We’ve recently rolled out new guest blogging packages for our clients and are also working on creating a database of blogs that accept guest blog posts.  We have clients in wide variety of industries from home decor to telecommunications, and would like to be able to offer a variety of guest blog opportunities to them.  If you have a blog and accept guest posts, leave a comment and we’ll add you to our database.  We are ideally looking for PR3 or higher blogs, but will accept listings of various page ranks if the quality of the site is good and relevant.

It’s safe to say that the last year has been tough on the SEO industry as a whole. There have been numerous Google Panda updates, then Venice and now Penguin.  Unfortunately, these updates haven’t been as cute as their names suggest for many website owners.  Many websites are facing penalties and having to redo their content and content strategy entirely.  This leaves me with one question:

Why are people still asking for article spinning and still using automatic techniques to create their content?

It’s no question as to whether or not these strategies are obsolete. They are! Google has openly said that they are penalizing for the use of these strategies, yet nothing is changing.  Everyone is always looking for “easy SEO,” but SEO wasn’t meant to be easy!  I see dozens of requests for content creation based purely on the use of software and low quality content.

In their latest update on the Google Inside Search blog, they’ve listed 52 changes they made in April. One of those was “No freshness boost for low-quality content.” This means that they have made a modification to ensure that low-quality content does not receive a freshness boost and therefore no boost in ranking, while their improvements on the “freshness signal” ensures that quality and fresh content will be promoted.

If you’re using software to spin content (that probably wasn’t all that great to start with) what are you trying to achieve? I see it as a waste of money. Instead of putting effort into creating spun content, why not put that effort into creating quality content that people will actually find useful? If you do, you’ll benefit much more in the long run.

Lay Off the Keywords!

Another update they made in April was a “keyword stuffing classifier improvement.” This update enables them to detect keyword stuffing more effectively and has made this classifier in search better.  Google has recently stated that a keyword density over 3% is too high.  In fact, I recommend that you create content with keywords in mind and use them as naturally as possible. Nobody wants to read content that has obvious keyword placements in it, it’s distracting as a reader and your reader will most likely click away quickly.

Focus More on Your Reader and Less on Google

I think these are becoming the words to live by for website owners and SEOs.  It’s easy to focus on the technicalities, but what we really need to focus on is our readers.  What do they want to learn? How can we provide them the information they seek?

Google tells us about the changes that affect our websites, but they’ll never tell us exactly what to do to improve our rankings. They give hints, but they’ll never tell us their secrets.  By not telling us their secrets, they are able to make us focus on improving our white hat strategies and on creating amazing and useful websites. That’s what they really want.  So instead of focusing on how you can “game” the search engines and make your job “easy”, focus on providing what your customers want and you’ll be rewarded by the search engines as well.

Our May Newsletter should be landing in your inbox shortly and it has some exciting information in it.  This month is devoted entirely to our new guest blogging packages! Google has been hard on many websites this past year or two between the Google Panda and Penguin updates. I wonder why they give them names after what appear to be friendly, cuddly animals? Because for many people, these algorithm changes have been anything but friendly.

We know that linkbuilding is perhaps the most difficult aspect of SEO. It’s just hard to get unsolicited links and it’s even harder to contact websites and have them take you serious. Plus, even if you’ve been doing article marketing the right way, those who abused it have pretty much ruined it for the rest of us.  The links are becoming more diluted each day, so it’s time to make a change and that’s what we’re ready to do.  We will no longer be promoting our article marketing packages, but will continue to offer them for those that are still interested.  What we do recommend is taking a look at guest blogging and how it can help you to increase the diversity in your backlink profile and hopefully help you regain your search engine rankings.

Here’s a quick breakdown on how it works.  It’s basically the new, friendly version of article marketing, but with a few twists and caveats.

1. We write in-depth and interesting articles on topics from your industry. At the bottom of each article, you get to include an author box, only it is now recommended to use a brand based keyword and an anchor text keyword, as Google is targeting anchor text keywords.

2. We submit the articles to a guest blog network where we will receive and vet the offers to post your articles from other bloggers.  We will select the blogs that have the most relevance and the best PR ranking that we can get for each article. We are shooting for PR3 or higher, but it will likely vary by topic and the offers we receive.

3. The guest blog will provide us with linking and posting details and then we will provide that information to you in a Google Docs spreadsheet and update it as we get more information, links, etc.

The process is quite simple and we believe that this is the best strategy to take these days in linkbuilding.  You can find our packages on our new Guest Blogging page.

I often get the question “Why do PRs cost so much more than articles?” Our standard rate for press releases is $100, while our standard rate for a 400 word article is $12.

The answer is actually quite simple – they have to be newsworthy.

