Google(GOOG) has just announced public opening of their new wiki-knowledge product called “Knol”.
After months of deliberation since December of last year, this project is finally open for people to use.
Let’s take a quick look:
For responding to a Knol subject such as this Lung Cancer article, the user can leave a review with a rating. This supposedly validates the experts’ writing and becomes part of Knol’s rating system.
Knol also let’s you leave comments. I believe the comments section is really for those quick comments but the review section should be used for expert reviewers of that subject.
Let’s take a look at the writing aspects of Knol. You can write a new Knol yourself but you need to stay within these guidelines:
The Knol project is a site that hosts many knols — units of knowledge — written about various subjects. The authors of the knols can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit peer reviews and comments. Users can provide feedback, comments, related information. So the Knol project is a platform for sharing information, with multiple cues that help you evaluate the quality and veracity of information.
Knols are indexed by the big search engines, of course. And well-written knols become popular the same as regular web pages. The Knol site allows anyone to write and manage knols through a browser on any computer.
Writing a good Knol can definitely boost your SEO and online visibility, especially you are good at what you write about.
Here’s a screenshot of writing a new Knol. It looks pretty simple and basically it’s like Wikipedia but easier to use.
I don’t know how popular this Knol Project will become but I am sure many webmasters will take advantage of the early SEO you can gain from writing expertise articles.
Google, the search engine googopoly, is currentloy working on crawling and indexing flash files. This means that web designers/consultants no longer need to focus soley on SEO through non-flash files.
As far as I am concerned, this isn’t really going to change up the SEO market very much as even if flash files can be crawled and indexed, that’s still going to require a traditional internal infrastructure for the flash files, meaning simply more work for the same thang.
Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
Well, after doing some testing with most of my blogs, it’s clear now that content isn’t everything. Quantity can bring you stability of a blog’s growth while Quality can bring you a high number of niche readers.
Why do you ask?
Because content is great, only if you can couple that with great internet marketing.
You can compare to real life business.
For example, you have the greatest product in the world but no one knows about you and you end up selling very few.
It’s the same thing in the blogging world. I know many great bloggers with the highest quality content, yet their traffic, PageRank, and readership never grows over time because they don’t market themselves.
The best way for someone who is not already famous is to blog a LOT. I don’t mean to create splogs but do create original content but you must blog a LOT.
How much is blogging a lot?
Well, if you want to be serious about making money blogging or getting ahead of competition, you have to at least blog as much as your competition. You look at the Top 100 blogs in the world, they all blog no less than 24 posts per day, 1 per hour. I personally do find 1 per hour is most optimal.
If you are not John Chow and you do not already have 20K RSS readership nor 6K unique visitors per day, there is no way you will ever grow in traffic and SEO unless you start blogging like crazy.
Of course, there are always exceptions. If you are already famous, you are a total expert on your topic, or you simply know “internet marketing”. If that’s the case, that’s fine but if not, I highly suggest you start blogging at least 3 to 5 posts per day minimum.
Those big bloggers will beat you down and no one will hear your voice unless you can keep up with their blogging pace.
Now, if you ignore my advice and you do 1 or 2 posts per day, you will probably be okay too. (It might take you longer to reach the same goals)
24 posts per day is definitely recommended for all you bloggers serious about going “pro”. If your topic is hard to write so many posts per day, then do focus on “fun” content. No one likes to read a Master’s Thesis, but everyone likes a joke, humor, or something to take their mind off the long day.
This week, we will be updating Zedomax Network. There are some degrading sites on our network that will have to be removed and we’ve got about 50 more blogs to add so hold on while we update one by one.
What is Zedomax Network?
It’s a network made up of quality blogs and websites. Basically we are going to gather up about 200 to 300 “quality” blogs and do some “group” advertising for everyone in the network.
Plus, everyone will benefit from network traffic, SEO, and most importantly, network negotiations with advertisers and publishers.
How does it work?
First, you will need a quality blog (no porn, spam, splogs please). For details, shoot an e-mail to zedomax [at] gmail.com.
I was sitehoppin’ today and found this great post on a Firefox plugin called “Rank Checker” that can help you analyze your rankings on Google, MSN, and Yahoo. As an old-school, I personally do not rely on these methods, but it can be very helpful and information to know your rankings using this tool.
I like being able to check my rankings real quickly without worrying that some SEO company is aggregating my data and/or spying on me. This tool is open source and hosted your computer - designed with privacy in mind.
Looking at the rankings of a couple of your sites that you know intimately well and tracking how they change over time allows you to
learn how to read the search results
appreciate and understand general algorithmic trends
be one of the first people to know when the relevancy algorithms change in a major way
Check out the video after the jump to see how it works:
A lot of SEO companies, especially those that have been around for while, will sell you SEO services with promise to get you on the first page of Google.
