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Orble Tips Search Engines - Blog Adviser

Duplicate Content

January 11th 2008 08:43
Copying content from other sources on the web for your own blog will hurt your search engine ranking. Google (and other search engines) take into account the "uniqueness" of a site's content (text and images) in their ranking algorithms.

If a site (or page on a site) mainly consists of text or images copied from another website they will usually rank poorly. Just changing the order of the paragraphs will not help either, or just copying just a segment of the text. If you want to duplicate content safely it needs to be completely rewritten.

This also applies to "quoting" from another source. Quoting is fine, but make sure that no more than 1/3 of the text of your post consists of a quote from another source. Copying an entire article, and then putting a link to the source after it with a few quick comments is not a good idea either. You would be better off simply having just the link and your short comments without the copied text.


In summary? Quality unique text and image content is best.
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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips, Search Engines, Google
   


Writing long posts about old or stable topics

October 5th 2007 04:35
Most bloggers write about recent events and people who are currently in the news. This is a great way to attract readers because we all like to know what is happening in the world around us. However recent events usually have a limited shelf life. After a couple of days or weeks people will mostly lose interest.

There are however many topics which people will always be interested in and which most bloggers overlook because they are so focused on what is new. A few examples:

1) Famous people from the past like people like Audrey Hepburn, George Washington, or Genghis Khan.


2) Well known places like New York, the Eiffel Tower, or Niagara Falls.

3) Events like The Battle of Waterloo, the Crusades, or the signing of The Declaration of Independence.

4) Guides to common things like fishing, framing a picture, or knitting.

5) Famous ideas like Relativity, Democracy, or the major Religions.



These "Old" or "Stable" topics always have a steady stream of people searching for information on them. Once written, a good article on a stable topic will keep attracting readers through the search engines indefinitely.

Audrey Hepburn Roman Holiday
Thousands and thousands of people search for information on Audrey Hepburn every day.


I would recommend that at least one third of your posts, depending on your blog's focus, should be about stable topics. For some blogs, almost all of their posts are like this. For instance the JDM Film Reviews blog is devoted to reviews of (mostly) old cult films which have a steady following, unlike the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

Out of the top 20 Orble blogs, a huge proportion of the traffic (more than 80%) goes to posts on stable topics. That's how important it is to understand the distinction. Once you realize this a big part of successful blogging becomes building up a large number of posts based around these stable topics. If you have twice the number of posts on stable topics you will almost always get twice the amount of traffic from the search engines.


Breaking it down a bit further, there are two basic ways to approach blogging about stable topics.

1) The Big End: Go for the big and popular topics. Lots of people are searching for information on Audrey Hepburn so a post about her could attract a lot of traffic. However there is also a large number of pages out on the web which will be competing with you (1,410,000 mentions on Google). If you are going to go after the Big End you need to write long, well researched, and detailed articles on the topic to have any chance.

2) The Small End: Go for smaller niche topics which are still stable. Good examples of these are reviews of local restaurants and pubs, information about really niche hobbies like collecting toe nail clippings, or guides to less visited places like your local beach, or a country town. Because there is much less competition you can write shorter articles and more of them and you will be surprised how many people are searching for this information. It can really add up.

The Small End approach can also be a bit hit and miss. Some topics will get you much more traffic than you thought, others will get you much less. The trick is to write posts for a large number of them and it will all average out.

When you are just starting out I would recommend going after the Small End. Because of the winner take all nature of the search engines (the top three listings on a web search take just about all the traffic) it's better to wait until you are more established to go after the Big End.

Of course there are many topics which fall somewhere between the Big End and the Small End, and you can take Big End topics and find less competitive topics based around them.

For instance, if you go to the Overture Keyword Selector and type in "Audrey Hepburn" you will see that most people are indeed searching for information on the main keywords "audrey hepburn". There are however a large number of people searching for information on "audrey hepburn treasure" (not sure what that's about), "audrey hepburn picture", "audrey hepburn quotes" etc. Once you get down to a search like "audrey hepburn quotes" you probably have quite a good chance of competing but will still attract a lot of traffic.

So don't forget to post about stable topics, it will definitely help you build up a more substantial and less volatile readership.
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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips, Search Engines
   


How often should I post to my blog?

October 2nd 2007 05:54
Frequent posting is very important to successful blogging for a number of reasons. The first is that there will always be fresh content to encourage your readers to visit often, preferably every day. The second reason is that the Search Engines love blogs that are frequently updated and will send your blog more traffic not just to your new posts but to all your old posts as well. The third reason is that regular posting will quickly build up the amount of content on your site which is also another key factor in attracting search engine traffic.

So how often should you post in an ideal world?

The simple answer to this question is the more frequently you post the more traffic you will have and posting twice as much will usually result in more than double the traffic.

The absolute minimum number of posts should be three per week to maintain a viable blog. Any less than that and you will be struggling with retaining your readers and keeping the search engines interested.

A good number is 6 times per week. Once per weekday and on Saturday. This means that for every workday your readers will have something new to look at. If you post this often you have every chance of building up a large readership.

More than 6 times per week is even better if you have the time. Blogs which have from 3 to 10 new posts every day can do especially well, however this obviously requires almost full-time dedication to the task which is not possible for everyone. It also depends on your subject matter. There just may not be that much to say on a given topic in one day.

Is there a maximum? I would say that anymore than 20 new posts in a given day would only be read by your most dedicated readers and would probably put off others.

Remember though to spread out your posts. If you are posting 3 times per week have one appear on Monday, then Wednesday, and then Friday. For 6 times a week a new post should appear every weekday and on Saturday. With an Orble blog you can write any number of posts at once and then specify when they should be published using the "Display Time" feature.
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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips, Search Engines
   




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