Tuesday 7 February 2012

Content Writing - Really?

"Content is KING" i am sure every webmaster and online marketing company has used this phrase more than once and based atleast some of their sales pitches around it.

All i have to say to that is "REALLY???"

Honestly, how many sites have we come across which have good quality content written, atleast the ones that I have seen seem to have content written not to impart information, but to promote websites and in turn promote the keywords around which the entire information is tweaked.

The entire reason for todays post is because one of our team members came to me asking if we can change the content written on a website and make it more content rich.  So basically he wanted us to rewrite everything to focus on the keywords, which are being promoted and change the orientation of the page towards selling rather than actual pure content.  Agreed, very important and needs to be done and will probably be done in this case also, but not for the "About Us" page  and other pages which need to give accurate, correct and crisp information to the users.

A big part of the blame for such tweaked content relies on us online marketing people also, our content writers get a brief which has keywords and the number of words needed, based on which an article or a blog post is written - can we blame them? No wonder, content writing has now seem to become one of the hardest and also the most sought after job - considering "Content is KING" the better the "king maker" you can find, the better the rankings you will get on google and other search engines.

Agreed that we are big into online marketing, but in addition to professionals we are also daily and avid users of the internet and also google.  More often than not we do end up on websites ranking very high on search engines, but dont really have any useful information to give, not because they are off-topic, but because all they are trying to feed into you are keyword oriented content blocks which are written with the pure intention of getting higher SERPS.

We, at MAG Studios have a different approach.  We write pure information rich content for users to actually benefit and also to uphold and enhance the image of our clients.  In addition to this we have a lot of content written, which is not only rich in keywords but is also inclined towards user interaction and user interest, giving our clients higher rankings - more user engagement and better ROI on their online marketing activities.

Till the time Google "GOD" does not change its algorithm to actually differentiate between information rich content and keyword rich content, i guess everyone needs to strike a balance between what gets them results and what upholds their credibility and brand image online.

Get in touch with us at MAG Studios to evaluate how a change in your existing online marketing plan or a fresh online marketing plan can help you get more conversions and higher placements - more revenue online.

Monday 6 February 2012

Online Marketing - Google Dance = Webmasters Dance

Hello to all webmasters and all other users reading this blog.  I am sure that the numerous company maintained and written blogs only talk about how good their online marketing strategies are and how their clients have benefitted and how you, as a potential client can benefit from working with them.  But, has anyone ever mentioned the difficulties in getting all those things done, the ups and downs and most importantly the unexpected sudden ups and downs which create a lot of havoc and uncertainty and certainly certainly throws the best of webmasters and online marketing teams off their comfort zone for sure.

I would like to share a recent experience that we faced with a client of ours, a call on a nice productive evening informed us that their rankings had disappeared, disappeared??? I mean unbelievable, since there were multiple teams working on the site and overlooking each others work - so any mistakes would have been caught.  So we did our ground work and it did turn out that the rankings had indeed disappeared.  After a round of some shouting, arguments and a little panic in the department, some searches were made online - google panda update - google algorithm update - site penalized etc. etc. i mean when you are on top of these things and still stuff happens, what do you do? obviously you revert back to what Google "God" has to say about these things.

Articles and forums were scanned - things about google dance and proxy searching in other datacenters were highlighted - but then the most unexpected thing happened - the rankings came back but were case sensitive - case sensitive????? isnt google search "Case Insensitive"...??? and then the rankings went into oblivion again - then came back and then went again???  After about 3 days of Google god playing torture with most of us at the online marketing department - the rankings came back and (fingers crossed) have been there for 3 days now, so we are all hopeful that the rankings are here to stay for the good.

So, we have finally termed this as a twisted case of google dance and documented it so if it does happen again - we loose less sleep and can move ahead.

Just FYI - if this does happen with anyone, please do not get into aggressive link building from the very onset of this, resume your normal activities else google may mark your site as a spam website.

Hoping others who have had similar experiences would share them with us, so we can also work on the concept of crowd sourcing and improve our skillsets.