Gear Up Your Site For Social Media Marketing
By Deepak Dutta
The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffíc.
You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interactions on more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the same from your site also.
If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects of your site.
Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.
The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of these sites are to allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.
You don't have to change your site completely within a month or so to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally throughout the year and you will be on your way to meet these new challenges.
The first step is to declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don't like to deal with unknowns. Create an About Us page and líst your achievements and skills.
Create a MySpace page and link your bio in the About Us page to the MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of these new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.
Install frëe blog software and start publishing at least one article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. This is done by providing an action button for each article on your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.
Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to your site.
Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don't delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.
If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.
Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers draw their attention.
Publish all your feeds at Feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.
Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube and Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them discoverable.
Provide embedded links to your posted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites.
Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.
Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services you offër. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.
For starters, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons that adds links to your website for users to share, save, and blog about your website. The Yahoo action buttons use del.icio.us for social bookmarking and the Yahoo blog site for blogging. It also has a print feature.
Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in profound changes to web surfers' experiences. It is the right time for implementing features that will make your site social media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffíc to your site.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
The Impact of Personalization on SEO
The Impact of Personalization on SEO
By Claudia Bruemmer
Personalization of search has been a growing topic of interest for a while, but has stayed under the radar for most people until now. With Google's widespread integration of personalization into standard search results, search marketers' attention has finally been firmly riveted on the issue. Up until recently, Google provided two personalization options:
- You could customize your Google Personalized Homepage for quick access to information of your choice (email messages, news headlines, etc.).
- You could get automatic personalization from your search history.
Recently, Google started combining the above two options for users who sign up for services through their Google accounts. When you sign in, you get access to tailored results utilizing information from your search history and your Google home page. If you don't wish to see results based on your past searches, you simply sign out of your Google Account or turn the option to track your history off in your Account settings.
To quote Danny Sullivan, "...anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account (such as Gmail, AdSense, Google Analytics among others) will automatically be enrolled into three additional Google products: Search History -- Personalized Search -- Personalized Homepage." In the past, Google Accounts required you to manually enable Search History. However, with the recent change, personalized search has been enabled for all accounts, new and old alike. All accounts also automatically get home pages generated based on account information.
Widespread Personalization
We don't know for sure how rapidly search personalization will take hold. However, a 2006 Choice Stream Personalization Survey shows that consumer interest in the issue is strong, with 79 percent of respondents indicating a willingness to receive personalized content and more than half of the 18-24 year olds asked expressing an interest. The study also saw an íncrease in the number of people who would be willing to trade privacy for increasingly tailored results.
These findings can likely be generalized to search users because the information required for search personalization is less intrusive than the content participants were questioned about in the survey.
Benefits and Drawbacks for Users and Site Owners
Personalization benefits users because it can help make their searches more relevant based on past search behavior. It also can help Web site owners who have excellent content and well-written Titles, since the Web sites with the "stickiest" content will be weighted more favorably. However, in both cases there is also the possibility of closing out potentially useful resources because they do not fit a user's previous history.
In addition to good content, Web pages need good Title and Description Meta tags. Because these are displayed on the search results page, they represent the way human users will judge the site and decide whether or not to clíck through.
You can also gain by getting yourself on the Google personalized homepage of many search users. One way to do this is to offër users a feed, a Google gadget, or Add To Google buttons on your pages so users can subscribe to your content. Another tip is to put Google Bookmark buttons on your pages, such as those provided by AddThis. The more a visitor relies on your site, the better ranking it will receive when that user performs searches related to your keywords. The winners in personalized search are those who make a connection to their users because the results reward loyalty.
Implications for SEO
Increased personalization in search results has obvious implications for anyone performing search engine optimization since search results will now differ from user to user based on search history and user profile. Naturally, all queries will show a change in ranking positions between personalized and non-personalized results. Practitioners have analyzed this effect and found that results for personalized vs. non-personalized search can vary as much as 90 percent. Clearly, on page elements, particularly in the content and Meta data, will become extremely important again.
Rank Checking
The area most affected in the search optimization process is rank checking. An article by Mike Moran in Revenue January/February 2007 states, "Widespread personalization will doom traditional rank checking". Moran also asserts, "It's the biggest change in search marketing since paid search."
Extensive personalization will affect the traditional rank checking process because site rankings will differ based on users' idiosyncratic search habits. SEO analysts will be looking at average rankings rather than absolute rankings. This will force a change in search engine optimization techniques. Currently, SEO requires decision-making based partly on researching targeted keyword phrases used by leading competitors. With personalization, it becomes difficult to identify the leading competitors because all search results will differ.
