What will you do when you are asked to do something that you have never dreamt of even in your wildest dreams? Hide your face, jump with surprise and elation or start sulking? Well, for me it was more reminiscent with the third expression. Oh yes I admit that I am being mean, but that’s the truth – believe it or not! All this time, you were busy in churning out sensible articles (actually horny ones were left for me and also the scholarly ones) and then suddenly, one day you are asked to write a book! I did not open my mouth wide, but I just asked one question – “You want me to write a book?”

Though it was quite surprising that my senior colleague ended up choosing me for the work, but it was a welcome move for me. I have been reading books all my life, but I never thought of writing one of those. Now I know how difficult is the task of jotting down a reader friendly content in a book. Since my childhood days, i was always fascinated by films and the way they were analyzed by a group of intellectual people. Somehow it was irritating to me then, but now I enjoy dissecting each and every film that I see. So, now you are wondering about why am I talking about films and film critics suddenly…? I just wanted to clarify about the fact that I am a film buff, so I would definitely enjoy writing anything and everything about films. However, being a content writer and a human being, it is imperative that I should keep my choices and creative juices flexible enough to fit in to all kinds of content. I am sure you all will agree to this after being annoyed in the first of this write-up!

Now, I was given the mammoth task of writing a book on Balochistan. For people who do not know much about the name, Balochistan is the largest province of Pakistan and sadly the most terrorized region in Pakistan. I need to write one hundred pages for the book. I would definitely like to mention here about the supportive role that my senior colleagues are playing in this mammoth task of mine. Writing a book is definitely way different from writing articles. A book has a specified structure. There are chapters, sub-sections, preface and many other features. My job was made easier with the brief that the client had prepared and sent to us. They were absolutely clear about what they want from the writer and what are the areas that I need to concentrate upon. Now, I have a bad habit of starting the work as soon as I get the brief. However, here I had to take a long breath and decide upon what are the crucial points that I need to incorporate in the book.

The first few chapters of the book were not much difficult to concentrate upon. Problems started cropping up as soon as I reached the ‘SOCIETY’ section of the book. The problem with Balochistan was endless. There were very few positives in the region. However, I had to dig them out as I was asked to do so. The reason – organizations like World Bank, IMF, etc., social agencies like UN, social and political leaders, large corporate & MNCs, potential investors, Research Bodies and organizations, NGOs & Civil societies – these were the group of people who would most probably be banking on the book for their information about Balochistan. I dare write anything negative. However, stating facts was not been barred by the client. Till now, I have tried my best to keep up with the requirements. Rest is all in the hands of my senior colleagues and the client. Sometimes I feel like I was never out of my studies – the feeling is at times awkward, but most of the times it is of elation. I have to admit that it is helping a lot to add to my knowledge bank. So, next time you get to read something about Balochistan in the net, remember me!! J Wish me luck for the rest of the book…

Imagine that you are an owner of a website. Your first and foremost priority is to get a higher search engine ranking (kind of obvious). So what do you do? You proceed with some good old fashioned SEO. That did not work as well as you hoped, so you tried image optimization. That helped a little but you still need that little push to reach the 1st page of search results. You are running out of options. What are you going to do? You hear a little voice call out, “black hat SEO”, but you are too sensible and dignified to do that.

Have no fear, Video SEO is here! Video SEO is, as you guessed it, optimisation of a video. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Video SEO is a relatively new thing and it is still being experimented with. The rising bandwidth has sky rocketed the popularity of online streaming video and online streaming video sites like YouTube. Many major companies have also jumped on the video SEO bandwagon.

• The first thing you will need to do is to make a video. Make sure that the video is relevant and informative. The most common practice is to make a video explaining your company and the website itself as many people these days prefer to watch something rather than read about it.
• Just like an article, your video will need to have a catchy title. Try and include a key phrase in the title that is relevant to your product.
• Nobody wants to watch a whole movie about your product. Keep the length of the video to about 5 minutes. If you have to make it longer, divide it into multiple parts.
• Incorporate your logo in the video; it’s a great way to create brand awareness, especially when you post the video on to video sharing sites like YouTube.
• Tag the video with important phrases as well as generic ones so that users are more likely to come across the video. Remember to also add descriptive Meta tags to the video.
• When posting the video on sites like YouTube, remember to give a link to your website in the description. Also give them the option of embedding the video, this will allow them to post the video on their website/blog and in return, you get free advertising.

