Video content engages web surfers. There’s a reason that over 48 hours’ worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.1 That’s right. Two days of video, every minute (that’s 8 years uploaded every day). If you’re not embracing video on your website or blog then you’re losing out on one of the fastest growing media segments.

Online marketing professionals know that video entries and tutorials build a rapport with your target market that can’t be achieved by written material alone. Video-blogging puts a face to the content writer behind the great information appearing on your site. In addition to helping you relate to your readers more personally, you can create a variety of clips that supplement your other content. You can create how-to segments, product demonstrations, or visually explain concepts that are difficult to grasp via a text blog entry.

Because of the interactive nature of video, these types of posts increase the user activity on your website. Visitors tend to linger on pages with video longer than on pages with just text. This increases the odds that they’ll explore the rest of your site, link to your post, and subscribe to your newsletter or feed. People can also share video content easily and quickly with their friends via social media or by embedding a clip into their own blog, resulting in valuable backlinks. Easily reach a wide audience by adding your content to sites like YouTube or eHow. This can be done in a matter of minutes and is a low-cost way to attract large numbers of new users to your blog.

Video gives you an additional method for generating dynamic and original content. By adding this potent format to the mix, you add variety and make it more likely that readers will return. A combination of video and text entries keeps things interesting for your target audience and gives them a reason to return. Use video to express yourself in creative ways or visually connect with users and you will not only gain new traffic, but you’ll discover a great way to reach out to your community.

Sara Onderdonk is a member of the Content and Article Writers Network of Internet Writers and Bloggers. To learn more about the CAW Network go to http://www.ContentAndArticleWriters.com

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If you’ve written a great piece for your website you may think your hard work is done. Wrong. Successful content writers know that without a standout title, you have little chance of hooking readers. If your title is dull, confusing, or vague, it won’t matter how fantastic your content is—readers will simply move on to the next link that catches their attention and your blog will languish in obscurity.

Well-written titles force casual web surfers to notice your site. Think of it as your shot at a stellar first impression. It takes only seconds for a potential visitor to decide if they’re going to click on your link or if they’re going to continue scrolling through the search results. A strong title not only gets visitors to check out your blog entry, but encourages them to take a look at past entries and explore your web site.

Writing a captivating title involves more than just summarizing what your post is about. When you create a title you must consider both the reader and the search engines. With a bit of practice, you’ll be able to hit right balance with copy that appeals to both.

Never forget that your blog is meant to be read and understood by actual human beings. First and foremost you must make sure that you cover topics that are interesting and relevant to your audience’s needs. Put yourself in your readers’ place when you develop your next title. If your headline wouldn’t encourage you to read the rest of the piece, then it’s time to start over. You must do more than convince people to read your article—it’s important that the finished product delivers on the expectations created by your title.

Make sure your title lets the reader know what the article is about, but also convinces him that the information that follows is something that can’t be missed. Titles that appeal to the reader work well in conjunction with social media like Facebook and Twitter, where people share striking items with their friends. To grab the attention of today’s savvy internet user, be sure that you’re to-the-point, witty, and succinct.

To ensure you please the Search engines, you’ll want to integrate your target keywords. Keyword-rich headings are great for site indexing, but may turn off potential readers if you overdo it. The trick is to use one or two terms that fit naturally with the topic you are covering and save your other selected phrases for a different piece. By highlighting a keyword at the top of your piece, you increase the likelihood of your site being indexed for that term by the search engine’s indexing spiders.

If you need help developing great titles for your blog, never fear. Our team of skilled online content professionals at Content and Article Writing can help. We have over five years of experience writing for the web and can make sure that your web site not only attracts traffic, but is SEO friendly.

Sara Onderdonk is a member of the Content and Article Writers Network of Internet Writers and Bloggers. To learn more about the CAW Network go to http://www.ContentAndArticleWriters.com

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You’ve created a great product and now you’re ready to promote it with an amazing website. You know that building a strong online presence is a must in order to succeed in today’s competitive market and you know that choosing the right keywords is a must if you hope to establish your business’s online presence. Pay per click (PPC) is a fantastic way to drive traffic to your site, but only if you’ve selected the right search terms.