Therefore, new methodologies for making search engine optimization decisions will have to be devised. Traditional SEO and on page optimization will still be very important and SEOs will need to continue to improve pages, making them superior to other pages for specific targeted keyword phrases. This will require more thorough analyses of competitor on-page and off-page factors.
The process of SEO competitor analysis will require data collection, quantitative and qualitative analyses, as well as multivariate analysis. Multivariate analyses can help determine the relative importance and influence of multiple factors compared to each other, yielding the competitive landscape for your targeted key terms. The strengths and weaknesses of this landscape will help practitioners make the SEO decisions needed for targeting the right terms for optimization.
In-depth competitor intelligence will give SEO practitioners more accurate readings of how their client's Web pages compare to their competitors' pages, and the result will be more accurate information than we currently get with rank checking.
The Challenge of Competitor Intelligence
In-depth competitor intelligence can reveal what's working and what's not for a site's strongest competitors. It can reveal which sites are competitively strong (or weak) compared to the client's site, regardless of what the respective ranking numbers would show with rank checking.
New age competitor intelligence will tell you what optimization factors are most important for specific competitive landscapes. Technicians will learn the true competitive nature of a keyword phrase rather that just the number of results returned for a specific query. They will know exactly what SEO factors to work in order to strengthen their client's position rather than guesstimate based on general guidelines.
In-depth competitor intelligence will tell practitioners how to prioritize the SEO factors to be optimized, revealing semantic relationships between the client's content, the competitors' content, and the semantic nuances of a keyword phrase related to search personalization of user results. Optimization in the era of personalization requires robust competitive intelligence, and this will pay big dividends to those who master analyzing the competitive landscape.
It is undoubtedly true that search will change dramatically once personalization is widely adopted. However, SEO is an art that is extremely flexible and will adapt with widespread use of search history to affect rankings. SEO practitioners have always been creative, and we will develop new techniques to achieve search visibility for our clients as personalized search becomes more prevalent.
By Claudia Bruemmer
Personalization of search has been a growing topic of interest for a while, but has stayed under the radar for most people until now. With Google's widespread integration of personalization into standard search results, search marketers' attention has finally been firmly riveted on the issue. Up until recently, Google provided two personalization options:
- You could customize your Google Personalized Homepage for quick access to information of your choice (email messages, news headlines, etc.).
- You could get automatic personalization from your search history.
Recently, Google started combining the above two options for users who sign up for services through their Google accounts. When you sign in, you get access to tailored results utilizing information from your search history and your Google home page. If you don't wish to see results based on your past searches, you simply sign out of your Google Account or turn the option to track your history off in your Account settings.
To quote Danny Sullivan, "...anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account (such as Gmail, AdSense, Google Analytics among others) will automatically be enrolled into three additional Google products: Search History -- Personalized Search -- Personalized Homepage." In the past, Google Accounts required you to manually enable Search History. However, with the recent change, personalized search has been enabled for all accounts, new and old alike. All accounts also automatically get home pages generated based on account information.
Widespread Personalization
We don't know for sure how rapidly search personalization will take hold. However, a 2006 Choice Stream Personalization Survey shows that consumer interest in the issue is strong, with 79 percent of respondents indicating a willingness to receive personalized content and more than half of the 18-24 year olds asked expressing an interest. The study also saw an íncrease in the number of people who would be willing to trade privacy for increasingly tailored results.
These findings can likely be generalized to search users because the information required for search personalization is less intrusive than the content participants were questioned about in the survey.
Benefits and Drawbacks for Users and Site Owners
Personalization benefits users because it can help make their searches more relevant based on past search behavior. It also can help Web site owners who have excellent content and well-written Titles, since the Web sites with the "stickiest" content will be weighted more favorably. However, in both cases there is also the possibility of closing out potentially useful resources because they do not fit a user's previous history.
In addition to good content, Web pages need good Title and Description Meta tags. Because these are displayed on the search results page, they represent the way human users will judge the site and decide whether or not to clíck through.
You can also gain by getting yourself on the Google personalized homepage of many search users. One way to do this is to offër users a feed, a Google gadget, or Add To Google buttons on your pages so users can subscribe to your content. Another tip is to put Google Bookmark buttons on your pages, such as those provided by AddThis. The more a visitor relies on your site, the better ranking it will receive when that user performs searches related to your keywords. The winners in personalized search are those who make a connection to their users because the results reward loyalty.
Implications for SEO
Increased personalization in search results has obvious implications for anyone performing search engine optimization since search results will now differ from user to user based on search history and user profile. Naturally, all queries will show a change in ranking positions between personalized and non-personalized results. Practitioners have analyzed this effect and found that results for personalized vs. non-personalized search can vary as much as 90 percent. Clearly, on page elements, particularly in the content and Meta data, will become extremely important again.
