The following is a guest post by Amanda DiSilvestro, If you would like to write for this blog, please check out the guidelines here.

First and foremost, you should be writing for your readers. Your content should be centered on your target audience, and your aim should be toward giving advice and adding value to your readers that find your site.

However, many companies write for reasons aside from reader experience; in particular, SEO. For those who are unfamiliar, SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and is a way for search engines to find content and determine where it falls on the search engine pages. The search engines use an algorithm that looks for several different components — duplicate content, keyword stuffing, doorway pages, etc. — and then it ranks the pages according to quality.

Now, every company knows that it is important to show up on search engine pages. Whether you’re starting a small business or are a veteran business owner, this is a great way to drive traffic to your site. For this reason, many companies write specifically for SEO purposes. They do keyword research, write content based on that keyword, and fit in unnatural keywords into an article just so the search engine bots will find the article and deem it “quality.” In some cases, there is nothing wrong with writing for SEO, but there is something wrong for writing only for SEO.

Here’s why:

• Search engines do not like websites that write strictly for SEO. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be hard to catch this, and sites have been getting away with it for some time.
• Readers do not like sites that write strictly for SEO because the content is not catering to their needs.
• Your website will surely never win any awards or special mentions in the online world. Editors and other website owners don’t like when content is written specifically for SEO.
• You will have a bad reputation. Although you may show up on page one of a search engine page, no one will want to stay on your page for more than a few seconds because there is nothing of value.
• You run the risk of getting penalized if the search engines do find out you’ve been writing (or even creating pages) specifically for SEO and not readers.

What many businesses don’t realize is that it is possible to get to the top of search engines if you write for your readers. This will boost your traffic, people will want to link back to your site when writing their own content, and you will eventually find your way to the top of search engine pages. If you think you’re ready to change your ways and start writing for readers instead of bots, consider a few of these changes you’ll need to make:

5 Ways Writing for Readers is Different than Writing for Search Engines

1. You need to write content that will get shared

When you write content for readers, readers will want to share this content via their social networks. This means that when writing, you need to be conscious of what you promise and what assumptions you make. If you’re writing strictly for SEO, you are likely writing in generalities, but writing for your readers is more personal. You cannot say “all of the customers at my last job weren’t nearly as much fun as you” because this could get back to your old customers! You also can’t offer a great deal to some people one week and then a mediocre deal to some the next week. I think you will find that writing in this way really does take a conscious effort.

2. You must be completely open and honest when you have made a mistake

If you’re really going to focus on writing for your readers, you have to acknowledge when something bad has happened with your company. If someone has a complaint, you cannot simply keep quiet about it because that customer won’t keep quiet about it. They will surely put a negative comment on your website and share it on all of their social networks. For this reason, it is important that your content changes as things like this happen. If there is something that needs to be addressed, you will need to address it through the content on your website (mainly because it probably began through content on your website).

3. Variety is important when it comes to content

Generally when a website is only focusing on SEO, they are focused on one or two specific keywords. This can get boring for readers because the general topic of the content is so similar. When you’re writing for readers, you want to make sure you have a variety of different topics on your website. The topics can fall under a general umbrella such as “business,” but each article should be something different about business. Not only that, but it helps to have content written in different forms. For example, you do not want an entire website full of “Top 5 Things” type blogs or a website full of only opinions.

4. The content will not always be about you and your company

While SEO is focused on your company, writing for readers is about being honest. Giving credit where credit is due is a great way to show that you are active in the online community. This will increase your exposure because whomever you are discussing will likely want to pay it forward and do the same for you. Even if they don’t, you have their audience looking at your content because they recognize a name or a blog you are referencing. All in all, this is a great way to connect and seem “real” to your readers.

5. Have a conversational and informal tone

You don’t always have to sound informal when trying to write for your readers, but it can help. Even if your website is very serious and centered around facts, you can offer a conversational tone that will help make things easier to understand. After all, if you’re writing for readers, you want to sound like a reader. If you’re writing for the bots, well then you will sound like a robot.