Online business owners unfamiliar with SEO best practices may be tempted by automated tools. These simple programs are easy, quick, and often free. But you get what you pay for. The “suggested keywords” list generated by Google Adwords seems helpful, but in truth many of the suggestions are too general or too popular to serve any useful purpose for your site. The best way to find effective keywords is to perform research on traffic and competition numbers yourself.

Begin by thinking about your target customers and the product you are offering. Brainstorm a variety of words and phrases that describe both. What is the problem your potential clients need to solve? What would you type into a search engine if you were searching for your product? If you’re trying to connect with local patrons, be sure that your town, city, or regional area features in some of the suggestions you generate.

Think about what phrases your ideal customer may use to encounter a site offering your product or service. Don’t worry about judging which idea is the best, for now, just jot down what comes to mind. Remember that the more specific a term, the more likely it is to appeal to your desired consumer.

Now that you have a list, it’s time to evaluate which offer you the greatest chance of success. Keep in mind your daily keyword budget and determine how much you’re willing to pay per each successful ad click, known as your cost-per-click (CPC). This is where Google Adwords can be of use. Type in each keyword and you’ll discover how many people have searched for that specific term in a given time period. Highly competitive terms will be more expensive and less likely to reach your target audience. Check out your top competitors to discover which expressions bring them high-ranking results to discover additional suggestions.

On the Google Adwords site you’ll be able to obtain a maximum CPC that would lead to your ads appearing in top positions on a results page. Once you’ve tested you’re top candidates Reduce your list down to a few combinations that fit your budget and ideal customer. possibilities by writing a couple of different ads with different keyword combinations. Run them these ads on Google and track the traffic results generated by each ad. The success of each ad will give you an idea of which keywords work best for your website.

Once you’re figured out the right search terms for your business, it’s time to work with an experienced content writer to integrate them into you web page. Well-researched keywords bring in more traffic and lead to more sales. Don’t get caught using the one-size-fits all SEO. Here at ContentandArticleWriting.com we have a pool of online writers familiar with the process of researching keywords and creating articles that result in SEO success.

Sara Onderdonk is a member of the Content and Article Writers Network of Internet Writers and Bloggers. To learn more about the CAW Network go to http://www.ContentAndArticleWriters.com

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Want to know the best way to capture a high search engine ranking and keep new visitors coming back for more? You don’t need the slickest-looking website or have to be a programming ace. The key to keeping your website at the top of search results is simple: a blog that is regularly updated with original copy. Great blog post writing will not only bring search engine spiders back for frequent indexing, but it will bring back human visitors as well.

Many companies with an online presence treat their blog as a necessary evil and only update it as an afterthought. Blogging is actually a powerful tool that helps organizations of all sizes develop loyal and lively communities centered on their brand, product, or service. By maintaining a steady flow, you start a conversation with your target audience. Provide information that is interesting and high-quality and readers will reward you with return trips to discover what your next insight will be. Ignore your blog and not only will customers return the favor, but they’ll turn to a competitor dedicated to keeping them engaged.

Every blog article creates a unique web page and another opportunity for your site to be indexed by search engines. New web pages get picked up by search engine spiders and will boost your ranking. Consistent new content on your site keeps your ranking high. Optimize your chances to entice new visitors by securing as high a standing as possible. Many people searching the web for a specific product, service, or industry rarely check out sites that fail to appear on the first page or two of results.

A blog entry is a wonderful way to showcase your business’s expertise and relevance. Use your posts to highlight success stories, discuss key industry trends, and educate your readers. Each new post is a reminder that you care about your clients and the issues that matter to them. Convince your audience to choose your business by repeatedly displaying your proficiency and passion for your service or product on your blog.

Avoid falling victim to low search rankings by using a professional experienced in custom blog creation. A dedicated blogger can update your page with fresh articles that enhance your customer relations and promote your company. Use an experienced online writer to effectively communicate your organization’s voice, values, and mission. Propel your site to the SEO success by offering dynamic content that encourages readers to return often.