Rank Checking
The area most affected in the search optimization process is rank checking. An article by Mike Moran in Revenue January/February 2007 states, "Widespread personalization will doom traditional rank checking". Moran also asserts, "It's the biggest change in search marketing since paid search."
Extensive personalization will affect the traditional rank checking process because site rankings will differ based on users' idiosyncratic search habits. SEO analysts will be looking at average rankings rather than absolute rankings. This will force a change in search engine optimization techniques. Currently, SEO requires decision-making based partly on researching targeted keyword phrases used by leading competitors. With personalization, it becomes difficult to identify the leading competitors because all search results will differ.
Therefore, new methodologies for making search engine optimization decisions will have to be devised. Traditional SEO and on page optimization will still be very important and SEOs will need to continue to improve pages, making them superior to other pages for specific targeted keyword phrases. This will require more thorough analyses of competitor on-page and off-page factors.
The process of SEO competitor analysis will require data collection, quantitative and qualitative analyses, as well as multivariate analysis. Multivariate analyses can help determine the relative importance and influence of multiple factors compared to each other, yielding the competitive landscape for your targeted key terms. The strengths and weaknesses of this landscape will help practitioners make the SEO decisions needed for targeting the right terms for optimization.
In-depth competitor intelligence will give SEO practitioners more accurate readings of how their client's Web pages compare to their competitors' pages, and the result will be more accurate information than we currently get with rank checking.
The Challenge of Competitor Intelligence
In-depth competitor intelligence can reveal what's working and what's not for a site's strongest competitors. It can reveal which sites are competitively strong (or weak) compared to the client's site, regardless of what the respective ranking numbers would show with rank checking.
New age competitor intelligence will tell you what optimization factors are most important for specific competitive landscapes. Technicians will learn the true competitive nature of a keyword phrase rather that just the number of results returned for a specific query. They will know exactly what SEO factors to work in order to strengthen their client's position rather than guesstimate based on general guidelines.
In-depth competitor intelligence will tell practitioners how to prioritize the SEO factors to be optimized, revealing semantic relationships between the client's content, the competitors' content, and the semantic nuances of a keyword phrase related to search personalization of user results. Optimization in the era of personalization requires robust competitive intelligence, and this will pay big dividends to those who master analyzing the competitive landscape.
It is undoubtedly true that search will change dramatically once personalization is widely adopted. However, SEO is an art that is extremely flexible and will adapt with widespread use of search history to affect rankings. SEO practitioners have always been creative, and we will develop new techniques to achieve search visibility for our clients as personalized search becomes more prevalent.
The Importance of Search in Internet Marketing
The Importance of Search in Internet Marketing
By Claudia Bruemmer (c) 2007
For long-time search marketers it will come as no surprise that search has become a media darling. Pay-per-click advertising is the most popular online marketing strategy, and organic search engine optimization provides top click-through and conversion performance.
Search is more popular than display ads and emaíl marketing because of its excellent performance and ROI. Internet marketers should take note of the development in the search marketplace in order to better focus their advertising budgets.
Search is Evolving
As the Web grows exponentially, search engine databases suffer from information overload. As a result, technology and consumer search behavior adapts and changes. One of the early attempts to make search easier was the use of metadata in search. The search engine, Clusty came out in 2004 to "deliver groups or clusters of similar results rather that millíons of search results in one long líst." The clusters were supposed to help users see search results by topic so they could more easily find what they were looking for.
Another of the early changes to search was the development of multiple databases within general search. Whether you go to Google or Yahoo, you'll see category choices such as Web, video, images, local, news, etc. These are all different databases that can help you target specific queries. Google aptly named this concept its OneBox solution; you could access many different databases from one box.
Along with the development of multiple databases on niche products or subjects came the vertical search engines. These verticals are particularly useful for B2B companies. The latest trend in the evolution of the market is social search engines, which give consumers the ability to interact with search queries, putting the human touch in search results. Social search engines seek to connect people through personalization and human understanding, using community knowledge to íncrease relevance.
Consumers Are Key Drivers
Social search highlights an important point to remember: consumer behavior has become a key factor in driving the search economy. Consumers are performing more searches as the Web becomes legendary for finding information quickly and effortlessly. It used to be that search was second to email in Web activities, but in 2006, Marketing Sherpa reported that search surpassed email, becoming the most popular online activity. comScore reported that the number of searches in the U.S. grew by 28 percent, year-over-year in August 2006.
While search behavior is changing, the proliferation of Web 2.0 platforms and applications such as social networking, RSS and blogging are impacting search, making it even more complex. The information universe is becoming too vast and complex to catalog by keywords alone. This has resulted in the development of expanded search opportunities into local search, vertical search and social search. Many times, consumers are slow to adopt new search resources. Local and vertical search took several years to gain a foothold. Social search is still in the early stages of development.
