How to correctly use “Double” or ‘Single’ Quotation Marks when writing English

July 22, 2006

First, note that American style of English has certain subtle differences with British English. According to Wikipedia - In many ways, compared to British English, American English is conservative in its phonology. Dialect in North America is most distinctive on the East Coast of the continent; this is largely because these areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of British English at a time when those varieties were undergoing changes. The interior of the country was settled by people who were no longer closely connected to England, as they had no access to the ocean during a time when journeys to Britain were always by sea. As such, the inland speech is much more homogeneous than the East Coast speech and did not imitate the changes in speech from England.

In American style English use:

DOUBLE QUOTATION MARKS

- To enclose direct quotes: For example - “The double-digit increase in online search activity marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Internet consumer behavior,” says Ken Cassar, senior director of analytics at Nielsen/NetRatings.

- To enclose article titles: For example - “The importance of sound website design & search spiders to Internet Marketers,” is the latest article by James Opiko

- To enclose slang, words of irony or words that may be unfamiliar to the reader: For example - Respect brings in traffic which translates into the all important dollars, “kwacha,” Euro or whatever you wish to call money.

SINGLE QUOTATION MARKS

- To enclose a quotation within a quotation: For example - “I love the article submission guideline that says ‘A Minimum of 500 Words Required’ (AfroArticles.com, 2006)”

In British style English the whole setup is reversed.

References: Quotation Mark | Articles on Writing & Speaking |

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Authoring | Leave a Comment

Inbound Link Quality Declared No. 1 In SEO

July 20, 2006

Writes: Jason L. Miller

For Google, it’s not about how many people you know or how many people seem to like you. It’s about, mostly, who points to you and says “there’s a person worth visiting.” Fortune Interactive’s reverse engineering to decode how search algorithms work suggests that one weighty somebody is worth more than a multitude of nobodies.

Continued….: Inbound Link Quality Declared No. 1 In SEO

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Search Engines | Leave a Comment

The 2 Most Common Mistakes When Writing With Keywords

July 20, 2006

It really gets my blood pressure up. SEO copywriting has begun to get a poor reputation all due to carelessness. How so? Because too many people claim to know what they are doing. In reality, they simply shove keywords into copy without any concern for how the copy flows. Copy that sounds mechanical or stiff is a sure sign that an amateur writer has had his/her hands in things.

When you write SEO copy, you should take the time to find out what works and what doesn’t. There are 2 mistakes almost every amateur search engine copywriter makes. Let’s take a look at each one.

Continued….Karon Thackston Writes: The 2 Most Common Mistakes When Writing With Keywords

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Authoring, Search Engines | Leave a Comment

How Google indexes (spiders) websites

July 19, 2006

Google currently is reported to have indexed 8 billion pages and counting. Google utilizes an array of bots A.K.A spiders or crawlers.

Among the specialized bots Google uses include: The web spider Googlebot, the Adsense spider MediaBot, the image spider ImageBot, the AdWords spider AdsBot, the RSS feed spider FeedFetcher-Google, and Googlebot-Mobile spider for mobile devices.

Why is it important for an Internet Marketer to know how Google spiders (crawls) your website?

A search engine crawler is your best visitor. Giving a crawler easy and uninhibited movement in your website is necessary for good search engine rankings.

Your website must be spider (search engine) friendly if you want any traffic from the search engines. A search engine spider does not read your website the way we humans do. The spider reads web-page source code(HTML) that renders your page, therefore ‘bad code’ can be an impediment to the spider, sometimes causing it to give up crawling your website.

Spiders love content(text), therefore a website that is packed with images with no ALT tags to assist the spiders will not be indexed successfully. So when designing your website you must incorporate structural website design principals that elicit search engine friendliness.

According to various surveys, more than 86+% of all people find out about other sites through the search engines. Unless your site appears in the top 30 of the major search engines & directories, you will hardly get any worthwhile traffic. Therefore, Search Engine Positioning is vital to your success on the web! Research shows that 66+% of online marketers find that search engine positioning drives traffic.

A top ranking in the search engines can bring you highly targeted traffic. If someone visits your site after searching for a product or service that you are selling, it means that he/she is interested in what you are selling and hence is a potential customer for you. Hence, search engines send pre-qualified customers to you.

Remember, search engine bots are your most important visitors, you must seduce, ‘open your doors’ and accommodate them in order to gain any measurable success in your Internet Marketing endeavor.

Kim Roach in her article titled: Today’s Google Bots and What They Do - attempts to reveal some of the most important Google spiders, their function, and how they affect you as a web master.

References:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization Articles)
2. Articles on Search Engines

Written by James Opiko · Filed Under Search Engines, Web-Dev-Design | Leave a Comment