GTS Blog

In a recent blog post, I wrote about the Semantic Web: a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to understand the meaning – or “semantics” – of information on the Internet. While doing some research for that blog post, I came across a company that makes use of semantic web technologies: Zemanta developed a web application designed to make blogging easier by suggesting related content and images. It also suggests tags for your posts and can automatically link to relevant topics used in your blog post.

Zemanta can be downloaded as an addon to your browser (Firefox, Chrome and IE supported); it is also available as a plugin for open-source CMS: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and MoveableType. As I blog in WordPress, I downloaded the Zemanta WP plugin.

Upon initial installation, the plugin seems to be highly intrusive: it basically hijacks your WordPress admin panel and turns it into a Zemanta box. But it is easy to minimize and maximize the plugin by clicking a button. Zemanta suggests links to related posts from other blogs and news sources based on the topic of your post. It can be customized to suggest links to your previous blog posts. It suggests images which can be easily dragged into your blog post. If you register your blog with Zemanta, other bloggers that use Zemanta will be able to link to your own blog posts. This may be good for your blog’s SEO.

Is Zemanta a useful tool for you? I suggest you give it a try and see for yourself. You can always uninstall it at any time.

Last year I posted a list of bloggers to watch in 2010. Since a whole year has gone by since then, here is the updated list of the top bloggers/blogs that I recommend you follow in 2011. This is not a ranking as such, so being number 4 does not mean that the blogger is ‘better’ than number 5. If you feel that I left anybody out, please let me know.
continue reading…

One of the greatest things about blogging, from an SEO perspective, is in the keyword ranking you can get from a good blog post. Blog content is much more dynamic than website content: blogs are usually updated more frequently than websites and fresh content is added on a more steady basis. Search engines like that and tend to reward a good blog post with a high position on the SERP. You can easily keep track of your popular blog posts using an analytics tool and see how these posts rank for various keywords.

Now here’s the part which is even better. Once you see the keywords a blog post is ranking high for and which keywords provide the entrance to that blog post, you can adjust the text to get your sales message out in the most effective manner. Like telling people what they can order from your company and by adding a contact point where readers can buy what they are looking for.

I’ll give you an example from my own GTS blog: last October I published a blog post entitled: Need to translate a PDF file? Google Translate does it for you. This post was read well over 1,000 times and is read by an average of 30 different people a day. But more importantly it has a top 10 Google ranking for ‘pdf file translation’ and ‘translate pdf file.’ These and other keywords are driving the traffic to my blog post. By adding a sentence that tells my readers that GTS can provide translation of PDF files into many languages, and by providing a link to our company website which provides further details, I will get this message out to hundreds of readers who will read the blog post in the coming weeks. And some of those readers may (and probably will) ask for price quotes. Will any of the price quotes turn into sales? It is a safe assumption to say YES.

So remember, blogging is good but selling your service is even better. Now you can do both at the same time.

Do you have writer’s block? Is your blog drying up for lack of new content. Have no fear. Here are some of my own ideas on how to break out of your slump and crank out your next blog post.

1. Identify key news events in your industry and write a commentary with your own opinions about it. For example, say you are in the music business and Apple just released the Beatles albums on iTunes. What’s your take on it? Don’t be shy and express your own thoughts with a clear voice. It’s called ‘original content’ which as we all know readers and search engines love. Use online news search engines (like news.google.com) to find out about the latest industry news.
2. React to trending topics. Search the blogosphere with Twitter, Technorati or Google Blogsearch and see what the hot topics are in your field. These are the topics that everyone is writing about and the ones that are attracting the most reader comments. You should be writing about them too. If lots of people are interested in the topic, they will be glad to read your blog for more information and views.
3. Find your sweet spot. After you have been blogging for a while, you will get a feel for which topics you have been most successful with; which of your blog posts have received the most page views and the most comments. Keep on coming back to those topics with new perspectives, new views, new ideas. Take old blog posts and freshen them up. Read a blog post you wrote a year or two ago and consider whether things have changed to a point where it justifies a new blog post with new information, new ideas.
4. Write about an interesting conversation you recently had with a colleague or competitor about your industry. For example: I met Kirti Vashee (a known speaker and blogger in the machine translation industry) about two weeks ago and heard him express some interesting thoughts about the future of the translation industry. I wrote a blog post about it the same day (The future of the translation industry: will most LSPs disappear?). That post was retweeted 20 times and viewed by about 300 different people.
5. Cover industry conferences. If you can travel to these conferences, great. If you can’t physically be at the conference, try and be there in a virtual sense by checking live video feeds, reading live reports and tweets from other bloggers.
6. Write an interesting case study. Did your company complete a sale or customer delivery recently? Did you participate in an interesting project at work? Did you win a case for a client? Perform a successful operation? I don’t know what field you are in but I am sure you did something recently that is of interest to your readers. Write about it!
7. Write a product/service review. Do you or someone in your group use a software tool in their work? An electronic device of some kind? Do you like to play a certain electronic game? Go to a certain restaurant? Write about your experiences with that product or service. Other people are interested in that kind of thing.
8. Write some top 10 lists that are relevant to your field: Top 10 websites. Top 10 blogs. Top 10 products. Top 10 industry figures. People generally like to read lists and it is pretty easy to put them together if you are knowledgable about your field.
9. Be the first to report news in your industry. This may sound tough but it is not impossible. Remember, the news item you report does not have to be earth-shattering and can be something simple that nobody else has noticed yet. Monitor the top websites in your field and be the first to report changes. When you speak to your customers and suppliers, ask them if their company has any pending product announcements, personnel announcements or organizational changes. Ask them for information that you can publish on your blog as an exclusive item. Once your blog becomes a trustworthy source of news, people will be more ready and willing to pass along new information knowing that it will reach a large audience through your blog.
10. Use reader comments as a starting point for a new blog post. Comments to a blog can be very insightful sometimes. They can give you inspiration for a new blog post. For example, last September I wrote a blog post entitled: Integrating grammar checking tools into the MT post-editing process. One of the comments made by Dr. Frans Wijma from Singapore inspired a followup post entitled: Preparing content for machine translation with spelling/grammar tools. Both of these posts were retweeted and read widely.