Sometimes finding something newsworthy about a website or a company can be rather difficult. There’s not always a new launch or a new product or a new event happening. Sometimes, as a writer, we’re asked to craft something newsworthy out of a pretty basic and unchanging situation. That sort of creativity is not typically required in your everyday blog post or article.

Additionally, press releases have to be written with not only SEO in mind, but the requirements of press release distribution sites like PRWeb. When using these sites, you have to be very careful about word choice as one word can make the site see the PR as too salesy or not newsworthy. One word can really cause this issue. I’ve seen it happen many times.

The following are a few of requirements that PRWeb has:

• Newsworthy Content – Cannot be an “open letter” or sales letter and it also cannot be written as a blog.
• Objective Tone – PRs must be written objectively and cannot have too much “hype.”
• Must be between 300-800 words – We write PRs at 400-500 Words You Want
• Have a Clear News Source – It must be easy to recognize what company or individual is announcing the news
• No Personal Opinions
• No Explicit Content
• No Spam or Link Spam
• No reprints
• No duplicate content
• No intent to harm another person or company

All news releases have to be written in the standard PR format as well. We provide the press release to the client in the standard press release format that is suitable for distribution to newspapers or television stations, but the format also makes it easy for you to copy and paste in the different sections of the PR into PRWeb or other press release distribution site.

If you’re looking for press release ideas, PRWeb has an excellent page for this. You can also learn much more about press releases on their How To’s and Quick Tips section.

“Over optimization” – it’s been a hot topic after Matt Cutts mentioned it at South by Southwest (SXSW) in the “Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better” panel discussion.  But what exactly is over optimization?

After being a writer in the SEO industry for almost 7 years now, it’s something that I’ve been fighting against for ages.  There’s a feeling of dread that falls over you when you read a project description that mentions a keyword density of 3% or higher.  I don’t think most people really understand what that sort of density means.  It means that in a 500-word article, you have to use that keyword phrase 15 times! (And most keyword phrases are 2 words or longer.)

But, before I go off on a tangent, let’s look at a few of the areas that may lead to over optimization that I’ve seen amongst clients (or client requests) that might just lead to problems down the road:

• Excessive Keyword Density – Obviously this is one and I think that in the past year or so most sites are calming down the keyword stuffing, but you still have to be aware of all the areas where you might have stuffed keywords. Think meta tags, descriptions, headings, body content, etc. Google suggests staying below 3%. I suggest 1% or just let the writing flow naturally and work the keywords in where they fit.

• Thin Content – This is in reference to thin content that doesn’t have any reader value. You read it and you didn’t learn anything from it – that’s thin content. Combine it with keyword stuffing and that’s a double whammy.  I’ve always promoted interesting and educational content. (It’s more fun to write too).

• Duplicate Content – You might be thinking that all of those spun blog posts or articles won’t cause you any harm, but think again. GoogleBot has gotten smarter and they can easily recognize this type of junk content now.  Additionally, if you have product descriptions, category descriptions or any other boiler plate type content on your site, that counts as duplicate content as well.

• Over use of Header Tags – When people discovered that H1 tags were good for SEO, they went a little crazy with them.  Your headings should be successive, so one H1, one H2 and so on.  Don’t make every new paragraph subheading a H1 and stuff a keyword in it. (I’ve seen this and it can be distracting as a reader.)

These are just a few of the items that are on the “over optimization” checklist for GoogleBot.  There are many more that deal with backlinking from poor quality sites, tricky redirects, ugly site design or paid links. Most of these items are obvious common sense items that a good white-hat SEO person wouldn’t do, but the search engines are constantly changing and you don’t want old content or other items that were created purely for SEO in the past to come back and land you with a penalty from Google.  It’s best to take inventory now and have new, fresh and useful content written to replace it.

That title may seem like a bit of a tongue twister, but it’s one that rings true.  There’s an interesting trend that I’ve been seeing over the past several months and that is that people want to pay less for content, but they want it to be higher quality.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way and, honestly, what product or service does work that way?  To me, it’s like saying you want to buy an iPhone, but you want to pay the price of a standard flip phone.  You simply can’t expect to buy something fabulous, but pay pennies for it.

I’ve literally seen people posting projects with budgets of $50 for 100 page ebooks! It’s insane.  That’s a nickel per page! If it takes you an hour to write 5 pages of content, that’s just 25 cents per hour!   What’s sad is that there are people willing to work at that rate, but that doesn’t mean that the resulting product is any good.

I recently stumbled across a SEOMoz Webinar by Ian Lurie and in that webinar he depicted the issue of low content budgets perfectly. It looked a little something like this:

Can’t see that little red dot? Yeah, I barely can. Ironically, content is a huge part of SEO, so why do companies budget such a small amount for content?

