appreciate the contribution of high quality, regularly written blogs as a component of SEO strategy and offer a range of strategic input, copy writing, technical development and blog submissions.

As SEO specialists we work to establish both relevance and ways by which the search engines are able to identify it. Relevance needs a contextual framework through informative, meaningful content. Content is THE critical component of the Internet and blogs serve to provide a great platform for engine searchable content.

Quality not quantity
Best keep them meaty too. Despite the rise and rise of micro blogging, largely in the form of Twitter, traditional blogs are still very worthwhile pursuing for their SEO benefits. Web guru Jakob Nielsen refers to in-depth content adding in-depth value, recommending fewer high quality articles over a higher quantity of poorly written blogs.

"A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours won’t write Shakespeare but create a thousand random, low quality posting that don't give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic, even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs." He says.

Though many blogs fall short of delivering the depth and expertise that is necessary to elevate their sites above the competition and many others fall in the ghastly vanity publishing black hole, carefully considered and crafted blogs, as well as articles, should be an integral part of an overall online marketing/SEO campaign. Blogs can play an important role in gaining trust, authority, high search engine placements and traffic largely through high quality inbound links - The SEO raison d’etre.

Scannable
Consumable - Make blogs concise and scannable, format using bullet points and lists offering useful tips and advice. Use Web 2.0 video, podcasts, streams and media as well if it makes sense.

Connection
From the most intimate to the most commercial, the important thing about blogs is connection; that it’s a forum for conversation through which community evolves. Bryan Appleyard writing in the Times refers to the intimacy/exposure nexus. ‘ The way to get your blog going is to use connectivity. Link to other blogs and place comments. They’ll come back to you. Once they do, a few will stay. You will acquire regulars. You’ll get to know them. If they stay away for a while, you’ll miss them. You’ll feel, if you’re a sucker like me, somehow responsible for and to them. This is weird, I know, but then good things start to happen.’

Blog Submission
Regularly and far afield should do the trick. Largely through RSS feed and blog submissions to directories.

Submitting blogs to many of the RSS & blog directories is much simpler than submitting standard sites as there are automatic systems in place that allow submissions of updated blog versions to directories.

Dedicated blog search directories including The Technorati Blog Directory (a U.S. based blog search engine is currently tracking over 112.8 million blog copywriters), Boing Boing, Answers, Digg and Feedburner plus the major search engines are great destinations. Technorati

It’s important that clients ‘get’ what is trying to be achieved – that a well written, regularly updated blog using a natural voice can offer a more ‘human’ type of writing and create a space where professional formalities are put to one side as a ‘human side’ is revealed. Blogs enable readers get to know you and your organization intimately, the closer you are able to be to your audience the better the experience for all. Engage your audience and interact. Blogging is a conversation, speak to your readers, always keep them in mind and at the centre of everything: the topics you cover, the way you write, what choose to include and what you omit.

Good blogs?
Here’s a couple of the best blogs as chosen by Bryan Appleyard;

bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology

At the BBC’s Dot Life, abundant intelligent comment replaces the prattle that makes most geek blogs unreadable. The British perspective is also refreshing in an American-dominated blogosphere.

popjustice.com

"You shouldn’t grow out of pop music the moment you hit puberty" and "You shouldn’t grow into pop music the moment you discover irony" are among the tenets of Popjustice. Whether wowed or withering, it is compulsive reading, and its accolade as the Smash Hits for the digital age is spot-on.

Two for the road;

Edpeto.com – guy living in Beijing. Has interesting things to say on life, music and yoof culture in China.

zmag.org/zspace/noamchomsky - thought provocation by the bucket load
SEO Copywriting By TOP PAGE

White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO

White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO
Search Engine Optimisation Techniques Explained

Some SEO companies are prepared to go as far as necessary in the pursuit of high search engine placements, others take a more long term ‘ethical’ approach to representing their web sites and their clients.

In our view the debate is very simple - Violate any of the search engine guidelines and you risk having the site removed from the index.

Discussing ‘shades of grey’ in the context of SEO is largely irrelevant as the guidelines and regulations are all clearly defined by the various search engines.

It’s White Hat or it’s not – simple as that.