Local Search
Local search is a key growth area. Borrell Associates estimates that local paid search spending reached $1 billion in 2006 and will reach $1.7 billion in 2007. It will continue to rise, reaching $4 billion by 2010, when it will account for 47 percent of local online advertising.
The U.S. Government estimates the number of small businesses at 24 million, all of whom are in a great position to leverage the power of local search. While many small businesses still don't have Web sites, the promise of local search is there for the asking. These businesses spend $90 billion annually on local advertising, mostly in traditional media. This reflects the potential for online advertising growth as businesses shift monëy from traditional to online advertising because of its effectiveness and ROI.
Nielsen/NetRatings shows that Google is catching up with Yahoo on local searches. Verizon SuperPages and SBC's YellowPages are also big players. As users continue to use the local search option on major engines, local search continues to gain in popularity and advertising revenue. Now is a great time for a small business to get into search engine marketing on a local level. The field is relatively open and not nearly as competitive as the general search engine results.
Vertical Search
Another good option for niche businesses is optimization focused on vertical search engines. Vertical search engines, along with the new social search engines, are beginning to lure consumer and B2B searchers away from the general search engines as the desire for more targeted answers and the ability to pose more focused queries increases. This is an indication that general search leaves many questíons unanswered, resulting in lower productivity.
Vertical search engines can provide the targeting that general search engines lack. This is why they are becoming increasingly popular. The market leaders in search, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, all are focusing efforts in the vertical space in order to respond to the needs of users. Social search is also on the rise with social search engines like Collarity and Rollyo allowing users to limit irrelevant results and benefit from the collective intelligence of previous searches.
Social Search
The interesting thing about social search engines is that they change search algorithms to include the human factor rather than depend solely on computer data. They not only include consumer-generated content, they can also include human intent. Collarity delivers search results with consumer-driven answers to queries and allows searchers to select various aspects of a search query. Rollyo allows users to create their own search engine roll, serving information from a preselected líst of sites and/or from other users' rolls. The social dimension of the Web and search engines is a fast growing phenomenon, and the major search engines are also experimenting with social search. We've had Yahoo Answers and Google Base in beta for a while, and Microsoft is reportedly negotiating with Eurekster for social search technology.
As search technology moves forward, new search models will continue to be launched. As the mobile Web and mobile search continue to expand, search queries will drive commerce around the world anytime anywhere, across platforms. This can only enhance the role of search in Internet marketing.
By Claudia Bruemmer (c) 2007
For long-time search marketers it will come as no surprise that search has become a media darling. Pay-per-click advertising is the most popular online marketing strategy, and organic search engine optimization provides top click-through and conversion performance.
Search is more popular than display ads and emaíl marketing because of its excellent performance and ROI. Internet marketers should take note of the development in the search marketplace in order to better focus their advertising budgets.
Search is Evolving
As the Web grows exponentially, search engine databases suffer from information overload. As a result, technology and consumer search behavior adapts and changes. One of the early attempts to make search easier was the use of metadata in search. The search engine, Clusty came out in 2004 to "deliver groups or clusters of similar results rather that millíons of search results in one long líst." The clusters were supposed to help users see search results by topic so they could more easily find what they were looking for.
Another of the early changes to search was the development of multiple databases within general search. Whether you go to Google or Yahoo, you'll see category choices such as Web, video, images, local, news, etc. These are all different databases that can help you target specific queries. Google aptly named this concept its OneBox solution; you could access many different databases from one box.
Along with the development of multiple databases on niche products or subjects came the vertical search engines. These verticals are particularly useful for B2B companies. The latest trend in the evolution of the market is social search engines, which give consumers the ability to interact with search queries, putting the human touch in search results. Social search engines seek to connect people through personalization and human understanding, using community knowledge to íncrease relevance.
Consumers Are Key Drivers
Social search highlights an important point to remember: consumer behavior has become a key factor in driving the search economy. Consumers are performing more searches as the Web becomes legendary for finding information quickly and effortlessly. It used to be that search was second to email in Web activities, but in 2006, Marketing Sherpa reported that search surpassed email, becoming the most popular online activity. comScore reported that the number of searches in the U.S. grew by 28 percent, year-over-year in August 2006.
While search behavior is changing, the proliferation of Web 2.0 platforms and applications such as social networking, RSS and blogging are impacting search, making it even more complex. The information universe is becoming too vast and complex to catalog by keywords alone. This has resulted in the development of expanded search opportunities into local search, vertical search and social search. Many times, consumers are slow to adopt new search resources. Local and vertical search took several years to gain a foothold. Social search is still in the early stages of development.