Too Many “Writers”

One reason is because the market has gotten to the point that it’s flooded with “writers”. I use “writers” in quotes on purpose because many of the individuals out there that are marketing themselves as writers have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.  They are just writing on the side and hoping to make some extra cash.  Worse yet, some are copying the profiles and samples of established, seasoned writers and trying to manipulate their clients into thinking they are something that they aren’t.

Unfortunately, they don’t know anything about SEO, they don’t understand the importance of quality and unique content and they put you at risk of duplicate content and plagiarism because of that.

Too Many Businesses Think They Can Automate Content

Much of what you read about SEO on the web today is grossly outdated.  You’ll read about article marketing and article spinning.  Additionally, tons of software programs were created to help you “automate” these processes.  Unfortunately, if you automate today, you’re likely going to get penalized by Google Panda.  It can be expensive, but the best route is to simply create new and unique content.  That’s one of the keys to better search engine rankings.

Businesses Don’t Realize that Content Helps with Linkbuilding

This one goes back to content being an important part of SEO.  If you write a report or a guide for SEO, you need a writer right?  Of course, so the cost of that writer is going to come out of your content budget and not the SEO budget.  Combining these two budgets may allow more businesses more opportunities in creating quality content rather than buying low quality content from low quality writers.

In addition, you need writers for a lot more than just SEO writing. You need a writer for web content, product descriptions, press releases and other pieces of content that make your website what it is.  One writer can handle several services, so it’s worth it to expand your budget to accommodate all that needs to be written by a professional.

What’s “Expensive” Really Isn’t All That Expensive After All

We get a lot of feedback that our rates are higher than others and we realize that. We can’t compete with new and foreign writers and the low rates that they charge, but you also can’t put a price on our experience.  We’ve been writing for the SEO industry for over 6 years and we’ve done over $1 million in sales.  We’re not huge company, but we are:

• Experienced
• Knowledgeable in the best SEO practices (including the up-to-date ones) and always trying to learn more
• Professional
• Timely in deadlines and communication
• Efficient
• Competitively priced

When you look at these qualities, it’s hard to say that we’re overpriced because we are provide a lot behind the scenes and we’re always available.  We don’t automate, we write from scratch, we do our research and we try to provide the best quality that we can.  We are always working to provide the best user experience for our buyers that we can.  We offer revisions if we don’t hit the mark the first time (even though we try to very hard). That’s a lot of service that you won’t get with a lot of writers and I believe that justifies our rates, which I feel are actually quite competitive.

Don’t Skimp and Save Money Later

By not skimping on your content now, I can almost guarantee that it will save you money in the long run.  We have had more clients come back to us because they went with someone cheaper and they received content written by foreigners that couldn’t be comprehended or they’ve experienced penalties due to duplicate content or similar issues.  Prevent stress and save money by having it done right the first time.

A professional SEO writing company can help your business in various areas, so why not expand that content budget a little bit and see what quality content can do for you?

On February 24^th, I wrote a blog about the disturbing trend in BMR (Build My Rank) content.  Apparently, not only was I fed up with it, but Google was too because just a few days later they rolled out Panda 3.3.  Google stated “This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.”  It took place February 27^th and related to this roll out was also a change in the way they are evaluating links in that they “turned off” a component that they were using to evaluate links.

Then March 19^th, Build My Rank posted a blog titled “It’s Been a Great Run!” Well, I guess as a company it was for them, but not necessarily their customers.  They are closing down their service and offering refunds for any “unused credits” and also giving people their content back that hasn’t been posted.  Users can also remove posts from their networks immediately.  Basically, if you spent money with the company and used all of your credits, you can delete all of your links and your money has been wasted. They say they will be back after the dust clears, but I’m not sure what they can do since their service is basically buying links, which is against the Google TOS.

While all links should definitely be deleted, one has to wonder if it even matters? Does Google not already know what sites were using BMR for backlinking and can they still not penalize those sites for buying links?  I’m sure some penalties will be handed out and some rankings will be lost.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that not only was Build My Rank affected, but so were several other link networks.  These include:

• Authority Link Network – About 20-25% of network has been deindexed.
• LinkVana
• SEO Link Monster
• SEO Elite Linkvine
• SEO Nitro
• Elite Network
• Backlink Buddy
• High PR Society

After this massive deindexing, it’s obvious that the strategy of buying links, even if it doesn’t even look like link buying, is a violation of Google’s TOS and they are obviously enforcing their rules.

Also, as I research this story, I’m noticing that many blogs have posted “BMR alternatives.” I think it should be stated that there are no true alternatives other than honest content creation and linkbuilding.  The best way to build links is to create value on your site, release valuable press releases, post to your social network sites, etc.  Quality should always be the focus, even if that means you have to expand your content budget.  Quality content is what the search engines want.

