Writing a good blog post

Writing a good blog post

Last week the Compucall site and blog were up in their new and improved form and we all started to contribute to the company blog.

I had no idea how hard it is writing a good blog post on demand. Even if it is on a subject I know and like. For some people blogging comes easy, not for me. Most of the time I find it quite hard to write a good blog post on any subject while trying to make it interesting enough for others to read as well as trying to remember to make it SEO friendly. I’m not saying I can’t and sometimes it’s easy even for me. My post on getting a page rank 5 was easy and fun to write, but for the most part I find it takes me a while to get the post just right.

For this reason I have decided to always keep in mind a few basic rules for writing a good blog post:

How My Blog Got a Page Rank 5

Ok, as almost everyone I know already heard, (I made sure to tell them every 5 min or so…) a few days ago, my less then 3 months old blog got page rank 5 from Google.

I know page rank is overated and I certainly don’t think that page rank is the ultimate criteria for a site’s quality, but there are a few good things that come with page rank so I decided to try and list why I think I got such a high page rank fron Google.

Relevancy

When I first started this SEO Blog it was as part of the clifinar competition I wrote here about. At that time there were no Clifinar related search results. Now, after Google indexed some 36,100 results on this word it decided my blog is very relevant to the term:

My SEO blog is called the Clifinar SEO blog, and if you look at my tag cloud you can see that it’s still one of the most used word in my posts (I didn’t get around to change it yet, and maybe it’s good).

Also, at some point during the competition I received a few inbound links that were all using the word Clifinar in the anchor text.

My blog is also constantly updated, if not with new posts or pages then by small edits to the content, fixing typing errors or new features I try to add – like my SEO Polls.

Long tail keywords and website optimization

The long tail graph

I was wondering what to write about this week and while going over the blog’s stats I found that a few visitors came to my blog using SEO terms I didn’t activley optimize for. I might have written about those subjects but I certainly didn’t expect to get traffic from searches on those terms.

For example, I wrote a post about social media bookmarking but then I was actually optimizing my posts for the term “Clifinar”. 

Currently, there are about 9,270,000 search results for social media bookmarking in Google and my blog comes up second (right after wikipedia).

Off page optimization

As part of our daily SEO work for our clients we usually focus around what is called the “on page” optimization. Meaning the keyword density, outgoing links, meta tags, image alt tags and other factors that can influence the site’s indexing. There are, however, quite a few other factors that can influence the SEO efforts as well, and those are part of the “off page” optimization.

When we use the term Off Page optimization we usually mean the inbound links that point to our site, their text, strength and so on. But there are other off page issues that we need to consider when optimizing a website/web page. These are the technical issues that rise from how the site is built, hosted and used.

Web analytics

A large part of my work at Compucall Web Marketing has to do with web analytics. I wanted to write my own post on the subject, and I probably will. However, yesterday I received a link to a very good post on the subject of web analytics and more specifically Google analytics.

After reading the post I decided I will simply post a link here so you can go and read it straight from ther source. I strongly reccomend doing so.

The post is written by Avinash Kaushik in his blog. So if you want to learn more about Google analytics now is the time.

Clifinar competitors analysis

Clifinar rising (thanks to wagg66 for the image)

As you know, I am currently in the final stages of the clifinar competition. I have been writing about the clifinars and even learned a few things about the way the major search engines index information.

After the first 2 weeks of the clifinar competition the search results in Google are relatively stable and there are no major changes. So today I decided to use a few really nice free seo tools found at seomoz.org and analyze the top 4 results from the first page and the top 4 results on the 2nd page. Hopefully this will give me some more insights into the workings of Google.

Clifinar and inbound links

One way links

I’m back!

After a week of not feeling so well and not updating the Clifinar blog I’m back and ready to start on my next subject which is a continuation of a sort to my last post “content is not king“.

 We all know that good quality, original content is a very important factor when bringing relevant traffic to the site. However, content is not enough. In order to have more people see your content and get the search engines to prioritize it higher then others’ you have to get as many one way inbound links as possible to your page. One way inbound links are the best. For search engines, a site is considered as being an authority site because it is linked to, naturally by other webmasters.

In order to do that what is required first of all is a strong and large social network and quite a few hours of work. Unless you have a very popular blog or site that is frequented daily by quite a lot of visitors that can link to your site, you will need to let people know that there is new and interesting content on your site, and in order to do that successfully you need a strategy.

Content is NOT king

Following this clifinar competition and my on-going clifinar observations on the search engines I realised that contrary to many opinions out there, content is NOT king. I’m not saying it’s not important but the best I can say is that “content is princess” not king. 

So, if content isn’t king what is?

The answer to that question has to be: one way inbound links and the size of the social network you have. Basically, the more inbound links you have the more you will be considered by the search engines, Google in this case, as relevant even if your content is not as good as someone else’s.

Ok…does this mean I should stop trying to write good content?