Local Search
Local search is a key growth area. Borrell Associates estimates that local paid search spending reached $1 billion in 2006 and will reach $1.7 billion in 2007. It will continue to rise, reaching $4 billion by 2010, when it will account for 47 percent of local online advertising.
The U.S. Government estimates the number of small businesses at 24 million, all of whom are in a great position to leverage the power of local search. While many small businesses still don't have Web sites, the promise of local search is there for the asking. These businesses spend $90 billion annually on local advertising, mostly in traditional media. This reflects the potential for online advertising growth as businesses shift monëy from traditional to online advertising because of its effectiveness and ROI.
Nielsen/NetRatings shows that Google is catching up with Yahoo on local searches. Verizon SuperPages and SBC's YellowPages are also big players. As users continue to use the local search option on major engines, local search continues to gain in popularity and advertising revenue. Now is a great time for a small business to get into search engine marketing on a local level. The field is relatively open and not nearly as competitive as the general search engine results.
Vertical Search
Another good option for niche businesses is optimization focused on vertical search engines. Vertical search engines, along with the new social search engines, are beginning to lure consumer and B2B searchers away from the general search engines as the desire for more targeted answers and the ability to pose more focused queries increases. This is an indication that general search leaves many questíons unanswered, resulting in lower productivity.
Vertical search engines can provide the targeting that general search engines lack. This is why they are becoming increasingly popular. The market leaders in search, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, all are focusing efforts in the vertical space in order to respond to the needs of users. Social search is also on the rise with social search engines like Collarity and Rollyo allowing users to limit irrelevant results and benefit from the collective intelligence of previous searches.
Social Search
The interesting thing about social search engines is that they change search algorithms to include the human factor rather than depend solely on computer data. They not only include consumer-generated content, they can also include human intent. Collarity delivers search results with consumer-driven answers to queries and allows searchers to select various aspects of a search query. Rollyo allows users to create their own search engine roll, serving information from a preselected líst of sites and/or from other users' rolls. The social dimension of the Web and search engines is a fast growing phenomenon, and the major search engines are also experimenting with social search. We've had Yahoo Answers and Google Base in beta for a while, and Microsoft is reportedly negotiating with Eurekster for social search technology.
As search technology moves forward, new search models will continue to be launched. As the mobile Web and mobile search continue to expand, search queries will drive commerce around the world anytime anywhere, across platforms. This can only enhance the role of search in Internet marketing.
Monday, April 9, 2007
Advanced Link Building
Advanced Link Building
Hosted Content, The Quest for the Perfect Link
By Frederick Townes
Ask Google, search engines love links. Of course, they love some links more than others. For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn't have as much value to search engines and so, it doesn't receive the same weíght as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link � the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred.
Article Syndication
In recent years, many sites have employed article syndication to develop links. These site owners write (or have written) articles of interest to a particular audience. The site owners then offer these articles to other relevant sites free in exchange for a link back to the originator of the content in the "about the author" section of the article. In this way, a single site owner can submit dozens of articles for syndication receiving an inbound link from each article in return for the frëe use of content. They can also watch other sites post the content virally to keep their sites fresh, as well.
Sites need fresh content so many will happily display your article and provide a link to your site. It's a tried and true link building tactic. However, search engines are programmed to seek out the most natural, and therefore valuable, links they can find.
The way articles are syndicated is through sites like goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com. The standard format for the display of the article is: headline, article body followed by a small blurb about the author with a link back to the author's site. Since those links appear in the body of the page, they appear to be more valuable in comparison to most purchased or reciprocal links which often appear at the bottom of a page column, or in the footer surrounded by lots of other links somewhat effective, but not necessarily the best way to acquire inbound links.
In addition, syndication leads to duplication when a single article appears on 10 sites all at the same time. This diminishes the quality of the text and the back link to the author's site. It's still more valuable than a plain link exchange, but search engines are placing less emphasis on syndicated content. So, what's a site owner to do?
Hosted Web Content
It goes by many different names: content swapping, advertorials, pre-sell pages and hosted content all basically the same idea.
The way hosted content works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, now, instead of the back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed those links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the "eyes" of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.
Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The web site that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hostíng site get useful content.
This strategy isn't new. It's simply doing what search engines want us to do is to produce content that's useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author, and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank in strong testimonials and referrals. Whether or not the site owners want to monetize their site by allowing approved authors to post content is the same debate as whether or not links should be bought and sold. However, publishing high quality, unique and useful content, rather than just creating inflated link popularity with diminishing returns, is, in comparison, a tested SEO tactic.
Designing a Hosted Content Page
You're paying for the placement of this content so you want it to be good. In the eternal quest for successful link bait, you also want the content to be ranked by search engines because it provides real value to the reader and is hosted on an authoritative site.