If you would like to read a very educational article on the link network deindexing, visit the SEOMoz blog.  The Unnatural Link Warnings and Blog Networks post has some excellent explanations and graphics on how it works and what to do if your site is penalized.

Another important point I see that should be learned from this is that there are no guarantees in SEO. No matter what you do to build links, it’s all a strategy and sometimes those strategies don’t work.  Sometimes even legitimate strategies don’t work; no matter how much money you throw at them. There’s no guaranteed strategy in SEO. You just have to keep working, stay creative and create quality content without breaking the rules!

As a writing company, we pride ourselves on prompt communication and we try to make sure that we are clear on all project details and requirements before moving forward.  Unfortunately, it seems that sometimes even this is not enough to have a project written without a hitch.

We understand that revisions sometimes happen and that we can’t please everybody, we learned this a long, long time ago.  Even though we try to get a project 100% right the first time, there are times that revisions are needed and we understand that.  However, it’s also important that our clients are prompt in their communication and provide us much detail as they can when it comes to writing their project.

To assist our clients in providing us with the details we require, we have three questionnaires that can be downloaded from our site.  We also provide these on projects in Elance that we are awarded to further assist buyers who may need the additional help in providing us the details we require.  We have questionnaires for:

• Web Content
• Article and Blog writing
• Press releases
• eBooks

They can be downloaded here.

One of the reasons that we use email as our main communication, we are able to keep all project details in writing and so that they can be later referred back to if necessary.  This has proven to be important time and time again.

We take great pride in being very quick to respond to any and all messages.  We often have clients who wonder if we even sleep.  While we do, we make ourselves available to the very last minute, as many of our clients are out of the country and we try to be available as much as possible.

If revisions are required, we do our best to complete them promptly and usually within 24 hours. Revisions are offered within the scope of the project though, so we only offer revisions on what we wrote.  We also only offer revisions 14 days after the work is turned in, as it is not feasible to request revisions on a project that is older than two weeks due to the conflicts with scheduling such a request can make.

Over the years and as business demand has increased, we’ve had to make a few adjustments to the way we schedule projects and perform work. However, one aspect still remains the same and that is that each project is scheduled a day (or more depending on size) and completed in its entirety.  We don’t jump from project to project on a daily basis doing one article here for one client and another article there for another.  Each project is worked on until all 10 articles or 25 pages are complete.  This is to ensure quality and consistency across the project.  It really does make a big difference in the outcome.

Here’s how our scheduling process works though if you are interested in making an order and need to determine when that project would be completed.  It’s really rather simple:

1. Make contact by email.  Let us know how many pages, how many words and the type of project you have. This will allow us to give you an accurate quote. If you know what you want specifically, you can also prepay via the Quick Order page.

2. After we’ve quoted you and you’ve given a definitive ”go” on the project, we will send an invoice for half up front via our Freshbooks account. This system allows you to pay by PayPal or Google Checkout. You can also fill out our Credit Card Authorization form and we will charge your card directly.  For very large projects, we’re also willing to accept bank transfers.

3. Once the invoice is paid or if you’ve prepaid, we will schedule you in.  We book up a week in advance, so if your order is in before Thursday of each week, your project will be scheduled for the upcoming week.  We have a 7 day turnaround time, although it is first come, first serve as well. We will try to schedule you in earlier if our schedule allows.  If it comes in after Thursday, then you will likely be scheduled for the next, next week, which will put delivery within 10-14 days.

4. If you would like to receive a first chapter and outline for approval on an ebook or a first article for approval prior to the set being completed, just ask. We’re happy to accommodate.

If you need your content in a hurry, we do offer priority rates and we can often accomodate a quick turnaround. Just let us know what you need and how quickly you need it.  We can ofte work something out.

As you can see, the scheduling process is not difficult. We really just need all of the details you can provide us, as well as a definitive “go” after you receive a quote. This way we can get you scheduled in without any delays.

Many of the press releases that we write for clients are mainly for SEO purposes.  They do have some newsworthy value, but overall it’s the launching of a new website design or product.  Very rarely do they affect the lives of people in a very personal way.

This past Monday we had the opportunity to write a press release for Universal K9 Inc. They are a personal protection dog and police/military dog training company.  They have trained dogs for sale, however, they also offer a service allowing parents and individuals the ability to locate drugs or weapons within their own homes.  The press release was written Monday and distributed Tuesday via PRWeb.  The client also sent the press release to local news stations and two of them picked up the PR and did a story on the 6 o’clock news!

Needless to say, we are thrilled for this client and the service that they offer truly is newsworthy and beneficial to the people of San Antonio and the surrounding area.

You can watch the KSAT broadcast and story on Universal K9 here and read the press release on PRWeb here.