When it comes to SEO, there is one thing that we can never overlook. That is, content writing. I am a strong believe in SEO techniques and other strategies that help you get on the top of SERPs. However, I also believe that the bottom line is having great content. You can employ all the best SEO tactics there are but if your content is not worth it, then all your best efforts will simply go to the dogs. As such in the next few posts, we will probably be focusing on content writing.

In this post, I want to answer two questions that have been bugging me lately. How often should one post? More so, is it alright to change posting frequency? I think that there is no simply answer to the first question. How often you post really depends on what you have to post. If you have no new (and worthwhile) content, why post at all? Then again, if you want to keep your readers coming back, then you have to have new content up and running as often as you can. I think that a good frequency would be at least a couple of times a week. If you have the time and the content, once a day would be great.

On the second question, what if you wanted to increase or decrease your frequency? Would it matter? I think so. If you post too much – say 3 times a day, it might bug your readers, making it hard for them to catch up. On the other hand, if you post rarely, your readers might get bored waiting for new content. The idea is to be able to maintain a good balance. And remember the bottom line – post when you have something worthwhile to write about.

Photo courtesy of Leo Reynolds

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Comments are a blogger’s best friend – well, among many other things. We have been focusing on increasing Page Rank in the past several posts. However, as many of my friends online have pointed out, commenting can bring about more benefits than Page Rank. Google’s PR does have its value, but it would be good to not lose sight of the bigger picture because of it.

So what can we do with comments? Let us look at the situation from the other perspective – us bloggers commenting on other blogs. As I pointed out in the previous post, we love receiving comments but may be a bit lax when it comes to dishing out comments.

However, when we comment on other blogs, we take advantage of the chance of making new friends. This, in turn, can translate into attracting more traffic to our own blog or web site. Real traffic is something that also takes some time to build up. It depends on many factors, delivering quality content being one of them. Once you have this down pat, you still need to let the world know that your blog or web site exists. This is where commenting comes in.

I call this technique the “manual” way. That is, instead of depending on SEO professionals and techniques alone, you do your own advertising by visiting as many relevant blogs as you can and leaving quality comments as well. Remember, spamming is not the idea here. You are leaving comments because you want other people to become interested in your blog, to visit it, and to become returning visitors.

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In the last post, we had an overview of how SEO is also an important consideration in multi-lingual sites. We looked at some points that could help promote multi-lingual sites. Let us look into these in more detail.

Keyword translation
We all know how keywords are important when it comes to SEO. Just as with English web sites, however, we do not want to overload our pages with keywords. Otherwise, the overall result may seem like gibberish and that is not what we want. Instead, you should focus on getting the most essential keywords and making sure that the translation that you make use of is accurate. What if you cannot find direct translations for keywords? This is entirely possible as there are many English words that do not have exact translations in many languages. The thing to do then would be to find alternative keywords in the target language.

Content translation
Not only do you have to focus on translating keywords but you also have to pay attention to the translation of your site’s entire contents. You can always opt to have automatic translation done but this would not ensure accurate translation. If you’re thinking of saving some money by NOT hiring an expert translator, think about the repercussions of having a badly translated site – it could very well cost you more than paying for a good translator.

Let’s look at the other points in the next post.

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Creating a web site and incorporating SEO principles is a challenge in itself. How much more if you are creating one which deals with different languages? With the idea that you want to reach as many people as you possibly can, it is but logical to try and cater to various languages – at least the major ones. Of course, you will definitely get a lot of traffic from English-speaking people alone but you cannot discount the fact that you can always cater to more if only you offered your web site in other languages.

Moving on to SEO, is there anything different about SEO when working on multi-lingual web sites? The good news is that there isn’t a whole lot of difference. The key SEO principles remain the same – except that you would have to do some of them (especially those regarding keywords) in a different language. Here are some tips that could help you in your quest to put good SEO practices into place when working on a multi-lingual web site.

I have four things to share with you. They are as follow:

-Pay attention to keyword translation
-Pay attention to content translation
-Pay attention to the links in all of your sites (all languages)
-Pay attention to the language options as seen by your users.

They are all pretty much self-explanatory but it would be good to look into some details in the next post.

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Though SEO and all the concepts surrounding it have been around for quite some time, you’d be surprised at the number of people who still have misconceptions about it. I think this is one reason I still read blog posts on whether or not SEO is a one-time thing. Take this post on ifacethoughts. The blogger talks about his inexperience when it comes to SEO but he hit the nail right on the head with his question: Is SEO a one-time activity?

If you have been reading the many other previous posts in this blog, you would know the answer. SEO can be a one-time activity if you wish for it to be but you cannot expect the results to be satisfactory. SEO is all about making your web site available and accessible to all potential readers out there. It is about attracting new readers and keeping existing readers coming back.

Sure, you can always attract a reader with a one-time effort but do you think that you can keep them coming back for more without doing anything else? This is where content comes in. This is where link building enters the picture. This is when you realize that you have to continually employ SEO practices if you want more readers – both new and old. It is important that you realize that the SEO process is dynamic and so should your efforts. Once you start becoming complacent, thinking that you can stop your SEO efforts, then your readership may become quite static as well.

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More than keywords – pay attention to content
In the first post, we took a look at how important it is for you to know the keywords that people are conducting searches on, in relation to your niche. If that is all that you want to think about, then I guess you can merely put in a jumble of words – as long as they are important keywords – in your site and you are good. However, your readers are not stupid, and neither are the spiders that search engines use to crawl web sites. If you do not provide good content, then the chances are that you will not have readers returning to your site. Worse, the search engine spiders will not give you the ranking that you need. An additional note on this, more than providing content, you also need to continually update your content. Old and stale content will not get you anywhere.

Mark your keywords
It isn’t enough to use keywords strategically in your content. You also have to go one step further and mark these keywords in all your pages. How do you do this? By using tags such as bold, italics, and underline. This practice would not only help you out with search engines but will actually help your readers identify the keywords in your pages. However, moderation is the key once again. Do not go trigger happy on the tags I just mentioned and over do it. Perhaps 2 to 3 marked keywords per page would do the trick.

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