No matter how much great copy you write, how many cool images you add, how well you format or how much HTML you know, if you don’t proofread before you publish it is all wasted.

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A good image is worth a thousand words, use them to add impact, humor and personality to your writing.

Selecting images that get noticed is an art itself and a few things need to be kept in mind during the selection process:

1. The Internet audience is overwhelmingly male.
2. People are attracted to pictures of people, particularly faces.
3. Studies indicate that even women prefer to see women in advertisements.

I’m not saying add pictures of hot chicks to every post on your blog, I’m just saying for best results, know your audience and be clever in your selection.

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Knowing a little code is essential to creating the kind of post that will do well, it allows you to insert a little personality and to organize and format your information.

WordPress does have a built in editor, but it can become cumbersome and confusing to use. I recommend turning the visual editor off and doing it the old fashioned way: actually learning the tags you’ll need most often.

HTML Code

Although it looks complicated, the basics of HTML are sensible and easy to grasp. Code is inserted on either side of the text you’d like to affect and there is always an opening tag and a closing tag.
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Think about how you read; when you are researching, when you are learning, when you are browsing social media. Do you read every word? No, you scan images, headers and bold text to determine if the post is worth reading, relevant and credible.

My point is: write that way too.

Formatting

Here are a few tricks to use which will help get your words noticed, and make your posts more readable.
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The competition gets tougher every day when it comes to writing online. There are so many bloggers out there now that the web is saturated with strong opinions and conflicting views about almost everything.

As professional writers it’s our duty to ensure that we provide the most relevant, well researched information in a format that makes it easy to use, understand and source. Writing a good post can earn you credibility, more traffic and a long-lasting authoritative voice.
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Just a quick note to let you know, if you are interested in seeing what happens to a site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages when it is redirected to a new domain. So far, around 2000 pages are indexed from the new domain with 262,000 left by my count. It’s happening right now, which makes it all the more interesting.
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The web is like the wild wild west, much of it is uncharted territory full of cowboys. You can end up in trouble if you don’t know how to cover yourself and your website. Luckily, there are precautions you can take which can save your butt should an angry cowgirl hacker come after it.

I wrote an article about the basics of protecting your website(s) called Prevent Your Site from Being Hacked for Hostgator’s blog and it just went live.

Be sure to check it out for a list of tips that may prove helpful, and at the very least serve as an important reminder about web security.

Just a quick note to let you know (as if you are really interested!) that a guest post I just wrote went live on SEO Scoop.

It’s called Predictive Copywriting – Fight Big Publishers and Win in 2009
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