The best way to optimise a video is to think about your target audience. Don’t just post a video for the sake of it. A good video will drastically enhance your reputation among your prospective customers and maybe even your competitors.

Proper SEO etiquette dictates that every page of a web site is optimised for search engines, for that will help ensure that the web site is on top of search results. When I say every page, I mean the home page, the content, the services, the about us page, and so forth. While this may very well viable if you have small company web site with about 40-50 pages, it is downright impossible if your web site has a humongous number of pages.

Well, technically, it isn’t impossible. You could hire an army of SEO specialists and pay them huge quantities of money and leave them to optimize each and every one of the 10,000 pages in your website. Then leave for a vacation to the Bahamas and come back after a month to find that all your pages are now fully optimised with keywords, Meta tags and descriptions. As a result of all that money, hard work and time, your website now generates 10% more hits. Is it a Success? I don’t think so.

The key is to find the right balance between time and the results. You could spend months on end optimizing a web site for an additional 100 hits or you could spend a day or two to optimize the most popular pages on your website and gain about 10-20 more hits. The choice is quite obvious.

The simplest way to speed up optimising is by concentrating on the popular pages first. Only then you should move on to the other pages of your website. Another method is by the clever usage of Meta tags. Before optimising, create a number of Meta tags and descriptions (the number depends on the size of your site) to use as templates. Then cycle through those templates at random and avoid using the same ones many times in a row so as to avoid being labelled as a spammer.

In an ideal world, the amount of time spent optimizing web pages would be directly proportional to the hits you get. Is this possible? Here’s a hint: ideal worlds don’t really exist. So you have to make do with what you got.

You have incorporated every trick from the book of SEO on your website, but when you type the keywords in the search tab, apart from showing organic results to your website, the search engine also displays a few websites and forums that are bad-mouthing your product. That can be such a bummer!

Today, solely implementing search engine optimization techniques to create a wider reader draw to your website cannot help in building a company’s brand over the internet.  With hoards of online communities, review platforms and forums available, reputation management is very much pivotal in enhancing one’s brand power. The functioning of a business is proportional to its brand identity and a positive identity can lead to increased efficiency as well as revenue. Online reputation management (or ORM) helps companies and businesses to prioritize and position the good over the bad by pushing them lower on search engine page results with the purpose of decreasing their visibility.

The main aspects of ORM are publishing positive content on the web and wiping away or at least covering the negative and misleading details with a thick dark blanket so that any user when searching for a company cannot see the detrimental results. Through extensive involvement in the social media (which includes blogs, Facebook, forums, Twitter, etc.), creation of positive content and promotion of existing content, companies are able to improve their online identity to a great extent.  At times companies also make formal ‘take down’ requests to site managers to remove negative or inappropriate content, and if that does not work the last option is to file a lawsuit.

Realizing the importance of ORM several companies have sprung up to help businesses and individuals manage their online reputatio. It seems Google (I have a new moniker for them – The Trailblazer!) might help companies (specifically the big ones) in doing away with ORM needs entirely. Its latest roll-out is huge site-links that take up almost half of the first page, pushing the organic links down and the bad links way further down.

Come to think of it, these monster-sized links can make generating online traffic through keywords quite tricky. Do SEO specialists need to worry? Well that’s a topic for another blog post!

A recent study conducted by Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life Project had some interesting results to show. It claimed that search and email were among the most popular activities online. The exact numbers shown by the study will be talked about later, but let’s focus on how this result affects the marketing maxims that people have long held holy. For one, it dispels the popular myth that social media optimization is your best bet as an online marketer. Meanwhile, those who are religiously engaged in tipping the search engine scales to their favour can breathe a sigh of relief: SEO still reigns supreme in online marketing.

The guys at Pew seem to have done their homework. Tracking online activities of adults since the past 10 years, they come up with some numbers that might rearrange the priorities of online marketers. Coming to the numbers themselves:

1. Using search engines and reading emails tops the list at a dominating 92 percent,
2. Reading online news gets the silver at 76 percent,
3. Online purchases occupy 71 percent,
4. Bringing up the rear is social networking, which is placed at a miserable 65 percent.

An interesting point arises here: Although the rise and rise of social networking sites has heralded a phenomenal growth of SMO activities to raise brand visibility and attract traffic, it looks like sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc. have not yet managed to consolidate their hold over all demographics. It seems to be more cluster-oriented, really. Au contraire, search engines and email have consistently attracted a sizeable chunk of followers from just about every strata possible.

