Softz Solutions

Web Content Writers often struggle for versatile and quick references to consult with. Repeated writing on similar topic is exhaustive unless their effort is fueled with striking momentum.

Hence it is imperative to navigate them with resourceful ideas so as to make their contributions ever green.

a) Nurture the habit of delivering problem solving observations and recommendations through your writing. It’s interesting and satiating too.

b) While writing for client website, consult competitors too. Understand what and how they are offering? How different is your client’s service, practice area from rest others? In a way find primary data from multiple relevant domains.

For example, if the assignment is about a service company, assimilate information from these following sections based on availability- Client testimonial, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), service type and specialties, reviews, location, case studies, updated news etc.

c) Ideas can flow from any direction- On a particular topic of your choice ask opinions from your friends, colleagues or seniors either offline or online. You can incorporate the essence of natural discussions too.

d) Keep a close watch on Newspaper’s editorial columns, speaker’s note, reviews; necessarily weekly magazines and special inserts too. These are authentic and well researched sources.

e) Develop the knack of analyzing Global advertisements and marketing pitch publicized in different media. Follow their trend of product/service display. Write on your own established view point, user’s experience.

f) Join some social networking sites, forums, discussion panels. Always look for quality places while participating and exchanging views.

g) As your topic necessitates, subscribe to sites with automated update features like Newsletter, RSS Feed, Blog post, Article feed etc. Through Google email alerts you can cover most of news story, industry trend, celebrity or event updates based on your choice of query or topic.

h) Learn how to connect and synchronize thoughts by expanding topic association. Play with words, experiment with their uses, identify good writing style on web and then imbibe it.

Finally, be honest to your contribution. Feel pride while serving information cum solutions to billions of audiences. Cherish the writing moments!

SEO is nothing but a marketing tool. A super-talented marketing expert cannot promote a product or service if he does not understand how the product works and what are the special features it has. And to market the product creatively, the marketer should have a solid knowledge about the product.

When you do SEO, you have to understand your client’s website. Few basic things you have to do before starting SEO for a client:

• Understand their target audience and country
• Understand their objectives – traffic, conversion or clicks on ads
• Understand the business – special features, how are they different
• Study the market; watch the competitors and their online behavior
• Start keyword research – consider client’s input and use your own knowledge to decide on the keywords
• Think of article topics that can create a buzz for the client
• Think of niche-specific online platforms where you can promote your client
• Find out web spaces where you can place banner ads to have a strong online presence
• Decide which social media channels can be good for the client
• Find target audience on Social Media and reach to them

With no understanding on how your client does business, you can do a lot of article submission and directory submissions, but you cannot think out of the box. To stand above the average you have to go that extra mile, do your own homework and prepare yourself to take up the project. And while preparing the marketing plan, apply your understanding in it. Unless you know the terminologies and industry-specific terms, you cannot write an acceptable Meta tag even!

And when it comes to Social Media Marketing or community building, this domain knowledge becomes more important. Without a fair understanding about the market, the product and the service, you cannot engage the customers in a conversation.

Stand out of the crowd, study your client’s business properly, know about the product, do some basic research and then start working on it.

Search Engine Optimization used to be considered as the process of making a website visible in the organic web search. But can you ignore Image Search, Video Search, Blog Search any more?

SEO 2.0 covers them all. Businesses that are looking for web presence should not miss the other verticals of web search. Image optimization, video optimization, blog post optimization and organic search engine optimization – the combined effect of all can only help to achieve a strong online presence.

There are many plug-ins available for WordPress that allow bloggers to optimize the blog posts – such as adding Meta tags, introducing search engine friendly URL etc. Image optimization and video optimization cover a lot of things also. These topics require dedicated blog posts.

Even a lot of individuals and corporate houses go for optimization for name search – professionally called online reputation management. If someone searches for the name of an individual or a brand name, they should see the official pages related to the individuals and brands only.

Finally, with the increasing popularity of mobile web, companies are going for optimization for mobile search as well. Competition is tougher when it comes to mobile search as on web people may visit the pages appearing in the second page of the SERP. But on mobile, people hardly browse beyond top 5 results.

However, if more people start accessing web from mobile – then companies cannot go without having mobile website and without doing optimization for mobile web search. Get ready for the new verticals; otherwise it might be too late.