About the Author:

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to workers compensation insurance. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including phone systems to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.

As a continuation of my Building Links to Your Website post, I want to do the same thing with the subject of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A lot of people are confused about SEO, PageRank, search engine rankings, etc., especially if they’re just starting out.

I’ve been asked a number of questions recently via email and Facebook regarding this subject, so I wanted to share them with you all so that if you have the same or similar questions, you can get them answered here.

I’ll quote the questions and answers, and if I have anything to add, I’ll post it below that to keep Q&A’s separate from my afterthoughts.  Confused? You’ll see what I mean.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Q&A’s

Questions: May I ask you one question about SEO? What do you think about PR calculating? Is it really possible to achieve a PR 6 with 19 backlinks from a website that also has a PR 6? I mean, if I write 19 articles for EzineArticles.com, will my new website also achieve a PR 6?

Reference: http://www.fuzzone.com/blog/346/search-marketing/how-to-calculate-your-pagerank/

Is it a good idea to make backlinks from one site with a high PR, (for example, write articles to ezinearticles.com), or is it better to get backlinks from different sites? For example, EzineArticles, forum signatures, bookmarking, comments on blogs, etc.?

Answers: There are many variables to how PR is calculated. Simply getting a few backlinks from a PR 6 site like EZA will not make your site a PR 6.

I recommend getting backlinks many different ways; through articles, forum postings, blog commenting, social bookmarking, etc.

Afterthought: For more competitive niches, you definitely want to vary your link building strategy. However, if you’re building a micro niche site in which you only need a few good backlinks, then submitting a few articles to EZA would do the trick in most cases.

Question: What is your opinion about article marketing? Is it possible to achieve Google’s first positions ONLY by writing articles to ezinearticles.com (The niches would be with low competition)?

Answer: I highly recommend article marketing. As long as your competition is low, it is possible to get to the first position of Google by submitting to EZA alone. However, keep in mind your anchor text would need to be the same keyword phrase for every article you submit, and getting to the first position will take time.

Afterthought: The less the competition, the easier and quicker it will be to rank at the top of Google. If you’ve been following along with me for a while now, you’ll remember it took me all but a week to get my micro niche site to the first position in Google for my main keyword phrase.

Questions: I submit my articles to additional directories but they’re rewrited by software, so all articles are different from 30% to 50%. So, all is well there, but a lot of them are NO FOLLOW backlinks, so about 30% of my backlinks will be not counted, and they will not affect my sites in any way?

I have seen that search engine rankings are more important than PR, because many times I have seen that on the 1st place is a website with 2 PR and some count of backlinks, and on 2nd place is a website well known with 6 PR and much more backlinks, and I have always wondered why? Looks like that second site should be on the first place with the same keyword?

About bookmarking, I have a question. Must I bookmark only my site’s first page? I want to get good rankings for my home page, and all my backlinks are directed to the home page, so I must keep doing the same? Or, could I redirect backlinks to other pages on my site? One more thing, what if I bookmark some of my ezine articles? I heard that is good for PR and search engine ranks because the links will make the link between my site, ezine and bookmarking? Is it worth doing that if those bookmarking sites are nofollow?

Answers: As long as the article is at least 30% different, then they should be fine. In most cases those backlinks from those articles would count, and as long as the links are DO FOLLOW then PR will get passed through to your site. No Follow links are still beneficial for rankings, though.

Yeah, more baclinks doesn’t mean higher rankings… all the time. Each baclink is weighted on varying factors; factors that include the site’s PR, relevance, type of backlink, etc.

One social bookmarking site I use (http://www.mmosocialnetwork.com) does give you a DO FOLLOW backlink. May want to check that one out. I’m sure there are others as well. Perhaps a quick Google search will present a few.

When bookmarking, it’s important to bookmark individual blog posts and not the home page. When building backlinks in general, you do want to build backlinks to your home page, but at the same time you want to build links to your internal pages as well.