Does that mean that a change is in order? Should we, for the matter of debate, start paying more attention to email marketing in our campaigns, something that’s widely regarded as the ignored cousin of SEO and SMO? Remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: this study is sure to get online marketers rethinking their strategies.

The stage is set. The weapons have been polished and the shields are clanging with anticipation. Social networking el supremo Facebook faces off against search engine colossal Google’s throwback, Google Plus. At first glance, it looks like a regular David vs Goliath. 500 million users against a measly 20 million. But the numbers only tell you so much. Delving deeper, one can see many reasons why Google Plus has more than a few aces in the hole.

The biggest advantage that Google Plus has over Facebook is that it has the direct backing of the big daddy of all the search engines, Google. A classic case of SEO meets SMO, if there ever was one. It has been all but openly announced that Google will be heavily leaning on rewarding Google Plus users with higher rankings on its search engine page. And sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can’t do much more than shaking their fists in frustration. That is, unless they (the latter two) don’t end up as dinner for Google’s massive buying spree.

Another reason why Google Plus has become a force to be reckoned with is the revolutionary social media tools it offers to its users. The ‘+1’ button has already trumped Facebook’s likes, the privacy features offered by Plus are aeons ahead of anything Facebook has to offer, and the Circles are being widely acknowledged as the ‘Holy $#!*’ idea of the decade. 10 million users within the first few weeks will nod happily along to that.

Talking White Hat SMO, Google Plus has taken pains to ensure that its users get all the brownie points to promote their websites, provided it’s legit. Website integration with APIs, +1 Button Syndication and a whole new level of networking gives Google Plus ample leverage when it comes to SEO building. Also, Google’s announcement that its +1 button carries a heavy impact over a site’s SEO rankings carries a veiled threat: If SMO for Google Plus is not on your site’s daily calendar, expect a cold shoulder from Google’s crawlies.

Bottom line is, as someone who is actively engaged in SEO and SMO to bump up site rankings, you simply cannot afford to overlook Google Plus anymore. Case closed.

If you have a blog, you can hire a SEO firm to optimize it for you but it is important to know the fundamentals of writing blog articles that are SEO friendly. If you know some of the basic tips to make your blogs SEO friendly, you will be able to save a lot of money and efforts. Below are a few tips that can help you in the process:

Make Sure That The Search Terms Appear In The Post’s Title

Incorporating the search term(s) in the title helps search engines index your website. In fact, the headline or the title of your blog post is the first thing that search engines and people notice and consider them as the most important words. Thus, making search terms appear in the title holds a lot of importance from the SEO standpoint.

It is always a better idea to put yourself in your readers’ shoes and think from their perspective. Learn about what search words they would be using when looking for your products or services. This will help you include relevant words in the title.

Create A Link Between Earlier Blog Posts And Important Words In The Current Blog.

Search engines prefer blog posts that have been linked over those that have not been linked. They also take into account the words that have been linked. Better link building process makes for better search engine rankings.

Tag Your Posts

Most of the blogging platforms provide you with this option so that you can organize your posts. This also helps the search engines and netizens find your content easily. Google identifies these tags and then prioritize your site accordingly.

Make Use Of Google Insights To Find Relevant Terms

This can help you find search terms relevant to your blogs.

Asserting an online visibility for the wholesalers is the biggest challenge for the writers as wholesalers are mushrooming in the cyber domain for marketing their products. My tryst with SEO centric wholesale sunglasses articles has been really interesting, captivating and sometime monotonous also because “Are you planning to buy an exclusive pair of wholesale sunglasses? …” is the line which became stereotypical and symbolic of my writings. But these were also lines that best described the need of a wholesaler from his prospective customer.

In an ocean of choices for buying sunglasses on the wholesale, how can one wholesaler get an edge over the other? An extensive SEO centered exercise to increase the online visibility of the website is the key to this. And SEO articles plays a small but very significant part of this very exercise.

