An occasional writer's journal

It would be easy to consign to your spam dump every unsolicited article that arrives in your e-mail, but how much useful information are you throwing away?

Internet marketing and so-called “pro blogging” have become so obsessively competitive that the amount of spam dressed up as e-mail tips or resources for bloggers has become freaking phenomenal.

However, I have found that the quality of material circulated by the more respectable blog resource sites has steadily improved, and contributors to the more popular blogging digests know that spamming gets them nowhere when trying to entice subscribers.

Of the half-dozen or so blogging sites to which I subscribe — and which I find the time to read — one that has particularly impressed me of late is Blog Traffic Exchange which always seems to present the more bewildering of blog topics in clear and concise terms.

Leap up the search rankings with key words

A recent edition focused on the importance of writing “unique SEO content” for your blog, a factor overlooked by the more stubborn blogger who writes an occasional entry using the most popular keywords they can incorporate before sitting back and waiting for visitors to arrive in their thousands.

It is curious that snappy titles can attract a flood of visitors from social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon, while the overuse of keywords within a blog entry could end up being penalised by search engines. It is difficult to keep producing articles when you’re actually forcing yourself into SEO writing instead of blogging. You simply get bored.

The easiest and cheapest way to maintain your enthusiasm for blogging is to produce fresh content, and regularly, whatever the subject. You can vary your content and still garner high rankings in the most popular search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

According to BTE, “It is important that you avoid making the SEO mistake that so many other websites are making, which is that they are failing to add new, fresh and unique content to their websites on a regular basis. They spend hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars designing the look of their website, and then it fails in the search engines because they believe that once the website is running, their job has been completed. The truth is, if you stop updating your website once you have taken it live, you are doing something very wrong.

“Why is this? This is because search engines love and feed on fresh and unique content. This is so true, in fact, that they literally troll the internet specifically looking for websites that have updated their contents. In the world of search engine optimization or SEO, content is king.

“Adding fresh content will help to significantly improve your search engine results, because search engines are literally constantly on the lookout for websites that have updated content, making sites with fresh and new content the best on the web. You can easily give these search engines what they are looking for simply by regularly updating the content that is on your website, adding informative articles and refreshing the content on other pages. Your content should never simply sit still or stagnant unless you don’t want people looking at it.”

You probably will find me blogging about popular themes if they happen to be newsworthy and I can be bothered to come up with a new angle. It would be more of an achievement to reach the upper search engine rankings with the general keyword of “writing” to keep my content options open. Besides, I’ve always thought of blogging as a way of sharing whatever is on my mind, without being limited to a particular topic.

Thanks to Blog Traffic Exchange for the germ of an idea for another random post.