Bookmarking to NO FOLLOW sites won’t help with PR but will help for rankings.

Afterthought: Just remember when bookmarking you also want to bookmark other people’s stuff… it’s best to keep a good mix rather than bookmarking only your pages. You’ll be seen as a spammer and could have your accounts deleted.

That concludes the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Q&A.

Note: I don’t proclaim to be an expert in any field, especially anything related to SEO. I only speak from personal experience and what I’ve done and am doing to increase my search engine rankings for the sites I have, including this one.

If you seek professional advice or the wisdom of a “guru”, you won’t find it here. Search Google.

Final Thoughts

I want to thank you for sticking with me through this lengthy post. I hope you got value from these questions and answers and can apply them to your own SEO efforts.

Ask Your Question!

Do you have a question that wasn’t covered here? What specific SEO question do you have and would like answered? Let me know in the comments below.

I look forward to answering your questions!

Recently I’ve been getting a lot of questions related to getting traffic to a website, search engine optimization (SEO) and building backlinks to a site. My email and Facebook inboxes have been flooded with all kinds of questions, so I thought it would be great to post them here in case you had similar questions.

The topic I’m going to cover in this post will have everything to do with getting traffic to a site, for the most part. Some questions may stray a little into the other areas I mentioned, but for the most part they deal with traffic.

I’ll quote the questions and answers, and if I have anything to add, I’ll post it below that to keep Q&A’s separate from my afterthoughts.  Confused? You’ll see what I mean.

Traffic Q&A’s

Question: My site for the main keyword is #1 on Google. The local searches Google shows 6000, the webmaster tool as well. So I suppose it would be 6000 divided by 30 (month days) = 200 visitors per day. However, with Google Analytics I see that my site visiting only 70 unique visitors per day? My webmaster tool shows Search queries – Impressions – 6,600, Clicks – 1,000. Is this some kind a rule that if Google shows some number of searches you will never get all visitors to your site and must be divided by two?

Few times I have tried to change the description, but nothing happened.

Answer: When using Google’s keyword tool, those monthly search numbers are only estimates. So, sometimes they may be accurate, sometimes they may not be. The only thing to do at that point is to start ranking for other related search terms which will increase your overall traffic.

Afterthought: Another thing you want to remember is that just because your website may be in the number one spot, you still have the Sponsored Listings to compete with along with the other natural search results. Granted, being number one is going to bring in the majority of that traffic, but not all of it.

So, as I recommend, start trying to rank for other terms as well to increase your overall traffic.

Question: Maybe you could advise what should I do to fix this problem.

On my Google Webmasters account, I see that on my site, which is on #2 spot, have a very small amount of clicks – 73, but impressions – 1900. I’m wondering that here should be something not right, I understand that Google shows my website’s link – 1900 times, but visitors clicking on it only 73 times, am I right Alan?

What should I do to get most of those clicks from those 1,900 impressions?

Answer: My first reaction would be that the ads being displayed on your website aren’t targeted to the content on your site. Or, the people coming to your site aren’t targeted for the content on your site, assuming the ads are relevant. That would be where I would start.

Afterthought: You could also try Adsense Section Targeting so that more relevant ads show up on your site. I recommend reading through what it is and note the caution if you do implement it.

Question: Hey, do you know much about buying traffic to your website? Is that a bad idea, or do you recommend it?

Answer: I have nothing against it. However, make sure you do some homework and have a budget for it. You can easily lose money if you don’t know what you’re doing it. I’ve done it in the past… made some money, lost some money.

I’ve heard Yahoo and MSN are pretty good, so those are possibilities too. I’ve never used them, though, only Adwords.

Afterthought: Yahoo is pretty much non-existent now, and MSN is now Bing. So, I’m not sure where the PPC side of things stand for either as I haven’t looked into it since these happenings. The majority of people do use Google Adwords, though.

Question: Hey, I was wondering if you would be able to help me improve my Google ranking? I know it wont be easy, but I would LOVE to get my page to appear on Google page 1 at some point within the next 6 months. Is that at all possible, under such a competitive keyword phrase like ‘keyword‘?