Design the hosted content page using standard SEO conventions: a keyword savvy title, header < h1>, subheads < h2> and a keyword density of less than 5%. Any higher and search engines may consider the content to be "spamish" regardless of where the content appears.
Now comes the most important part. As you write the article, carefully place links to topically relevant pages on your own site within the body of the article's text. These are high value links that will improve your SEO. However, it's also important to place your articles on sites that are topically related to your piece (and probably already rank for related topics). The authority of the site hostíng your content, the relevance of the site (topically speaking) and that back link make your site look stronger as far as search engines are concerned. Also, remember that the quality of the content to which you link also matters. Link to strong pages (those with quality back links) on your site, as well. Your article should reference other authoritative, relevant articles so that search engines see that your piece was written to offër real value to readers.
It's Not Quantity, It's Quality
It's no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It's not quantity, it's the quality of the links that improve ranking in the SERPs.
Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more "natural" from a search engine's perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site's pages. Just like quality link bait, which is unique, original and useful content, quality hosted content on respected sites will also naturally develop its own back links - the ultimate validation and the desired outcome of placing quality content. Finally, because these links are found on pages optimized with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.
Start Your Hosted Content Campaign Today
It's being done everyday, successfully building small sites into largër sites, providing frëe advertising for the thought-leader/author, delivering less duplicate content to search engines and more new content (plus revenue) to the hostíng site and, perhaps most importantly, hosted content actually delivers useful, relevant information to readers � exactly what search engines rank in the first place. As with any link-building technique, hosted content can be abused, but topically authoritative sites are not going to accept content that does not meet their high standards � so everyone wins when the goals are white hat.
Start searching for websites that might be interested in hostíng your next article, or start looking for a site owner interested in content swapping. Create content that's unique, useful and well-written and you may find that you won't even have to pay a site owner to share your content with their readers � exactly how it should be.
Hosted Content, The Quest for the Perfect Link
By Frederick Townes
Ask Google, search engines love links. Of course, they love some links more than others. For example, a simple link exchange (reciprocal link) doesn't have as much value to search engines and so, it doesn't receive the same weíght as a non-reciprocal (one-way) link � the theory being that a one-way, in-bound link is a recommendation from a site owner to visit this linked site. The link, itself, is testament to the quality of the site being referred.
Article Syndication
In recent years, many sites have employed article syndication to develop links. These site owners write (or have written) articles of interest to a particular audience. The site owners then offer these articles to other relevant sites free in exchange for a link back to the originator of the content in the "about the author" section of the article. In this way, a single site owner can submit dozens of articles for syndication receiving an inbound link from each article in return for the frëe use of content. They can also watch other sites post the content virally to keep their sites fresh, as well.
Sites need fresh content so many will happily display your article and provide a link to your site. It's a tried and true link building tactic. However, search engines are programmed to seek out the most natural, and therefore valuable, links they can find.
The way articles are syndicated is through sites like goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com. The standard format for the display of the article is: headline, article body followed by a small blurb about the author with a link back to the author's site. Since those links appear in the body of the page, they appear to be more valuable in comparison to most purchased or reciprocal links which often appear at the bottom of a page column, or in the footer surrounded by lots of other links somewhat effective, but not necessarily the best way to acquire inbound links.
In addition, syndication leads to duplication when a single article appears on 10 sites all at the same time. This diminishes the quality of the text and the back link to the author's site. It's still more valuable than a plain link exchange, but search engines are placing less emphasis on syndicated content. So, what's a site owner to do?
Hosted Web Content
It goes by many different names: content swapping, advertorials, pre-sell pages and hosted content all basically the same idea.
The way hosted content works is that you, the author, pay a site owner to display your article. However, now, instead of the back links to your site coming at the end of the article, you embed those links in the body of the text surrounded by your target keywords and actually useful content for the reader. In the "eyes" of a search engine, this is among the highest valued back link.
Hosted content is basically renting a page on another site with links to your site embedded in the main body of the article. The web site that hosts the content receives payment from the author plus fresh content, the author gets a valuable back link and visitors to the hostíng site get useful content.
This strategy isn't new. It's simply doing what search engines want us to do is to produce content that's useful, beneficial and appears on quality sites. Not only does a quality piece of content receive more visibility when hosted on an authoritative site, it also delivers increased benefit to the author, and the page may even rank itself for target key phrases. When a major site hosts your content, you gain from its page rank in strong testimonials and referrals. Whether or not the site owners want to monetize their site by allowing approved authors to post content is the same debate as whether or not links should be bought and sold. However, publishing high quality, unique and useful content, rather than just creating inflated link popularity with diminishing returns, is, in comparison, a tested SEO tactic.