Sara Onderdonk is a member of the Content and Article Writers Network of Internet Writers and Bloggers. To learn more about the CAW Network go to http://www.ContentAndArticleWriters.com

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A press release is a great resource for companies looking to gain exposure. A well-written press release increases brand awareness and captures media attention for far less than the cost of traditional advertising. Whether you’re announcing a new product, celebrating a major milestone, or generating publicity for an event, an interesting press release is needed to secure media coverage. A professional familiar with press release writing can craft powerful and attention-grabbing press releases for companies striving to increase website traffic and garner media exposure.

The main goal of press release writing is to get publicity for your online business or website. Submitting your release to well-known press release websites such as PRWeb.com or PRNnewswire.com will get your release in front of hundreds of reporters and increase the odds of your release getting picked up by news outlets and respected industry websites. Readers trust credible sources such as reporters and editors and when your press release appears on a respected media website, your business or website appears more credible as well. This makes it more likely that other websites will republish your press release. When other websites republish your press release it will create more opportunities for your website to appear in search results related to your product or service.

It’s not enough to know where to send your release—it must get read by a writer or editor at your target website. In order for your release to be published by a credible media outlet, it must be newsworthy. Experienced content-writing professionals put themselves in their readers’ place and ask themselves, “Why is this newsworthy? Why do I care?” Knowledgeable press release writers will hone in on what is important to the reporter’s readers. Make it easy for journalists to see how your news is important to their audience and you make it easy for them to write about your company.

Even a newsworthy release can be discarded if it fails to follow the standard press release format. The headline and first paragraph are the most important parts of any press release. Busy reporters rarely read past the first paragraph. This is why a press release writer will highlight the newsworthy information at the beginning of your release. In addition to a strong first paragraph, an effective press release will include quotes from key spokespeople or experts. Good quotes help your release to stand out from the many others vying for media attention. At the bottom of release provide your standard company background information and your contact information. The final touch to correctly formatting your release is to make sure it is well written and grammatically correct.

A well-written press release is an easy and powerful way to improve SEO performance and drive web traffic. In addition to boosting your website’s publicity, a press release picked up by reputable media outlets adds to your website’s credibility. By using an experienced content writer, your company will reap the many benefits a good press release produces.

Sara Onderdonk is a member of the Content and Article Writers Network of Internet Writers and Bloggers. To learn more about the CAW Network go to http://www.ContentAndArticleWriters.com

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It’s as simple as that. If you’re not consistently adding dynamic content to your website, you will not be able to maintain any type of high page rank with Google, Yahoo, Bing, or anyone else who uses an algorithm to order their listings. Submit to all the directories you like, bookmark with social media sites, and add Meta tags to all your pages, but if you don’t increase the size of your website with relevant content writing you will not see significant traffic. Internet marketing professionals and SEO specialists know this, and they’ve known it for years.

The whole point of algorithmic changes by Google earlier this year was to produce more relevant results for web surfers. When you enter a keyword into the search field, you don’t want to see an ordered list of websites that have the most directory links for that keyword. You want to find the products or information that you’re looking for. All Google did with their Panda update was make the content a more important variable than the link count. Yahoo and Bing have since followed suit with changes of their own. What’s the result of all this? You need to add content or lose your page rank.

Content Development Dos and Don’ts

Use your blog. It’s the best possible advice we can give to you. If you have any writing ability at all, start blogging about your company on your company website. You’ll probably get tired of writing after a while and you’ll most likely hit a major case of writing block at some point, but start the process. Once you’ve laid the foundation with a few posts, contact us and we’ll pick it up where you left off. If you don’t have any writing skills, have us start blog post writing for you right away.

Take a look at your site map and develop a plan to add static pages to your site. Valid information about your industry, products, or services is a valued commodity on the web. Our writers know how to create the pages with the proper mix of keywords to score you a high page rank with the search engines. We recommend that you do not attempt to create content pages if you don’t have a working knowledge of recommended keyword density and search engine marketing techniques.

