Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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New Copywriting Services Released

My firm has been providing professional web copywriting services for a while, but this past week I finally formalized them and created a new section on my website.

You can click my post title to go to the home page of the section. As with all of our other services, you will find that we are transparent. Unlike nearly every other firm on the web, we post our copywriting rates and writing fees. We even go a step further in our FAQ section and explain your ownership rights and about our charges.

Although we may not be a good match for every client and particularly one who wants “Work for Hire” or unlimited rights, at least you will know that up-front and not when you finally get to a Letter of Agreement.

We offer several types of writing services: blog copywriting or ghost blogging, e-newsletter writing services, website content services, and feature article writing services (these we do perform as “Work for Hire”).

So if you need writing for the Web, I invite you to check us out, review our information, pricing and consider us for your next project.

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Linking From Blogger Blogs Does Not Work Anymore for SEO

I downloaded my blog files the other day to keep an up-to-date archive as I was moving my site to a new server and noticed that Blogger is now adding in the links inside comments on my site this tag rel=”no follow”.

That means if someone leaves a comment on your Blogger blog, or you leave one on someone else’s Blogger blog as a way to try to improve your Website visibility, the link you leave means nothing. It is not considered in Google’s algorithm and because Blogger has arbitrarily made this decision it means that using this tactic as a workable strategy to point people to your website has now effectively been dissed. No engine will follow the link now. This is not a setting you can change it is a behind the scene thing that Google, the owner of Blogger, has done.

Google has effectively worked to disregard linking on the web that we used to use for SEO organic placement improvement in one of their last algorithms. This means that we no longer do resource pages in websites as a place to show reciprocal links. As Google considers these links literally meaning nothing. Another way we used to get placement was by posting comments on blogs and pointing back to the main website, and now this tactic is gone as well for Blogger blogs. Many blogs you simply can not identify if they are blogger blogs or not, some you can by the template choice but not always.

So the bottom-line is that the world of SEO is really changing. Using blogs and forums to point to new sites to get links to improve your chances of being picked up on a search engine are narrowing. If I can think of any other way to get exposure that replaces these previously tried and true methods, I’ll let you know. One that I am thinking of right now is MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Do you have one you want to recommend?

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Live’s New Webmaster Central Invitation

Visit the link in our post title to send an email and get into the Microsoft Live webmaster central beta program.

If you are using Google webmaster central tools, you’ll want to get in on the ground floor with MSN tools too. I sent my registration and in a day got invited to the beta.

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Do Blogs Improve Stickiness?

Yes they do! In our white paper (click our post title to get it free), we prove that having a blog will increase the stickiness of your website. Using two case studies one that was extended over a multiple month period, we track that the amount of time that a viewer stays on your site improves with blogging.

The increases are not as pronounced as those in traffic increase, but still important. So if you want to keep readers longer and keep them engaged, blogging will do it!