Book Review – Teach yourself VISUALLY Search Engine Optimization (2013). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

 

Rafiq Elmansy (www.rafiqelmansy.com), a globally renowned designer, author, blogger, and search engine optimization (SEO) consultant, has come a long way with his recent book: Teach yourself VISUALLY Search Engine Optimization: the Fast and Easy Way to Learn.

SEO is an exhaustive concept that includes employing effective techniques and methods to drive more traffic to your blog, fan page, or a website by increasing its rank and visibility in search results. The book is certainly one of the best resources on SEO available in the market today. 

Rafiq demystifies SEO techniques and methods by teaching you nearly everything that can be counted as the best SEO practices. What’s more? Almost all the resources referred to in the book are available for free!

Divided into 14 chapters, the book teaches through step-by-step, visually illustrated tasks that make learning a fast, easy, and practical experience for the reader:

 

Chapter 1, Understanding SEO process, discuses succinct concepts about SEO techniques and major search engines. Chapter 2, Preparing your website for SEO, and 3, Building an SEO-friendly website, are probably the most important stopovers in the entire book since here you learn the fundamentals of a good website: how to choose a good web hosting service, create a Privacy Policy page (in seconds!), check browser compatibility, plan an optimized website, build an .htaccess file, and work with 301 redirect, among many other techniques.

The W3C Markup Validation tool provided here assists you to effectively track and correct any errors in your website’s HTML code. Remember, results-oriented SEO starts from an error-free webpage that is regularly crawled by search engine robots.

Chapter 4, Mastering keywords, teaches you almost everything about keywords and lets you experiment with such valuable online resources as Bing Search, YouTube Keyword Tool, Yahoo Clues, etc.

Chapter 5, Building on-page SEO, is about how to create an HTML document, work with meta tags, optimize your images, improve your website’s loading time, and so forth. Chapter 6, Building off-page SEO, deals with many areas that one needs to work off-page: backlinks, traffic comparison, submitting links to a directory, and a press release. Next Chapter, Working with content, takes you to quite a few online resources to develop compelling content for your website – content is king!

Chapter 8 and 9, Working with Google Analytics and Using search engine webmaster tools cover all the relevant walkthroughs in traffic analyses and webmaster controls. If you’ve done all the tasks up to here, you will undeniably feel that you’re becoming an expert in SEO. Trust me.

Chapter 10, Working with social media and SEO, is remarkably appealing since here you will learn how to effectively market your webpage or blog through Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter, and manage all the accounts with the free tool, HootSuite.

The next three chapters cover key areas like AdWords campaign, Wordpress, and earning from your website’s SEO ranking. If you’re a big company, you will find the last chapter quite helpful in how to employ an SEO team to manage your online presence.

Eventually, with so much to offer, the book is for everyone: an individual looking for better social networking, a novice blogger, or an expert Internet marketer.

 

Good Academic Writing Is Like a Beautiful Face

Do you write as beautifully as a human face?

Good academic writing is as inspiring and refreshing as a human face. Human face is most probably one of the most proportionately beautiful creation of the Creator.

Good academic writing can be seen in the light of a human face that inspires, refreshes, and motivates us to move in the direction of perfection.

Take for example the human face without any cosmetics being used. What we have is equally distributed features from skull to the chin. We cannot deny the fact that including the brain and the eyes, most of human capabilities are found within the area of the face.

Good academic writing is essentially analogous to this beautifully created part of human body. Yes.

To further define my analogy, I would break down an academic work into its integral or required parts.

An academic work such as a research dissertation or a term paper consists of the most important portion called the abstract, executive summary, or thesis statement (yes, it is only in the few first line that the reader has to decide whether your effort is worth going through or not!).

It has to be carefully crafted. It does not need lofty language expression; does a human head look anything different from a human head? Absolutely not. More than the words, what counts is the clarity of your thought that ensures the work attracts attention. Good words are just like a good hair-dye and a hairstyle.

Next comes the body of your research work. It contains different chapters, sections, and paragraphs. Each one of it is proportionally connected to the other parts and contributes to the whole picture. From A to Z, from starting paragraph to the conclusion, each part has to fit in well just like the eyes, ears, nose, the lips and other minute facial features.

Unless each part is carefully crafted and garnished, it is difficult for the whole picture to emerge as something inspiring.

