Tag Archives: content5 SEO Trends To Follow In 2012
The past year has proven that Google is planning to bring the hammer down even harder on SEOs with questionable practices. Quality, ethics and smart optimization strategies will be the factors that differentiate the smart SEOs from the uninformed ones. 1. Quality Content Is A Must The Google PANDA updates of 2011 have left once-profitable websites … Read the rest Turning Your E-Commerce Site into Great ContentDanny Dover recently did a great whiteboard piece about how to create great e-commerce webpages, that is, ones that are interesting, drive sales, and garner natural links. The first thing not to do is make a bland page. Don’t use the manufacturer’s picture of a product and a boring description of what you’re selling…who wants to read that? No one visits websites multiple times just to re-read the same generic content whether it’s about office chairs or seo hosting. The main problem is that there are dozens of sites with exactly the same information, and the site itself is a good example of duplicate content. Here are described six different things that can really make an ecommerce page pop. The first is the title…you’ve got to start by not changing the actual title since people are going to be searching specifically for that title. Perhaps you should add some text … Read the rest Use Your Content to Reach Your Audience EffectivelyStoney deGeyter, Search Engine Guide’s resident business expert recently posted about how to get your audience’s attention using the content on your site. His tips, techniques, and ideas are summarized for you here. When trying to get your readers to absorb your content then perform the action you want them to (buy!) you’ve got to remember a few things. The first is to not get too repetitive and “train” your content so that it will do what you want it to in order for you to reach your consumers. It’s got to be easily skimable, scanable, and point your consumers to calls of action. Make your audience like it There are only two options: get your content to do things you like or to do things your audience likes…which one do you think converts better? When people visit a site they do a quick scan to see if they’re … Read the rest Outsourcing Your ContentDanny Dover has some really polarized opinions about content creation and so does Rand Fishkin…together they recently put out a whiteboard on the topic. Outsourcing content is a reality of SEO and crucial to the majority of businesses that don’t have the money to hire in-house content writers. Best practices are essential as the wrong content gets you the wrong customers, so choose carefully and consider the following methods. Gather Requirements: Before you decide what content you want you’ll have to figure out what your goal is. Are you looking for more traffic? Higher sales? Links from other, similar sites? Once you’ve determined what you’re trying to accomplish you should decide what metrics to use to track your progress toward completing your goal. Locate Resources: There are many different options for outsourcing content, namely offshore writers, in-house staff, or a web contractor. It’s great to find a dependable web contractor … Read the rest Avoiding the Duplicate Content PenaltyMike Moran at Search Engine guide has a few points about avoiding a duplicate content penalty we think are worth noting… Here’s an excerpt from the email that got Mike into this question: “We want to start put lots of content in our blog and hope those articles we put will show up in search result (and we can catch long-tailed keyword search). It looks like it is quicker to establish content partners and just use other people’s content. Will the content still show up in the search result if it is exactly the same as the content in another website? If not, how much percentage difference should we have? 80% the same?” He thinks the approach is flawed – trying to fool the engines just by tweaking content? The first thing to note is that Google’s not penalizing duplicate content, they’re just trying to filter it out so users … Read the rest All Good Content Starts Here: Keyword Researchby Stoney deGeyter One of the great things about developing content for your website is that, with a little research, you can know exactly who your target audience is and how create content to meet their needs. Spending a few minutes before setting pen-to-paper, or fingers-to-keys, can tell you just about everything you need to know about what types of things people are searching for on the web. From that, you can determine what kind of content you need to reach your audience.
Perfect Content Doesn’t ExistSearch Engine Guide’s columnist Stoney deGeyter posted not long ago about the idea that’s infiltrating the SEO community that there is such a thing as perfect content, content that’s optimized just the right way to please both the engines and the consumer. No content is ever perfect, but there is a way to tinker with it to make it more optimal for the goals at hand. The idea is that as time goes on, expectations change, much in the same way VHS has evolved into Blue-Ray, and consumers and engines alike expect more from content than they used to. It’s in this scenario that it makes sense to alter. Remember that optimizing a site may mean making changes not just to the invisible side of the pages but to the content that’s outwardly facing. As time goes on, your readers will expect different things from you so it makes sense … Read the rest It Isn’t Good Content Unless it’s SEO’d Contentby Stoney deGeyter People who believe that SEO is the devil’s work have a point. Such proclaimers can stand side by side with those who say lawyers are bad, non-christian music is demonic and TV rots the brain. Sure, outlawing lawyers may make the world a better place, Miley Cyrus is corrupting our adulthood and you clearly must have had an overdose of PBS in order to enjoy Glee.
One of the first points of irritation about SEOs is about the “optimized” content they produce. I’ve heard complaint after complaint from … Read the rest Links And Content Need Each Other, For NowI can’t help but think this is a silly discussion, like an argument about whether or not Lois Lane could really have Superman’s baby, but I’m diving in anyway to wrap my head around it and, in the process, take you with me.
Over at Media Post, David Berkowitz (of 360i, not Attica prison) writes about a Web where links don’t matter in SEO. You can read that article here, if you don’t mind a half an hour of the third degree to get the content (Media Post hasn’t ascribed to the concept of registration-free content, yet). Berkowitz writes:
A Few Ways to Get Fresh Links to Old ContentYou may have gotten some good links in the past, but don’t count on them helping you forever. Old links go stale in the eyes of Google. Google’s Matt Cutts responded to a user-submitted question asking if Google removes PageRank coming from links on pages that no longer exist (for example, GeoCities pages that have been shut down). The answer to this question is unsurprisingly yes, but Cutts makes a statement within his response that may not be so obvious to everybody. “In order to prevent things from becoming stale, we tend to use the current link graph, rather than a link graph of all of time,” he says. (Emphasis added) Now, this isn’t exactly news, and to the seasoned search professional, probably not much of a revelation. However, to the average business owner looking to improve search engine performance (and not necessarily adapting to the ever-changing ways of … Read the rest |
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Using keyword research tools provided by the search engines and third party keyword platforms can help you a great deal in writing for your target consumers. Not only can you learn what keywords people are using, but keyword research can also help you craft your content using the words and phrases that your audience searches for most frequently. This helps you attract the widest audience possible while … 
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Lawyers do a lot of good, Bon Jovi is still releasing good albums and shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica make TV one of the singular enjoyments of life. To lump all SEO into the “evil” category is to completely disregard the benefit SEO brings to the web.