Problem

There is a strong relation between wholesalers and SEO writing because for them gaining top organic listings is an indication of their successful online presence and popularity. While writing SEO article for wholesalers, it is extremely important to focus on main key phrases or keywords which are to be used repeatedly in the article. The problem of attracting more traffic and higher search engine rankings frequents wholesalers and this problem persisted with the client in question as well. The challenge in my project is to form an effective SEO copy which tops the search results along with living up to the client’s expectations. Generally the copy for wholesalers’ website lacks the insights to search engine rankings and the study of the visitor’s nature and requirement. If your SEO copy has not incorporated keywords effectively and logically, then don’t expect your SEO’s success because an over usage of keywords may also lead to spamming.

Solution

While writing articles for wholesale sunglasses, I work with an objective of making everyone hum about my client all over the cyber space regarding the products and services offered by them. ‘Mesmerizing’, ‘fantastic’, ‘superlative’, ‘captivating’, ‘exclusive’, ‘attractive’, ‘elegant’ and ‘beautiful’ are the few keywords I play with in wholesale sunglasses articles along with the repeated mention of the client’s name which is essential for enhancing the online visibility. Fixing up these problems is not very tough; all it requires is well written content for online wholesalers with the inclusion of keywords and the name of client’s website in the SEO article to highlight vision over value. If you are an amateur writer and still in your learning stage, then follow this direct approach to optimize your wholesaler’s website.

Search Engine Optimizing is backbone of Internet. With time SEO has attained a very high position in the web world. Many companies say that they provide SEO services but they are few which can provide the right technique and follow the right method. Those who follow the right method always promise late results but those results as valuable gives the page and the site a good ranking. Those who follow the Black Hat SEO Techniques do produce quick results but those results do not last long.

The White Hat SEO is non-manipulative and safe where as the Black Hat SEO is manipulative and not safe.

How White Hat SEO Is Done?

For White Hat SEO the website needs to be optimized by using META tags and Keywords. The URLs of the site along with the keywords should be submitted to different directories and creating keyword oriented content. Making sitemaps and obtaining links from sites so that the website has a higher ranking on the search engines. Search engines encourage such techniques and give site a higher ranking.

White Hat SEO is more time-consuming and yields better results which have a positive impact on the site. The sites which do White Hat SEO do not get removed from search engines results. The traffic generated at the site is always the right traffic.

How Black Hat SEO Is Done?

Black Hat SEO is redirecting search engine “spiders” to different pages. For Black Hat SEO lots of mass-posting “spam” comments are made in the blogs, different social forum and via articles. A keyword list is put at the end of the page in a very small font size. No doubt users visit those sites but no sales or business is conducted. The spiders keep visiting the site. This technique is easier and faster to implement but the search engine can easily remove the site from its list also. The spider is quick to detect which site is following the Black Hate technique and such sites are often penalized.

It is important to the use the White Hat SEO techniques correctly because if the technique is not used properly then it can turn into Black Hat Technique. Example: If you have to post a comment on the blog it has to be related to the topic and not diverting from the topic. Otherwise it becomes Black Hat SEO.

While doing SEO of any website or page it is important to draw a plan. The plan should mention the technique which will be used for SEO and how a good page ranking can be achieved. If once the site is penalized by the search engine then it is difficult for the site to get a ranking on the search engine. Select the write method for SEO as search engines spiders are technique very sound and can detect the method very aptly

If you are one of those who think that a conference is just a waste of time where people keep rambling on the topic of discussion, then you are in for a huge surprise. Even if you consider yourself to be very experienced in this line of work, there are a lot of things which you might not even be aware of. Never let over confidence get on to your head. It is very terrible. There are quite a lot of grounds on which you can attend conferences on search engine optimization. Come, let us explore them

In such conferences one comes across a lot of people from the same business with whom you can strike a good conversation. When you and the person to whom you talk start sharing views, you tend to come across a lot of things you never knew of and in the process also end up teaching that person a thing or two. It is beneficial for both. The topic for conversing is same. It will really interest all the people. This is a nice chance to strike a good rapport. When someone finishes debating, come out with questions that challenge the person. You will gain a lot of admirers.

At such forums, you would often find lots of CEOs and Directors who are scouting for talented individuals. If you are good at your craft, there are very strong chances that such people might consider you for your services and a good job offer may come your way. Talk to people who are veterans in this field. You get to learn a lot from them. If people ask for your contact details, hand over you business cards. This makes a very good impression and you will be remembered. If you do not have these cards, get them made.

Most of all, when the whole environment is flooded with search engine optimization; you can expect to come back home with lots o data sufficient enough for the next couple of months. Enjoy the ambience, the food and the privilege of meeting industry leaders.