What those SEO companies really do is buy links for you and re-sell them to you at higher price. Now, if those are lifetime links, it might be okay but if they are not, you are screwed.
Although I am not a total expert as I am not a solely SEO guy, I can tell you from my experiences blogging that PageRank is something you can’t buy.
Of course, you can go out there and buy some text links from such companies as TLA or other text link brokers, but this is like putting cocaine in your body.
Why?
Think of it this way. Everytime you snort those drugs, it will get you high for a short period of time, as soon as you your high is gone, you are worse off than you were before.
SEO is the same thing. Google doesn’t rank you because you have so many links coming in, their algorithm constantly changes to give users “the best content” when a user types in some keywords. You can buy links but how long is that going to last? Even if you did have millions of dollars, you are basically throwing all of that into the toilet the minute you start hyping up your blog or website with “text link” steroids.
So how do you go about it?
Here’s some guidelines that can help you get higher PageRank and also get #1 on Google for your target keywords:
1.Don’t buy text-links. Network with bloggers in the same topic as yours and “trade” blogrolls.
That’s right. Blogrolls are probably the most often overlooked free links you can get. Blogrolls are great because you are usually dealing with your blogger friends, who are trying to achieve the same goals as you are. And, they won’t spam their own site for those reasons.
Every time you communicate with another blogger, whether that IM, Entrecard, or whatever, see if you can get him to trade blogrolls with you.
This is probably the most important step for you to take right now, especially if your blog is brand new and your PageRank is zero.
Even if you trade blogrolls with PR0 blogs, you might find yourself lucky one day if your blogger friend gets PR6.
Everytime you write a post on your blog, you send out “pings” to Technorati and other blog ping services. (These are great for backlinks by the way.)
Now, if you had blogrolls made of 30 “blogroll trades”, everytime your blogger friend writes a post, you get “pinged”! (That’s 30 backlinks if every one of your blogger friends posted 1 article per day.)
2. Content is King. Write great articles that will interest people to read your blog or website.
From what I’ve seen, no matter how poor your PR is, if your content is good, people will read and your PageRank will go up. (because people will link to you)
Another thing, great articles are good but you need to post daily to get more PageRank.
Quality is probably more important than quantity if you want more readers.
Quantity, on the other hand, can get you more traffic faster.
Quality is great but if you only post 1 article per day, each with 10 tags, that’s the density of your keywords and tags read by Google and other search engines.
But let’s say you write 10 articles per day, each again with 10 tags. That’s about 10 times more tags. Tags are probably more important than anything else these days.
I find that Google indexes your content and later discards most of it when your post gets older and older but Google keeps the tags.
Anyways, the most important part is that you write great content, and the more posts, the merrier.
If you have a long article, try to break them down into 2-3 posts. That way, you will get more traffic in the long run AND your article is still quality first.
3. Link a lot to active bloggers who respond back to you
That right, you want to link to active bloggers who are likely link back to you.
For example, you find a blog post that you find interesting on the web, you link to it and write a blog post.
The blog you linked to blogs back in return.
Pretty simple but if you do this more and more daily, you will get lots of more links and more blogger friends who will help you in the long run.
Next time, we will go into more depth on how you can get your blog or website to be #1 on Google for your target keyword.
Wow, it’s been a fun ride with our new site, SiteHoppin.com. Although we haven’t really made that much money off traffic, the good news is that we’ve “doubled” our network traffic as whole in just 2 weeks since SiteHoppin’s public beta launch!
It’s great that our traffic is going up, but how can this help you? Go submit your blog posts at SiteHoppin‘. (The more you bookmark, the more it will get distributed to the SiteHoppers)
Zedomax Network, a Web2.0 Web 2.5 company based out of San Francisco, breaks through 16K unique visitors for the day on January 11th, 2008, one day right after the founder Max’s birthday.
Thanks to their new site, SiteHoppin’, which brought more than 10K unique visitors for the day, contributing to the Zedomax Network.
Check it out if you want to see our site being revamped live.
On another great note for year 2008 and 4am in the morning, we got a new knol project called http://knolproject.net. Right now, we don’t have anything on there but we are planning to “open-source” the paid wiki concept to let everyone get in the new “paid wiki” wave. Basically, we will teach you how to make a wiki site like the One Buck Wiki or the new Google Knol Project. We are currently accepting any freelance developers to contribute and share ideas for the site so if you are interested in community development, shoot us an email at zedomax [at] gmail.com and you will be included in our exclusive list of developers for the new open source project.
