Search Engines - Blog Adviser

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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

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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.

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

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Incoming Links and Blogrolls

October 4th 2007 06:32

Most successful blogs obtain a large percentage (80% or more) of their traffic from search engines so it's very important to know how they work.

Search engines rank websites by counting the number of other websites which link to them -- called incoming links. The more incoming links your website has the higher your ranking will be for search terms relevant to the content on your site. However it's actually more complicated that this:

1) Links from important websites count for more. How do the search engines tell if another website is important? By counting the number of websites which point to it, and so on and so forth. A link from an important website can be worth 100 or more regular links.

2) Links from sites which are of a similar topic to yours are worth more. For a website devoted to chess, links from other chess websites are worth more than regular links.

3) Older links are better. The longer a link has existed the more it is worth.

4) New links should be spread evenly over time. Search engines figure that websites with good content will obtain links at a fairly steady rate. This basically means that you should put a little effort into getting links every week rather than going nuts for a week and then leaving it.

That's the bare basics. Again it's actually much more complicated than what I've described. Most people think (completely guess) that Google has over 100 different factors that it takes into account when ranking a website for a given search query, and the importance of these factors are probably interdependent creating a non-linear, probably chaotic system, where predicting how a given site will rank is almost impossible.

In fact it's suspected that Google now employs actual people to double check the quality of most high-ranking sites. All the different rules will apply to different degrees to different websites depending on how they fair under all the other rules -- for instance if a website already has lots of incoming links then Google is probably not too worried about the rate that new incoming links appear. But for the purposes of our discussion the above 4 rules will be enough.

So how do I get incoming links to my blog?

1) Write your blog with Orble

All the Orble blogs link to other Orble blogs automatically giving them a great head start in the search engine wars. This is one of the main advantages of joining a blogging network.

2) Write amazingly useful and entertaining content. This one is often overlooked but if you have the talent and the time it's probably the best way to get links. If people like your content they will inevitably link to it, and comment about it on other sites. Most of the best Orble blogs have become successful mainly through attracting completely unsolicited links from people who just liked the content.

3) Swap links on a blogroll. A blogroll is a list of links to related blogs which you recommend to your readers. Ask related blogs if they would like to be on your blogroll in exchange for them putting you on theirs. Only link to very high quality blogs. Linking to blogs with low quality content and spammy link getting policies can actually harm your search engine ranking. Giving a link to someone from an Orble blog is a big favour -- you are in effect putting your blog's reputation with the search engines on the line -- so make sure they deserve it. Have a look at this post to see how to set up a blogroll on Orble.

4) Comment on other blogs and forums outside of Orble. Many blogs will allow you to link back to your own blog from theirs if you leave a worthwhile comment. You can search for related blogs using Technorati or Google BlogSearch. Be sure to play by the rules of each blog.

5) Submit your posts to social bookmarking sites. These include Furl.net, Spurl.net, Simpy.com, Digg.com, Delicious, Fark.com, StumbleUpon.com, Reddit.com, and TailRank.com. This can also be a great way to attract new readers.

6) Get all your friends who have websites to link to your blog. This is one of the easiest and most overlooked ways to get quite a few links.

7) Take part in blog carnivals. This is a huge topic in itself and the subject of a post for another day. To find out more either type in "Blog Carnival" into Google or try the relevant Wikipedia page.

There are also a few things that you should definitely not do, which will almost certainly get you banned from Google. Any kind of link exchange program or marketplace is definitely a big no no and don't pay for your site to be submitted to hundreds of search engines. Basically any scheme which makes it seem super easy to get incoming links will probably get you banned. If in doubt don't do it, or leave a comment below and I'll let you know what I think.

By putting a little bit of effort into attracting incoming links you will really notice the benefit in increased traffic from the Search Engines. Even 3 or 4 good links can make the difference between a couple hundred readers per day and a couple of thousand.

If you have any other suggestions for attracting incoming links let us know!

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines, Google

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Correct use of Meta Tags and URL

October 3rd 2007 09:57

Using the Meta Tags and URL correctly for each post on your blog can make a big difference to the amount of Search Engine traffic your blog will attract.

There is a lot of debate amongst the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) people about whether meta tags are used by the search engines at all anymore. From my experience if the search engine trusts your site they will at least take notice of the Title meta tag

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines

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Don't make sudden large scale changes to your Blog

October 3rd 2007 04:46

A blogger contacted me yesterday asking why Google had suddenly stopped sending her blog traffic. After a bit of questioning I discovered that she had added a number of new categories and had then gone through all the posts on her blog (a couple hundred) and had added them to these categories.

This has the effect of creating a large number of new pages very suddenly. Not only does each new category create a new page, but each new category combination creates another new page if there is a single post that is in both of them. So after creating just 5 new categories she had effectively created around 100 new pages which was about a 50% increase in the overall number. Changing the name of a category (even just one letter) can have the same effect

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines, Google

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Attracting Image Search Traffic

October 2nd 2007 12:14

Image search traffic accounts for a huge proportion (more than 50%) of the total traffic of most successful blogs so it's very important to be absolutely on top of making the most of it.

There are a couple things you can do which will help

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines

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Using Blog Categories to attract Search Engine Traffic

October 2nd 2007 11:49

Categories are essential for organising all your posts to make it easier for you readers to find what they are looking for, however they can also be a very useful tool for attracting search engine traffic.

Because each category page has a lot of content -- a list of post summaries -- with great keywords and text they are very good at attracting search engine traffic with high volume keywords if named properly. In fact they are much more effective than a single post targeted at the same keywords would be

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines

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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

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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips, Search Engines

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