These are my picks from the problogger group writing project. There were some great entries and I found some new blogs I like. The first 3 are on topic for my blog. I naturally gravitated towards the seo and ppc posts and these all contain good information. The last 2 were entries unrelated to search marketing but ones I particularly liked.

It was an interesting process. I found myself analysing why I clicked some titles and not others so it drilled home some copywriting lessons.

Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO by Michael Jensen

Top 5 Ways Ignorant Advertisers Lose Money to Google via AdWords by Richard Ball

Top 5 Ways to Lose Your Great Search Engine Rankings Fast! by DazzlinDonna

Top 5 Ways to Become a Major Poet or Problogger (With Apologies to W. H. Auden). by Geoffrey Philp

Top 5 Things About My Ex by Katie Baird

Also, I made it on to a favourites list which felt good I’ll include the link because his picks were good ones (in addition to my entry I mean )

My Life With IT

By way of some background, Google has two indexes, the main index and a supplemental index. The supplemental index has been given the name Google Hell amongst others. There are some good reasons why you don’t want pages of your website or blog to be in the supplemental index.

• Pages from the main index show up first so if you are stuck in supplemental your pages will be way down in the rankings for anything competitive
• Google doesn’t crawl the supplemental index as often so once there it can take a long time to get back

To ascertain whether your pages are in Google Hell use the search query site:www.yourwebsite.com.au

The supplemental pages will have supplemental result after the url.

Top 5 Reasons

1. Duplicate or Similar Content

Pages with very similar or duplicated content are likely to end up in the supplemental index. Blogs can have a problem if posts are short and therefore pages are similar to each other with elements such as navigation, blogrolls etc repeated on each page. Longer posts with unique content will fix this as will comments.

2. Similar Page Titles

Give each page a unique page title. With blogs beware of generated page titles that are all very similar because the blog name is prefixed to the title. This is more of a problem with long blog names. Don’t leave these titles as they are or Google will determine that all your pages are about the same thing and will regard them as duplicates. There are plugins for wordpress blogs that allow you to customise the page title. Seo Title Tag is one.

3. Similar or Duplicated Page Descriptions

The same applies to the description metatag. Make sure that you enter a unique description for every page. The Seo Title Tag plugin has this feature for wordpress blogs.

4. Poor Quality External Linking

One of the the top reasons for a page being in the supplemental index is a lack of relevant links from quality sites. Write good quality content that is worth linking to and get trusted links. Don’t take part in link exchange programmes.

5. Poor Internal Linking Structure

It can be hard at first to get good quality external links but you do have control over links to pages from other pages on your website or blog. If a page ends up in the supplemental index a few internal links pointing to it, in addition to fixing any duplicate problems outlined above, can get it out.

(This post is part of the problogger group writing project. I’d like to welcome any first time visitors who clicked through from problogger).

The “reasons why I blog” meme has been doing the rounds lately and even though the same themes keep coming up it’s still interesting to read the perspectives of fellow bloggers. Randfish at seomoz wrote one of the best responses.

Here are my top 5 reasons for blogging:

1. Establish Credibility

Writing about search engine marketing topics, and pay-per-click in particular, gives me the opportunity to demonstrate knowledge and attitude / enthusiasm. It’s a good way to show experience, particularly to prospective clients.

2. Explore Topics and Clarify My Thoughts

Often when I’m writing a post I’ll combine my own experience with some further research into the topic. I find that this process, and the discipline required to try and write something of value, and write it clearly, gives me a better insight into whatever topic I’m covering. If I get comments, positive or negative, which make me think further then so much the better.

3. Marketing and New Business Opportunities

This is connected with my first reason “establish credibility”. Blogs are a great way to get noticed, get more website traffic and establish a brand. One of the things that has happened since I started blogging is an invitation to have posts from my blog syndicated on the ientry network. Blogging is a good way to get this kind of recognition.

4. Feel Part of a Community

I mostly work by myself and it suits me to do so. I like the focus and concentration that comes with a quiet, solitary work environment. However I’m not entirely anti-social :). Online communities are a good place to form peer relationships, share ideas, have the occasional spat and generally avoid the feeling that you’re in a vacuum.

5. Improve Skills

I’ve already mentioned that I believe blogging improves my industry skills. There’s also a whole lot to learn in order to blog effectively. It can be frustrating at times and I’m definitely still learning but I like the idea of improving skills in this area. I bought this book a few weeks ago and really recommend it. There are also some great blogs on blogging.

What about you? If you blog I’d really like to hear your reasons. Or anything that’s stopping you from blogging if you don’t have a blog.

Brian Clark has some excellent ideas for writing effective titles in his blog copyblogger. He has recently re-written headlines submitted by his readers along with a rationale for the changes. It’s a good way of demonstrating what works.

At the core of his recommendations is the need to use the title to clearly communicate the value of the content to the reader. There are some tried and tested techniques for this such as:

• “10 ways to ……”,
• “How to (do xyz) and get (some benefit)
• “What you need to know about (xyz)”

If you are optimising a page for the search engines the title is important because having keywords in the page title is one of the most important factors contributing to ranking well for those keywords.

So, should you optimise for the search engines by making sure the title contains keywords, or should you make the title persuasive so that the reader is motivated to click through and read the rest of the post or article?

There’s no reason why you can’t have both of course. A title can be both persuasive and contain keywords. That’s always going to be the best result. I would always make sure that consideration is given to keywords in the title for the following reasons:

1. Using keywords will get more targeted traffic than people clicking a clever headline out of curiosity. Untargeted traffic doesn’t have as much value.

2. If one of the goals is to get your article republished, publishers will search article directories for relevant content using keywords.

3. The titles of most interest to your target audience are the ones that have relevance to them. Keywords are exactly that – words that have relevance for your target audience. If you don’t include the keywords the headline is less likely to stand out when someone scans a page.

A friend of mine started a blog. Take a look, he’s a good writer.
Boomtown Rap

Everybody (well almost everybody) is talking about the threatened legal action from the US Pork Board against breast feeding advocate Jennifer Laycock. One of her TShirt slogans is “The other White Milk”.

Plenty of bloggers have covered it already so I’ll just link to Kalena Jordan who has a good write up on it. I recommend you look at her blog anyway, and she’s in Australia

If you’ve never subscribed to a website before there’s some really good information on what it’s all about in this post by web strategist, Jeremiah Owyang.

The post is also useful if you have a company website that may benefit from offering feeds such as RSS.

You can start by subscribing to my blog if you’ve never been through the process before. You need a feedreader. I like netvibes and it’s quick, easy and free to set up an account with them. Then all you do is click the subscribe link on the left, or above, and select netvibes or any other reader. When you look at your netvibes page my blog feed will be there.

If you prefer, subscribe and opt to have new posts delivered to your email address.