Websites are for your visitors; it is always recommended to write content for the visitors, and not for the search engines. It is true that you have to keep few parameters in mind while writing web page content; otherwise, search engines will not be able to send traffic to your website. But that should not be your sole objective.

It is the reader who goes through the website content and then buys the product or service you are selling. So write for them, address their requirements and make the content presentable and informative so that they find it appealing and helpful.

Few suggestions to make your content useful for visitors and crawlable for search engines as well:

1] Divide the content into different headings and sub headings.

2] Use <h1></h1>tag to define the heading.

3] Use <h2></h2>, <h3></h3> and so on to define the sub-headings.

4] Keep the paragraphs short – long paragraphs are difficult to read.

5] Keep the sentences short. Simple and short sentences are easy to read online.

6] If you are using images on the page, make sure the image has proper alt attribute and title attribute. This will help people understand the content of the page even when the image does not load.

7] If you are using video or audio files on the website, have a transcript available. Readers who are physically challenged will find it helpful indeed.

8] Use readable font size and font color.

9] Make sure you are using a soothing color combination. Font color should match with the background color.

10] Link to other pages of your website where relevant information is available. Interlinking is good for search engines and useful for readers too.

11] Make sure the page content has the terms that your readers may use to search the service or product that you offer.

If you want to add something more to this list; feel free comment. Let’s build up the best content writing guideline here.

It has been more than 7 days since Google confirmed the influence of site speed in web search ranking. Site speed is a signal that Big G is considering with many others and it may not be a strong ranking factor as of now. But the ball has started rolling – if the webmasters do not review site speed now and take suitable steps to make them load faster, it may be too late!

Here are some free tools (suggested by Google) that can be used to test and improve site speed:

• PageSpeed: Open source Firefox/Firebug add on
• YSlow: A free tool by Yahoo!
• WebPagetest: Page performance and optimization checklist

Besides, the Site Performance check in Google Webmaster console helps to find out the areas that can be improved. Many other tools and information on how to make your website faster are available at http://code.google.com/speed

The comments below the announcement show a mixed opinion about the change. Some are happy as the speed gets importance, whereas, some are concerned about the websites that contain images, videos and flash files. People have also asked how Google will take care of the sites that are slow because of the Google Analytics code snippet!

There is no reason to think that Google will not improve the algo. Let’s wait for the Speed Part II to be released!

Continuous effort to offer better user experience is what makes Google different from others. And that is the reason, Google is putting so much stress on website loading time. How much time your website takes to load is a factor Google is likely to consider to rank your website!

Just think: a user runs a Google search, Google displays the results, and then when the user clicks on a link, it takes several minutes to load the page! Why should Google list such a web page that annoys its user? Logical!

Slow websites are bad for your users also. When someone with dial up connection visits your website and the page takes so much time to load, chances are high that the user will leave your website. So, you are losing visitors because your website is slow.

Google is so desperate to enhance user experience that they are going to introduce a new internet protocol, name spdy (should be pronounced as speedy) which is supposed to be many times faster than http. It’s own optical fiber based private internet is in beta or something. What else do you need? Get ready to type spdy://www.google.com/ in near future.

Are you one of those who believe that Social Media cannot return satisfactory profit and that investing in Social Media is a total waste of money? Then this post is for you!

You simply cannot ignore social media anymore; if you do then you are going to lose something for sure. Google has integrated real time search with its web search. Logged in users can see relevant updates from their social networks.

In a video Google has described that this integration will help people find ‘What’s happening right now?’ and ‘What’s happening nearby?’ very easily. Watch the video here.

Now comes the SEO point of view: isn’t it an easy way to make it to the first page of the search engines? If your website is new chances are high that it will take some time to rank high for relevant searches; but if you have an active network, you can actually appear on the first page throughout the day. For this you have be a super-active node on various social media platforms preferably on those Google is fetching data from.

Even if someone is not getting quality traffic from social media, they can get a strong web presence by staying active on social media and networking websites. Now, how to get quality traffic from social media is a different topic; will discuss more on it later. Keep visiting us.

What is content optimization? Optimize for whom? Is it different from on-page optimization? How to optimize content? Well, let me answer one by one.

What is content optimization?

Content optimization is the process of presenting the content of a website in such a way so that it becomes useful and attractive for the users and easy to crawl for the search engines. And here comes the next question – optimize for whom?

Why content optimization? Optimize content for whom?