Article writing for directories is still good for link building, but don’t submit the same article to multiple directories. That might get you a few direct hits if anyone sees what you write, but submitting original articles to high PR sites like Ezine, Helium, and Squidoo will give you actual link juice, the necessary accelerant to attain high page rank. Contact Content and Article Writing today to learn more about how to do this. Our team of article writers knows exactly how to get you the results you desire. We’ve been doing it since 2007 and we’ve produced consistently positive results for our clients.

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They say it in real estate, but it’s just as true on the Internet. “Location, location, location.” When it comes to real estate in cyberspace, this means that if you want to get found, it’s critical to post your information in places where people are going to look. But where exactly is that? A good place to start is local search directories. Since the majority of things people do take place in and around the places they live, this means that a good deal of web searching is locally driven. That’s why posting content on local directories can be an SEO gold mine.

Local search marketing is pretty simple: put your content where it’s most likely to convert sales. Of course, part of the marketing model you adopt for your business should be to disseminate info to the places where everyone goes the most. But while sites like Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites are highly trafficked social scenes, only a fraction of users will know you exist (and most of those who do will not be in your area). The other part of your marketing model should be to post content in places that only some people will go—but everyone will see. By doing some content development on local search directories like Google Maps and Google Places, you’ll be posting content about your business to local consumers who are highly likely to search the very directories you post on, dramatically increasing the likelihood that those consumers will become your customers.

A great example of a local directory is Leominsterwebsites.com. It’s a guide to local services, recreation spots, entertainment, and shopping that are in and around Leominster, Massachusetts. Consider a restaurant in Leominster that wants to post menus, rave reviews, special promotions, and contact info on the local search directory, for example. Someone reading the content is more likely to try the restaurant because she probably lives in Leominster, or close by—as opposed to the guy in Los Angeles who lives 3,000 miles away and simply friended them on Facebook because he likes the menu.

SEO doesn’t only mean optimizing your website so it ranks well in the Google SERP. It also means optimizing your business itself so its online presence reaches a customer base that’s relevant. And while it’s true that the more global sites on the web give users access to a wider range of information, what’s really most relevant to people is always what’s right next door. If your name appears there, then you’ve snagged a piece of cyberspace with a seriously high property value.

For Writers:

The CAW Directory Project will be coming to Boston, MA on December 15, 2011. To learn more and get involved, go to http://www.contentandarticlewriters.com/service-directories/

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In our digital age, the Internet is fast becoming the primary mode of customer contact—and for some businesses, it’s actually the only one. So when it comes to the reputation of your business, the role your website plays has never been more critical. When customers search online for a product or service, they’re almost always deterred (and for good reason) when a website contains undiversified content or reads more like a link farm than a trusted, legitimate business enterprise. Therefore, a large part of your reputation management needs to come from quality content development.

Quality content writing can boost your online reputation in two separate but related ways. First, providing a constant stream of varied content lets potential customers know that you have a vested interest in your area of expertise, products, or services—and that you’re there to give customers the information that they need to make informed decisions. If all customers see on your site is promotional copy with sales driven language, it’s just too pushy. You want build a solid reputation that customers associate with quality, so incorporate blogs, press releases, articles, instructional guides, etc. into your website. These are things that lend credibility to your enterprise. Answering customer specific questions or speaking to issues relevant to your product genre is sometimes as valuable to customers as your product itself.

Your reputation in the eyes of your customers is only part of the big picture. Your website won’t even show up in the eyes of your customers if search engines won’t put it there. Google especially makes it known that they seek to give users reputable websites that are relevant to their search criteria. So like it or not, part of your reputation is your page rank. And it’s fresh, diversified content that makes the search engine spiders look kindly on you as they crawl your pages. When you use diversified content writing and show up on the first page of the Google SERP, it’s like a stamp of approval from the Internet’s very own Better Business Bureau.

Of course, generating a continuous feed of fresh content can be a daunting task—especially when you need to actually run a business at the same time. Luckily, you can enlist content writers to take care of your rep. Because in a time when people are becoming increasingly skeptical of what they find online, you need to make sure your products and services are presented to consumers in a way they can trust. That means a commitment to high quality content development.