Other than language and its mechanics, it is important that the writer has the clarity in the thought they're trying to present. Clarity of thoughts alone makes up for the major part of your picture.

Most of the writers, contrarily and wrongly, try to beautify their writing with sophisticated words, expressions coupled with complex grammatical structure when their thought lacks clarity.

Once your thought is clear, your chapters, passages, paragraphs, and sentences connect to each other logically from the beginning to the end without requiring you to put any unnecessary efforts to cloud it with anything like not so common vocabulary.

Clarity of thought comes from the smaller parts just like the parts of a human face that has subtle details for the eyes, nose, eyebrows, lips, cheeks and what not.

The human face tells us that there it is created with so much at the background.

Thus, you need to clearly understand why you're doing what you're doing. It is always a better way to ask the three basic questions while doing any single activity on your academic writing: (i) what, (ii) why, and (iii) how.

Trust me once you've learned to address these three WHs above, you'll get clarity of the thought which would help you a great deal in forming the beautiful face of your work.

Last comes the role of cosmetics. What do cosmetics do to a human face? These are different substances used to care the human face - in simple terms cosmetics help enhance the beauty of the face.

Just like cosmetics, your presentation of your work enhances its overall appearance. It includes everything from typeface to line spacing, from margins to indentations, and so on.

As they say, the best cosmetics are the simplest ones. You must follow the simplest possible strategy toward your presentation. Simplicity is the best cosmetics. Choose most common formats for presenting your work

With clear thoughts you paint a beautiful picture; with good presentation you embellish the face of your research work that has every part defined with great and careful details.

Freelance Academic Writer or a Company?

If you're looking for hiring a freelance writer to handle your writing project, you should make sure that the writer you're dealing with is legitimate, reliable, honest, and qualified.

These four attributes are a MUST for any business transaction whether with individuals or with companies.

However, when it comes to freelance writing, things can turn both highly beneficial or badly disappointing because of its inherent strengths and downsides in today's digital world.

The most basic question is how to find a freelance writer in the first place? There are quite a few virtual marketplaces (agencies) like oDesk, Elance, GetAFreelancer, GetACoder, and writing companies where you can work with individual writers.

I cannot name any academic writing companies here because I do not want to sound connected to any of the companies. Secondly, online scam companies are growing in number as much as freelance writers; thus, I better not mention any.

Before we can move any further, I should ask you a primary question: Why on earth hire a freelance writer?

The answer is quite straightforward. Freelance writers have their own strengths that are not present with a big company.

Some of the strengths are:

• Personal contact, communication, and collaboration between you and the writer.
• Smaller projects for quicker turnaround time.
• You don't need a business strategy to outsource your work.
• Good for limited budget projects.
• Timely response

Though agencies and big companies may be well-known in their market niche, it is not difficult to understand that their writers also work as freelance writers.

Outsourcing your work to a company or agency keeps you from directly contacting to their writers because of such obvious reasons as concealing the commission earnings. This puts you at a distance from your writer and all you do is wait for a response from them. Company-mediated communication (mostly via the email) is full of semantic noise, barriers, and flaws.

Sometimes, this results in acute frustration for both the writer and you.

When you outsource your work to a freelance writer, you have every liberty to communicate with them: Email, Skype, phone, or any other means - you name it.

Almost ALL the companies, agencies, and related entities over the Internet require that you pay the complete project price upfront. Though you pay them in one-go, they do not and cannot guarantee to deliver most satisfactory work. In such a case you end up asking a writer (in case of a legit company) for multiple revisions!

Most of my clients hire me for these reasons.

If you google for companies and writers, you'll find countless results that lead to in the middle of nowhere. However, there still are place over the net that can help you find legitimate freelance writers who are also qualified (obviously many other people working in the same field.

• Once you shortlist a few writers (remember to do a prior research beforehand), ask each of them to provide you with an outline and or synopsis of your work.
• Follow the same precautionary steps I mentioned in my previous post.
• Soon will the things start making sense to you about who is the one you'd like to outsource your project to.
• Always follow an installment plan for paying the writer only after you receive the installments of your work.
• Always run similarity-index check on the pieces you receive.
• Pay only through a reliable and secure means.
• Be quick to ask for any revision, adjustments, or corrections on the pieces of your work.

With these steps, I am very hopeful that you'll get your work done satisfactorily without being scammed and frustrated.

Good luck!