First priority is readers of course. Present the content in a proper way so that your readers find it easy to comprehend. At the same time, make it understandable for the search engine bots too. Especially when you are dealing with non-textual content such as image or video, you have to be very careful on how to make it understandable for the search engines.

Is it different from on-page optimization?

It is a part of on-page optimization; but on-page optimization includes many other things. When we discuss content optimization, we just talk about the part within and .

And then comes the most important point – how to do this. Let’s see:

How to optimize content?

1] Know how people read web pages. Process of reading a web page on computer screen is different from that of a book or newspaper. Short and simple sentences and small paragraphs make web content more readable for human beings.

2] Arrange the entire text under various headings; use H1, H2 and H3 tags for the headings and sub-headings.

3] Use keywords in the content and in H1, H2 and H3 tags. Do not put in keywords in the page content so that it looks like keyword stuffing; maintain a healthy keyword density. You can just think of various words that your readers may use while searching the type of product, service or information you offer and use those words in the text; it should make sense!

4] If you are linking to another page of your website or an external website, use meaningful words as the link text. This will help your readers understand where they will be going.

5] Use link title attribute properly to help your readers know about the destination.

6] While presenting image, make sure the alt attribute and image title attribute are properly used; put meaningful and relevant text in image alt and title attributes. This will not only help the users understand the image, but help search engines to tag the image properly.

7] Use relevant terms as image file names; this may increase the chances of the image to appear in the image search.

8] If you are showing content in video, use proper tags or place a transcript just below the video. This will be helpful for those who are physically challenged; good for search engines too.

Do you want to add more points here? Feel free to comment.

Search Engine Optimization is a process of promoting your website on the web by making it more user-friendly and search engine friendly. To be honest, users are more important than the search engines; however, you cannot ignore the search engines as well. Hence, do not try to fool the search engines OR apply any technique to exploit the search engine algorithm. At the same time do not try to deceive the visitors. Wear the white hat proudly.

It is true that some SEO clients ask for guaranteed and instant result. It is the responsibility of the SEO company to supply proper study materials to the clients so that they can understand how search engine optimization is done. Once the clients understand that SEO is a long process and no company can guarantee top position, they will not make such demands.

It is not right to apply unethical black hat techniques just to satisfy the demands of your clients. White Hat SEO may take some time to deliver the result; but it covers the ground so well that the optimized websites continue to perform well and sustain the performance.

Therefore, while taking up search engine optimization projects, it is important to know how much understanding the client has about SEO. Do they expect something that is not achievable? In that case, talk to the client and let them know that SEO is an array of ethical strategies to assign higher visibility to a website.

Things that fall under white hat SEO are:

• Meta tags optimization
• Content optimization
• Code optimization
• Content creation
• Making websites more crawlable
• Proper navigation for users
• Creating a strong web presence

Do you want to add more points to this list? Please comment.

In 2010 you just cannot ignore the power of internet. Whether you are a business owner in USA, UK or in India – you must have a website to establish your web presence.

If you are still not convinced, just click on the link to check internet usage statistics of the world. Remember the computer savvy generation of India is no more in school. Internet penetration is likely to increase like anything in next couple of years. The TREND of searching information online and doing transaction online is supposed to become TRADITION in the South Asian countries too.

Therefore, not having a website is a no-mercy ignorance. If you have already covered the ground and hosted your own website, jump start and start promoting it online. It can be difficult for you to understand the whole process of web marketing, so take help from a reputed web marketing company.

It may not be possible for a small business owner to hire a web marketing expert; assigning the web marketing jobs to a reputed SEO company is the best thing one can do. This way you can get the expert minds work for you and at the same time you can avoid the hassles of setting up a whole new department.

If you do not have a website yet, do not feel bad – you can actually turn this situation in your favor. Contact SEO web design company and let them develop your website following all the SEO guidelines. See if the SEO web marketing company you have chosen to work with can guide the design team on how to build search engine friendly website.

Once you have a website that offers easy navigation to search engines and to your visitors and satisfies all on-page factors you can expect better visibility and higher ranking.

If you already have a website, professional SEO consultants will conduct SEO audit to find out the areas of the website that needs improvement. This way they help you prepare a search engine friendly website. With a flawless website, it becomes easy to promote your brand, products or service online.

Contact professional SEO company today and know your options; any delay may result in more loss.