What is SEO?

SEO is one of the often heard words in blogging circle. If you are blogging for a while, you would have already known what SEO means. For new bloggers, SEO is something alien. In this post, I make an attempt to introduce SEO for beginners.

What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Are we going to optimize the search engine then? No, we are actually going to optimize our blog or website to gain some traffic from search engines. You can achieve Search Engine Optimization by improving internally (on-site) and externally (off-site) in order to increase the traffic from search engines.

What is a search engine?
A search engine is basically a tool or program designed to search for information on the internet. Examples of search engines include Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, Excite and so on. Each search engine has a proprietary algorithm that is used to extract relevant information from web based on several factors. Google is widely recognized as the biggest search engine currently.

How SEO helps in blogging?
A new blogger will know how difficult it is to get visitors to his/ her blog or web site. An experienced blogger knows how difficult it is to sustain visitors/ readers. Search engines provide a regular flow of visitors to your site if you can get on to their search engine result pages. To appear on the search engine results, you have to optimize your blog for search engines. Some of you may already be optimizing your blog without realizing what is Search engine optimization. A well written blog with focussed content will automatically achieve SEO. But, with a little bit further effort, the blog can go a long way in establishing substantial amount of traffic from search engines. The idea is if you can regularly feature in the first page of Google’s search result for a few keywords, then you need not spend time in promoting your blog.

How to achieve SEO?
SEO needs you to change your writing approach. You have to look at each and every aspect of your blog from the viewpoint of search engines. Some bloggers are of the opinion that a blog optimized for search engines are not good for reading. It is not always true. You can write a blog with readers in mind as well as search engines in mind. It is in your hands to understand the needs of the two groups and address them effectively.

When should I start SEO?
You need to have SEO in mind even before you commence blogging. The URL of your blog also plays an important role. But, if you already have an established blog and your URL does not reflect what your blog is about, don’t worry (My blog URL has very little relation to what I write). There are other areas you can improve on. For example, your blog title, blog description, post title and the content of your blog.

Let us start with internal tweaking of the blog and then move on to external tweaking to achieve some sort of Search Engine Optimization. I will address some of the SEO techniques in my future posts. I am not an SEO expert, but I would like to share some of the simple techniques that have proved successful to me. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post

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Want to Become another John Chow?

Let me continue the discussion on my decision to stop writing sponsored reviews. I did some justification why writing sponsored reviews is not going to help you in the long term. I wanted to clarify further on two issues, raised by fellow bloggers, on this sponsored reviews discussion.

Issue #1: Mixing of Sponsored Content and Original Content
Some of you feel that it is alright to write sponsored reviews as long as you write original posts in between. The mixing of sponsored posts and original posts is a requirement by the paid reviews companies in an effort to dissuade bloggers from completely writing paid content. But, as far as Google is concerned, the mistake is the same whether you write one sponsored post or many sponsored posts. The best practice is to keep away from paid posts.

Issue #2: John Chow Wannabes
Some of you argue that you can follow bloggers like John Chow, who continues to write for ReviewMe. He earns very good money in spite of Google’s penalty. JohnChow.com now has a page rank of only 3. If his page rank is so low, then how can he make substantial money from sponsored reviews? In fact, I understand that John Chow charges as much as $500 for a review on his blog. In his last monthly income report I read, he declared that he made $4000 from reviews made in the month of October 2008.

Let me tell you something, not every one of us can become John Chow. John Chow has as much as 45000 subscribers on his blog. So, a review by John Chow is worth for the money spent by the advertiser. Considering $500 for 45000 readers, the advertiser can reach to about 90 readers for every $1 he spends on the review.

Compare yourself with John Chow; do you have so many readers on your blog? I have just about 150 readers. Using John Chow’s standard of $1 for 90 readers, I could demand only about $2 for a review on my site. Can I do this? No, it is not worth. Neither for me nor for the advertiser. Hope you get what I mean.

Conclusion
Writing purely for money doesn’t seem to work well either for the publisher or the advertiser. The advertiser who pays you money for getting some ride on your PageRank loses when Google pulls your blog down to PR Zero. So, the advertiser is not going to get any help for ranking higher on search engine results page.

Let me conclude that I will commence sponsored reviews again when I have close to 45000 subscribers and I can demand $500 a review. And of course, the review is to reach my readers and not for ranking higher on Google results. So, all the links will be no-followed. In short, I will go for sponsored reviews again when I become another John Chow. Until then, I will maintain “No” to sponsored reviews. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post

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Google sends me traffic again

Last month, I wrote about my intention to completely stop writing sponsored reviews. I started to slowly add the no-follow tag to all the sponsored reviews links (any way, these links will be of no use to the other party as my page rank went down to zero). I also started to remove all affiliate links to the sponsored reviews sites.

Response for my decision on Sponsored Reviews
In the meanwhile, I received mixed response for my decision to stop writing sponsored reviews. Some of you told that I made the right decision. Some of you still think that paid reviews will provide a good source of income. Even some of you suggested that I will write paid posts again after getting back the page rank.

Success of Sponsored Reviews depends on Google PR
Let me tell you, you will get the opportunities only until you have some page rank attached to your blog. Once Google finds that you are writing for sponsored reviews companies, they will penalize with a PR zero. That’s it. You will immediately see a drop in the number of opportunities available for you and a drastic cut in the offer amount per opportunity. The same guys, who wanted you before when you had a good Page Rank, start to dump you now. Why they cannot support you now? Nothing has changed in your blog. Your writing skills are the same. But, they don’t want you now just because you lost your page rank.

Sponsored Reviews Leads to Dip in Search Engine Traffic
The other side effect of Google’s penalty will show up when your search engine traffic slowly and steadily goes down to almost nothing. This is where you will start to feel the pinch (like me). The graph below shows what could happen to your blog. Look at the graph dipping down very fast.


This started to happen to this blog since end September 2008. I didn’t really notice this until recently. Once I saw this, I wanted to make it clear that I am not writing any more paid reviews. That was the reason for my outright post explaining why I said no to sponsored reviews.

Google sending Traffic Again to my blog
Once I declared my intention clearly, removed some of the affiliate links to sponsored reviews sites and no-followed those paid reviews posts, I could see slowly the search traffic coming back. I could not definitely say that Google started to send me traffic due to the above actions. But, most likely, it is true that Google recognized my efforts. My Google Page Rank still stays at zero, but at least I am getting back on to the search engine results pages. That’s good. If you don’t believe me, look at the graph below.



Contribution of Search Engine Traffic in 2008
The graph tells you the clear picture. I will breakdown how search engine traffic contributed to the overall traffic to my blog.

Jan 2008 – 36.80 %
Feb 2008 – 52.12 %
Mar 2008 – 33.84 %
Apr 2008 – 40.87 %
May 2008 – 45.65 %
Jun 2008 – 56.75 %
Jul 2008 – 56.28 %
Aug 2008 – 50.33 %
Sep 2008 – 33.24 %
Oct 2008 – 3.12 %
Nov 2008 – 1.08 %
Dec 2008 – 15.30 %

Look at how the search engine contribution dropped to single digits in the month of Oct 2008 and Nov 2008. In the first 9 months of the year, the search engines contributed about one-third to one-half of the overall traffic to the blog. The traffic went down dramatically in October and November. But, you could see a good recovery in December 2008.

Conclusion
I think I made myself clear here. But, if you still have any doubts about the impact of writing sponsored reviews, I am not going to push you further. Decide whether you want short term benefits or you want to establish a blog that brings in a steady income for a longer period. The ball is in your court. Please subscribe to my feed if you like this post

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