Designing a Hosted Content Page
You're paying for the placement of this content so you want it to be good. In the eternal quest for successful link bait, you also want the content to be ranked by search engines because it provides real value to the reader and is hosted on an authoritative site.
Design the hosted content page using standard SEO conventions: a keyword savvy title, header < h1>, subheads < h2> and a keyword density of less than 5%. Any higher and search engines may consider the content to be "spamish" regardless of where the content appears.
Now comes the most important part. As you write the article, carefully place links to topically relevant pages on your own site within the body of the article's text. These are high value links that will improve your SEO. However, it's also important to place your articles on sites that are topically related to your piece (and probably already rank for related topics). The authority of the site hostíng your content, the relevance of the site (topically speaking) and that back link make your site look stronger as far as search engines are concerned. Also, remember that the quality of the content to which you link also matters. Link to strong pages (those with quality back links) on your site, as well. Your article should reference other authoritative, relevant articles so that search engines see that your piece was written to offër real value to readers.
It's Not Quantity, It's Quality
It's no longer simply a matter of how many links point to a site. There are many cases of sites in which 50 quality links outrank sites with hundreds of links. It's not quantity, it's the quality of the links that improve ranking in the SERPs.
Editorial links (links in hosted content) are more "natural" from a search engine's perspective and, therefore, more valuable because the article has, at most, two or three targeted links pointing to your site's pages. Just like quality link bait, which is unique, original and useful content, quality hosted content on respected sites will also naturally develop its own back links - the ultimate validation and the desired outcome of placing quality content. Finally, because these links are found on pages optimized with your keywords, search engines will consider them extremely relevant to the subject at hand.
Start Your Hosted Content Campaign Today
It's being done everyday, successfully building small sites into largër sites, providing frëe advertising for the thought-leader/author, delivering less duplicate content to search engines and more new content (plus revenue) to the hostíng site and, perhaps most importantly, hosted content actually delivers useful, relevant information to readers � exactly what search engines rank in the first place. As with any link-building technique, hosted content can be abused, but topically authoritative sites are not going to accept content that does not meet their high standards � so everyone wins when the goals are white hat.
Start searching for websites that might be interested in hostíng your next article, or start looking for a site owner interested in content swapping. Create content that's unique, useful and well-written and you may find that you won't even have to pay a site owner to share your content with their readers � exactly how it should be.
Friday, April 6, 2007
Sitemaps Improve Site Value
Sitemaps Improve Site Value
By Lisa Barone
Getting your pages indexed. It is your most important SEO goal and perhaps the one most vital in determining the success of your SEO campaign. However, many search engines have trouble finding links buried deep within the structure of your site. So how do you make sure your pages are easy for the search engines to find? With a sitemap. Creating a sitemap provides the search engines with a one-stop-shop for all of the pages on your site. And if designed correctly, your sitemap can also be a valuable resource to lost visitors looking to understand your site structure.
What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap displays the inner framework and organization of your site's content to the search engines. Your sitemap should reflect the way visitors would intuitively work through your site. Years ago sitemaps existed only as a boring series of links in líst förm. Today, they are thought of as an extension of your site. You should use your sitemap as a tool to provide your visitor and the search engines with more content. Create details for each section and sub-section through descriptive text placed under the sitemap link. This will help your visitors understand and navigate through your site, and will also give you more food for the search engines. You can even go crazy and add Flash to your sitemap like we did with the interactive Bruce Clay sitemap! Of course, if you do include a Flash sitemap for your visitor, you will also need to include a text map so that the robots can read it.
A good site map will:
Show a quick, easy to follow overview of your site.
Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow.
Provide text links to every page of your site.
Quickly show visitors how to get where they need to go.
Give visitors a short description of what they can expect to find on each page.
Utilize important keyword phrases.
Why They Are Important?
Sitemaps are very important for two main reasons. First, your sitemap provides food for the search engine spiders that crawl your site. The sitemap will give the spider links to all the major pages of your site, allowing every page included on your sitemap to be indexed by the spider. This is a very good thing! Having all of your major pages included in the search engine database will make your site more likely to come up in the search engine results when a user performs a query. Your sitemap pushes the search engine toward the individual pages of your site instead of making them hunt around for links. A well planned site map can ensure your Web site is fully indexed by search engines. Sitemaps are also very valuable for you human visitors. They help them to understand your site structure and layout, while giving them quick access to your entire site. It is also helpful for lost users in need of a lifeline. Often if a visitor finds themselves lost or stuck inside your page, he will begin to look for a way out of his hole. Having a detailed sitemap will show him how to get back on track and find what he was looking for. Without it, your visitor would have just closed the browser or headed back over to the search engines. Conversion lost.