At Top Page we understand clearly that if a website is optimised ethically for human consumption and intelligently it will likely gain high rankings. Good for business.

If your web presence is designed to trick search engines into believing it has more search value than it really does it may also get high rankings – the likelihood though is that it will be found out and it will be punished. That’s bad for business

Here are some black hat techniques to be avoided:

• Buying Links – The engines detest bought links. Bought lilnks whilst trying to infer popularity only really establish the fact that the site owner has gone out and bought a load of links. Paid-for link add no extra value to visitors.

• Cyber Hoaxing – An affiliate program technique. A fake news site hosting a hard to prove or disprove sensational fake new story submitted across a range of social media sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, etc. The basic idea is to generate a buzz and get links to your fake news story even capitalizing on the outrage of the setup. Most media apply the concept to a minor degree

• Keyword Stuffing/Hidden Text - Old school, in fact rather naff and increasingly ineffective. Stuffing a page with keywords and keyword visible to search engine spiders, but not to human visitors is so 1999. They can be located in a hidden div tag, coloured so that they blend into the background, or even placed within HTML comment tags.

• Doorway pages - The aim of which are to be crawled and included in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Usually designed around the primary keyword being targeted, stuffed with keywords and published in bulk. They will likely have a form of meta refresh tag or javascript redirection sending visitors to the money site.

• Web Page Cloaking - A technique that shows a doorway page to search engine spiders but the “money page” to human visitors. Both pages are accessed using the same URL with software used to identify the search engine spiders and serve the doorway page to them. Competitors are kept from scraping the content of the optimised doorways, and human visitors are kept from seeing the ugly doorway pages.

• 302 Redirect Hijacking - The creation of a web page on a high-page-rank domain with a 302 redirect to the page trying to be hijacked. Spiders follow the redirect to the second page and indexes it, but on the SERP, the URL of the indexed page will be that of the page with the redirect.

• Scraping and Spinning – Content is grabbed by software from sites, paraphrased, randomized, and “new” content generated. It will invariable read terribly. Spinning content into duplicate-content-penalty-avoiding text is considered the holy grail of black hat techniques.

• Splogs - Related to scraping and spinning, splogs are simply, worthless pseudo blogs with automatically generated content. Admittedly it’s often hard to tell the difference between a Splog and a poorly written but genuine blog. Many splogs read RSS feeds and create blogs automatically. Splogs can be used to get other sites indexed or their Pagerank increased, by including links to them. It is estimated that 20% plus of online blogs are actually splogs.

• Link Spamming/spamdexing - A way of getting links through the use of automated software which accesses unprotected blogs through anonymous web proxies and leaves links in their comments.

It’s a tough call for the search engines. In attempting to help site owners understand where the lines are drawn they try to be as transparent as possible though not so transparent that they provide too much information that those inclined to abuse the system.

What colour hat you choose to wear is a relatively straightforward business decision, whether one chooses adhere to the stated guidelines or to take your chances beyond them. Techniques that violate the guidelines are Black Hat. They may work in the short run, be commonplace, non-deceptive or justified but that doesn’t make them immune to punishment. If your business objectives, timescales and reasoning can support Black Hat SEO then go for it, but don’t forget that Black Hat SEO activities run the risk of having the site removed from the search index.

If your SEO is a long term project and creating quality content to match the most relevant result for a desired query is your intent then go White Hat. Supporting your content in a topical environment with quality relevant inbound links and making sure the site can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines with light tight code is also important.

People often apply an ethical or moral spin when it comes to SEO. SEO’s bottom line though is about results not right and wrong, it’s about delivering business objectives to customers, professionally and over the long term. At Top Page we apply as creative techniques as necessary to give our clients a competitive edge, however, we won’t jeopardise their Internet presence in the process.

People often apply an ethical or moral spin when it comes to SEO. SEO’s bottom line though is about results not right and wrong, it’s about delivering business objectives to customers, professionally and over the long term. At Top Page we apply as creative techniques as necessary to give our clients a competitive edge, however, we won’t jeopardise their Internet presence in the process.

Contact Top Page today Tel:+44 (0)1242 227876 to find out how our expert SEO techniques can help you enhance your Internet presence and grow your business.

White Hat SEO Company - Visit our website

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