Answer: Sure, I’d be happy to help. That term is going to be very tough after looking at the sites currently on page one. Perhaps there is a long-tail keyword you could shoot for? This would help you rank faster and at the same time position your site to be in a better position to rank for your main keyword. That’s just my thoughts.

Afterthought: I always recommend going after long-tail terms especially if your niche is very competitive. For instance, my niche is the ‘work from home’ niche, which is SUPER competitive. It could take you months or years to be ranking well and earning money for that exact phrase, unless you targeted a long-tail phrase instead. FYI, my site is on page 2 of Google for the ‘work from home’ keyword.

Question: Yeah I thought something as common as “keyword” would be too tough to compete with, but I do like your idea of using a long-tail keyword phrase. Do you have any suggestions as to what I could go for? I was thinking terms like “keyword1“, or “keyword2” etc… would you think it is possible to appear on page 1 under those kind of search terms?

Answer: I haven’t checked Google page one to see what all sites come up, but it’s something to start with. I use this tool: https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer.

This tool is very handy to find the number of searches per month. Make sure to check “[Exact]” match type. Then, go to Google and type in the search terms you want to see the competing sites for. That should give you an idea of what you’re up against. Also look at the total number of sites that come up. The less the better.

Afterthought: Some people will tell you to search for the keyword with quotes when looking up your competition. This is fine; however, no one searching for that keyword is going to put it in quotes, so make sure to also do the search without quotes to get a total number of competing sites. The numbers will be significantly different from each other.

Note: I don’t proclaim to be in expert in any field, including how to get website traffic. I only speak from personal experience and what I’ve done and am doing to get traffic to the sites I have, including this one.

If you seek professional advice or the wisdom of a “guru”, you won’t find it here. Search Google.

Final Thoughts

These questions covered a wide variety of traffic techniques and strategies, but I realize there are so many other topics that could be discussed regarding traffic.

Ask Your Question

I’m turning the floor over to you now…

What do you want to know about getting traffic to your website? What question/s do you have that weren’t covered in this post?

Leave a comment below with your question/s or you can contact me directly.

I look forward to answering your questions!

This is a guest post by Sam Bakker. If you would like to guest post on this blog, please Contact me.

When I first started my own home-based business a few years ago, I thought that no matter what my first home business website would work. I thought I had everything important in place and the website was looking great. But the reality of my situation had to sink in eventually; even though I had an excellent website, and what I thought was successful home business information I was missing visitors, rendering my online presence useless.

Two years later, I took a second look, but this time with a careful look at all options. I would learn about Search Engine Optimization and how it can influence a business. Through it, I was able to add life to my websites as well as a sizeable amount of money.

If your website is currently suffering from a lack of visitors, the first place to look for answers is your website’s keywords and their search engine performance. Often we can build links for our website, writing content with the intention of ranking it. But none of that will matter if you don’t have the right keywords. There is a lot of money to be made in internet marketing if this step is taken seriously.

First of all, check the keywords you decided to compete for when you started your campaign. Review their usefulness and relative competition. Once you have done so, visit Google’s Adwords Keywords tool or use WordTracker. These tools will help you see clearly where opportunities in your niche could be for keywords.

If you are able to find some additional keywords that you should be ranking your website for, construct a plan outlining what on-page and off-page content will need to be produced. This is to get your website appearing on the front page for that term. Once your plan has been completed, stay focused on the job at hand. To rank higher in the search engines, you need to be consistently taking action.

As internet marketers, we often get excited and dive into projects without spending enough time working through our foundations. Looking for keywords is an essential step; a website cannot succeed in the search engines without it. Make sure you take the time to review your website’s keywords and take action if necessary so that your website doesn’t stay hidden from your potential customers.

About the Author: Sam Bakker has been in the internet marketing industry for the past 7 years. If you would like to find out more about Sam or learn some free internet marketing tips then you can visit his website at SamBakker.com