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When that special time of year rolls around, retailers know that holiday spirit means killer instinct. It’s the time when retailers need to boost their competitive edge and make sure that buyers get that special something from them — and not from their competitors. There are a few ways to do this, but none so effective as communicating special promotions and deals directly to target audiences. That’s why Content and Article Writing is offering a new product: the email string.

The email string is a series of ten emails designed to target a specific niche market or customer demographic. The emails can be used to communicate information about promotions, special discounts and promo codes, new product arrivals, etc., and are a great option for staying connected to a specific customer base. It’s effective, but sending emails to customers is only half the holiday battle: when customers receive promotional emails, it’s also important that they feel called to action. To ensure high response rates, CAW’s content writing service uses top-notch content writers and carefully crafted web copy that is optimized for target audiences. The result? Customers that feel like they’ve gotten valuable information from a trusted source.

How can the email string be so effective? There are really three reasons. First and foremost, good content writing is good content writing. And quality advertising will always be effective if you can just get it into people’s hands. Second, choosing the strategy of target-specific emailing sends the right information to the right people. If the same email is sent to everyone, maybe only forty or fifty percent will respond. Everyone’s different, and not everything applies to everyone. If people in certain demographics receive emails specific to their own interests, the likelihood of a greater response rate increases dramatically across the board. And third, holiday retailers tend to flood the traditional market with TV commercials and radio spots—so heavily, in fact, that they can become ineffective. The email, on the other hand, sets itself apart as a reprieve from the flurry of traditional advertisement.

Need more good reasons to try it? Emails typically speak to customers in a setting where they’re already in a position to buy something, i.e. at the computer—as opposed to when they’re driving or watching television. The email string is also a formidable tool for brand management in general. A regular series of specially crafted emails creates an image of a company that cares about communication and about providing value to its customers. Contact us today to learn more.

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We’ve all heard it before: there’s one right way to do things, and a hundred wrong ways. Optimizing your website for search is no exception. In the SEO world, there are plenty of things that can hurt your ranking. But surprisingly, duplicate content isn’t one of them. For a long time, webmasters have been under the impression that Google metes out a “duplicate content penalty,” but recent developments and communications from Google seem to indicate that this isn’t the case… at least not in the way that people think.

There are two kinds of duplicate content: malicious and non-malicious. Maliciously duplicated content occurs when a webmaster deliberately duplicates content across or within domains in order to generate more web traffic—the idea being that duplicate content equals duplicate keywords. It’s not exactly keyword stuffing; it’s more like keyword spreading, and is designed to manipulate web crawlers, search engines, and ultimately the users themselves. But since Google’s objective is to give users as much diversified and relevant content as possible, they don’t take kindly to spammers. This practice is likely to result in Google making a deliberate hit to your page rank.

But non-malicious duplicate content is different. It’s more common, and occurs without any deliberate intention on the part of webmasters. Examples of this are things like multiple URLs that lead to the same content (without canonicalized URLs, this give the appearance of duplicate content to a crawler), the existence of printer only versions of web pages, the same articles and blogs posted on different websites, or versions of web pages formatted down for mobile devices. This results in multiple pages within a web site (or across domains) containing essentially the same content. But Google has been clear about the fact that a duplicate content penalty for these sorts of things is just a myth.

Greg Grothaus, part of Google’s Search Quality Team, insists that if a webpage is not ranking because of duplicate content, it is only because Google is trying to provide users with the most unique search results possible. And while Google recognizes that most duplicate content is not deceptive, they’re not going to sacrifice the integrity and usability of their search engine. When it comes to duplicate content, the search engines are not actually penalizing webmasters—they’re just trying to give users a little assortment in the results. And just because your content is getting filtered out, that doesn’t mean you’re being penalized.

Unfortunately, it still doesn’t mean that duplicate content won’t have a negative impact on your page rank. You might need to take the steps to avoid what’s avoidable. Using canonicalized URLs, linking pages properly and consistently, and providing as much unique content as possible on each of your site pages can help to avoid some of the duplicate content pitfalls. And of course, good SEO practices across the board should help you make the jump to page one.

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