Tips for Creating a Sitemap
Your sitemap should be linked from your homepage. Linking it this way will force search engines to find it that way and then follow it all the way through the site. If it's linked from other pages it is likely the spider will find a dead end along the way and just quit. Small sites can place every page on their sitemap, but largër sites should not. You do not want the search engines to see a never-ending líst of links and assume you are a link farm. Most SEO experts believe you should have no more than 25 to 40 links on your sitemap. This will also make it easier to read for your human visitors. Remember, your sitemap is there to assist your visitors, not confuse them. The title of each link should contain a keyword whenever possible and should link to the original page. We recommend writing a short description (10-25) words under each link to help visitors learn what the page is about. Having short descriptions will also contribute to your depth of content with the search engines. Once created, go back and make sure that all of your links are correct. If you have 15 pages on your sitemap, then all 15 pages need to link to every other sitemap page. Otherwise both visitors and search engine spiders will find broken links and lose interest.
Remember to Update!
Just like you can't leave your website to fend for itself, the same applies to your sitemap. When your site changes, make sure your sitemap is updated to reflect that. What good are directions to a place that's been torn down? Keeping your sitemap current will make you an ínstant visitor and search engine favorite.
By Lisa Barone
Getting your pages indexed. It is your most important SEO goal and perhaps the one most vital in determining the success of your SEO campaign. However, many search engines have trouble finding links buried deep within the structure of your site. So how do you make sure your pages are easy for the search engines to find? With a sitemap. Creating a sitemap provides the search engines with a one-stop-shop for all of the pages on your site. And if designed correctly, your sitemap can also be a valuable resource to lost visitors looking to understand your site structure.
What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap displays the inner framework and organization of your site's content to the search engines. Your sitemap should reflect the way visitors would intuitively work through your site. Years ago sitemaps existed only as a boring series of links in líst förm. Today, they are thought of as an extension of your site. You should use your sitemap as a tool to provide your visitor and the search engines with more content. Create details for each section and sub-section through descriptive text placed under the sitemap link. This will help your visitors understand and navigate through your site, and will also give you more food for the search engines. You can even go crazy and add Flash to your sitemap like we did with the interactive Bruce Clay sitemap! Of course, if you do include a Flash sitemap for your visitor, you will also need to include a text map so that the robots can read it.
A good site map will:
Show a quick, easy to follow overview of your site.
Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow.
Provide text links to every page of your site.
Quickly show visitors how to get where they need to go.
Give visitors a short description of what they can expect to find on each page.
Utilize important keyword phrases.
Why They Are Important?
Sitemaps are very important for two main reasons. First, your sitemap provides food for the search engine spiders that crawl your site. The sitemap will give the spider links to all the major pages of your site, allowing every page included on your sitemap to be indexed by the spider. This is a very good thing! Having all of your major pages included in the search engine database will make your site more likely to come up in the search engine results when a user performs a query. Your sitemap pushes the search engine toward the individual pages of your site instead of making them hunt around for links. A well planned site map can ensure your Web site is fully indexed by search engines. Sitemaps are also very valuable for you human visitors. They help them to understand your site structure and layout, while giving them quick access to your entire site. It is also helpful for lost users in need of a lifeline. Often if a visitor finds themselves lost or stuck inside your page, he will begin to look for a way out of his hole. Having a detailed sitemap will show him how to get back on track and find what he was looking for. Without it, your visitor would have just closed the browser or headed back over to the search engines. Conversion lost.
Tips for Creating a Sitemap
Your sitemap should be linked from your homepage. Linking it this way will force search engines to find it that way and then follow it all the way through the site. If it's linked from other pages it is likely the spider will find a dead end along the way and just quit. Small sites can place every page on their sitemap, but largër sites should not. You do not want the search engines to see a never-ending líst of links and assume you are a link farm. Most SEO experts believe you should have no more than 25 to 40 links on your sitemap. This will also make it easier to read for your human visitors. Remember, your sitemap is there to assist your visitors, not confuse them. The title of each link should contain a keyword whenever possible and should link to the original page. We recommend writing a short description (10-25) words under each link to help visitors learn what the page is about. Having short descriptions will also contribute to your depth of content with the search engines. Once created, go back and make sure that all of your links are correct. If you have 15 pages on your sitemap, then all 15 pages need to link to every other sitemap page. Otherwise both visitors and search engine spiders will find broken links and lose interest.
Remember to Update!
Just like you can't leave your website to fend for itself, the same applies to your sitemap. When your site changes, make sure your sitemap is updated to reflect that. What good are directions to a place that's been torn down? Keeping your sitemap current will make you an ínstant visitor and search engine favorite.
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