LJN Blog Posts

The Landscape Juice Network [LJN] is a very powerful source of garden and landscaping related information. What makes LJN so unique and loved by Google, is because the information being written and added to the site is coming from the very people who drive the industry - YOU.

LJN isn't some cleverly worded marketing exercise designed solely to attract vast amounts of traffic just to sell advertising or products. LJN might sell advertising or products (hopefully for you) as a spin-off but its objective has always been to provide a place where trade-met-trade or trade-met-consumer - I like to refer to it as a connection broker - In days of old, it was always accepted that never the twain shall meet.

The connection between a trade member and a consumer isn't necessarily a tangible event and it is quite possible you'll never get to hear about how a client found you - even if a consumer did find your page and learned of your skills and/or products through reading an item or a page on the site (always try to ask where a client first found you).

It is estimated that 67,000 unique visitors will visit the Landscape Juice brand during the month of January 2011. That works out at approximately 45,000 visitors to LJN and 22,000 visitors to the Landscape Juice blog, although, come May/June, the unique visitor count to the Landscape Juice blog may exceed 45,000 unique visitors alone as the gardening season gets well and truly into gear.

It's free so start using it

In the 'olden days' before the internet, traditional print publisher enjoyed a very strong and exclusive position. Not only was it difficult to secure the briefest of editorial slots within a magazine, there were added pressures from the publisher's advertising department, hounding you to buy an advert to be published along side of your 'free' editorial.

Apart from the cost, one of the downsides to printed editorial is it has a shelf life; what is more every copy of a trade magazine is isolated from the next copy and the only index which exists is the one at the front or rear of the publication. In contrast, every article that is published  on the internet has the potential to remain high in the index for many years after its publication and as fresh as the day it first appeared.

Digital media has created so many opportunities; not just for the reader but for publishers at every level.

Landscape Juice has quite literally 'changed the landscape' when it comes to industry related news and information - Is your business making the most of the LJN blogging facility?

Writing a press release

A press release does not have to be a long piece of writing; sometimes, just a few lines can do the trick and by using hyperlinks to historical or archived material elsewhere on your own website, it's possible to make even a short piece become striking and attractive publicity.

Write your article/press submission for potential clients who DON'T already know you.

The secret to using the internet successfully is to try and write to attract interest from people or organisations that don't, as yet, know you exist.

The title

Writing on the internet isn't all about making attractive visual statements, your task is also to write a title in a way which has every opportunity of being captured by a search engine as it goes on become all or part of the URL and gets matched to a query by someone making a search.

Here's two examples: one is a potentially good title and one that will be of no use at all:

Good title
'New lawn and flower borders created by Joe Blogs landscapes'

Poor title
'Another good job done'

Note: adding a location to a title can also strengthen its geographical importance too.

The importance of the first paragraph

Whilst the title of any article - whether it's classed as a blog post, editorial submission, press release or forum post - is only part of your article's potential success and to ensure your writing hits the right spot, the title has to be followed up with a sharp and succinct explanation in the first and second paragraph.

Because a search engine reads information from left to right and from top to bottom, it is important to ensure anything you write at the head of an article contains the right keywords to enable your piece every chance of being found during the search process.

Here's a short example of what's good and what's not:

Good opening paragraph

I've highlighted the words that we're encouraging (but not spamming) the search engine to include in their search reesults.

Somewhereshire 01 January 2011: Joe Blogs landscapes has successfully completed the construction of a new lawn and flower borders in the village of [the village location].

Existing topsoil was removed down to a depth of 150mm and the underlying subsoil was broken up to allow free passage of air and nutrients at the same time encouraging drainageFresh topsoil was levelled and consolidated and high quality premium lawn turf laid to create an ornamental but hard wearing family lawn.

I've probably overemphasised the importance of keywords in these opening lines (a high density or repetition of keywords - called 'stuffing' may result in a post being penalised by a search engine provider) but I hope you get the idea? the closer to the top left your keyword is, the stronger you post may rank.

Internal linking
It doesn't matter where you are writing your news item or blog post, linking internally or linking externally to another site is important - however, don't overdo it.

As I've explained at the head of this article, you can write a new article and keep it compact and succinct but to help provide additional information for your reader, links can be inserted along the way.

For example, in the opening paragraph of the above (make believe) news item I've inserted 'somewhereshire' to represent where you are sending your news from. The word 'somewhereshire' can also be a link back to your contact page or your location on Google maps.

Here's what I mean...

Buckingham Palace: 25th January 2011 [news follows).

As you can see, I've linked off of Buckingham Palace so I don't have to write any further information because it's already been added somewhere else - whether that's inside of my site or outside.

When publishing news, think about linking of keywords into your archives to help explain more about your services or products. An example of this might be a page dedicated to the preparation of lawns or an archive of photographs and descriptions of work already completed when publicising the completion of a new lawn - think also about linking back to a photo album or blog post on this network..

But also be careful of stuffing too many linked keywords into your posts. There is no hard and fast rule but 4-6 links in a document of 500 words is OK and they should ideally be a separate word with it's own link - try not to use the same link over and over again.

Adding photographs

There's so much truth in the saying ' a picture paints a thousand words' ....so use images to assist in delivering a strong message.

Make sure your title of your image is an accurate representation of what your are describing, so if your picture is of a turf being laid to create a lawn then use 'turf being laid to create a new lawn'.

Tags

Whether it's photographs, video, blogs, events or forum posts, there is the facility for adding tags to each submission.

Tags are important, not only for search engines which are interrogating the site's content whilst analysing the site but a tag is also used by LJN's internal search engine so be sure to include strong descriptive words here.