Content sells and the more the better.

Website after website proves that content is the most valuable commodity. Not only for ranking, but for converting browsers into customers.

People are going online to find information and they expect it to be free — provide that information to them and either capture their email address with a free offer, or offer links to products that you recommend.

Jack Humphrey (Content Site Building) is a real cheerleader for content sites.

From his Secrets to Creating an Authority Site paper,

“Serve your market and you will beat everyone else in your niche that aggressively optimized (tricks) the engines. … Search Engine Optimzation (SEO) has been replaced for good. Their impending negative reaction and pooh-poohing of what we are saying will be deafening because it IS true and they are scared.”

That seems a little over the top to me, (how many people have said SEO is dead?) but he is correct in saying things are changing and content is at the center of what’s happening.

Consider these changes:

1. If you have a small site, i.e. less than 10 pages, you will probably not get ranked on the first page.

2. If you are simply re-selling someone else’s products, you won’t get ranked. (i.e. Google penalized ‘thin affiliate sites’)

3. Frequent updates have been important for a while and are getting more and more important for ranking all the time.

4. Blogs are taking over — Technorati tracking graph of weblog growth shows 3 blogs are updated every second.

5. Shopping cart sites still have a place in the overall scheme of things but they are under pressure. I would much rather read all about stereo system components and advise from an electronics expert and then consider his recommendations than figure it all out myself.

So how do you make a new content site, or convert a product or service based site into a content site?

1. Research your keywords and come up with a list.

2. Each keyword is a category and in that category will be articles based on a family of keywords. Think of it as a grocery list. There are categories like, meat, dairy, and vegetables. Each of these categories is going to be a section of your content website.

Within each section are sub-sections. In the meat section there are types of meat like beef, chicken, fish, and pork. These are going to be sub-sections, although they could be pages, depending on how comprehensively you want to cover your topic.

Within each of those categories are more sub-divisions - in the chicken section there is organic chickens and whole chickens. And so on…

3. Organize your keywords into a hierachy or family, and map it out like a tree. This gives you the blueprint on how to structure your site. Think ahead 6 months or a year.

4. Taking each bottom level keyword, research, think about, and expand the keyword into an article title.

5. Work on one branch of the tree at a time, starting at the bottom and working your way up. Write articles yourself or hire a writer to write content for you and start feeding content into the site in a bit at a time.

On each content page, place links to related products that you have. Remember less is definitely more - keep it simple and narrow down the choices in navigation. Browsers are going to read or skim an article from top to bottom. Make sure you have a choice for them at the bottom of the page. Remember they are looking for free stuff. If they get to the bottom of the page and see a link to purchase something beside a link to more free stuff their choice is predicable. Take off the links to free stuff and unnecessary navigation links.

Place an article on your site only once. If you have to put text on your site more than once, use the robots.txt files to exclude indexing and use the noindex META tag.

How much at a time? Think about percentages of the total number of pages. If you have 50 pages, now and add 75 all at once, that is 150% and Google is going to notice that and you will be penalized. There is no magic percentage, as long as you start off small and build up slowly and keep a steady percentage every week.

Duplicate content is a serious issue for most SEO, and while I can understand the tough line that Google takes, it seems to me they are getting a little carried away — but then they probably have little choice. If they didn’t take such a hard line the amount of dup content out would grow exponentially.

Not only is duplicate content an issue between sites, but also internally, similar content. Pages that are too similar to each other are penalized. This is a vexing problem with hotel sites, real estate sites, and a whole host of other sites where the essential product is the same, only the specifications are slightly different.

Using a duplicate content checker like CopyScape will not detect similar content, only duplicate content. Copyscape checks for plagiarism, which is an exact copy. Presumably they extract a snippet and search for it in quotes to find another indexed copy or something like that.

According to Google SpamCop Matt Cutts, the pages have to be quote VERY DIFFERENT unquote. See the full collection of his SEO talks here. According to Cutts, Google’s algorithm doesn’t just check the pages once, but has a whole series of checks where pages are tested right up until milliseconds before the results are shown.

The details of duplicate content, and similar content, are complex and interesting. A full discussion is here at studtdubl.com.

Without getting into all the technical details, which others do very well for a different audience than here, I would like to present a few tips and pointers for fixing similar content.

Here are some tips for making content VERY different:

Use a duplicate content checker HERE and try getting the pages below 20% similar.

In fact, the duplicate content algorithm doesn’t work on a percentage basis — nevertheless, if you can get it down to a low level, (i.e. below 10 or 20%) you can skate through. (Oh right — 40% is not a low level!)

Test all your pages with the dup content checker and make a list. Probably the pages say the same thing or use the same way of speaking about the product. Things like, “all of our materials are prepared by… ” Or, do an “Extended find” for the text using an HTML editor. Likely the phrase that is repeated is part of a paragraph that you used over and over when building the site. Count the number of pages.

Depending on how long the list is, there are 2 ways to go — adding new unique content or rewriting the existing content, or both.

First, look at the paragraph and write 20 versions of the paragraph that all say the same thing, but are totally different. If you really set your mind to it, it isn’t that difficult.

Next, research and write new unique content for each page or small group of pages. Depending on how long the text is, you may only have to add 100 or 200 words to dilute the existing text enough to squeak by.

Next mix and match the 20 unique descriptions with the new text.

Article Syndication is still a great way to get your name out there, and attract targeted traffic that converts like crazy. The ‘bricks and mortar’ analyogy of article syndication is having a syndicated column in a newspaper. Regular content is published that is of interest to a target group. Over time a loyal following is built up.

In the past, it was also great way to get one-way links and increase your ranking. On very low and low-ish competition keywords, article syndication works just fine, even if the articles aren’t sydicated widely. Which I still think it helps, together with a well rounded linking campaign, it just isn’t helping as much. And I suspect, may actually be hurting.

Hundreds of links from low grade Article Syndication sites can’t be good news to Google. I recently saw several client sites who had installed Article Dashboard software downgraded to a grey PR and other sites linking heavily to them appear to be penalized as well. The sites weren’t ranked well to begin with, so it is difficult to say how much there were penalized.

Once the Article Dashboard software was removed, the PR returned on the last update. The sites linking heavily to the penalized site stayed at #135 (down from #3) for the targetted keywords. Once the links to the penalized site were removed, the rankings bounced back to #5 on the last update.

Quality counts more than ever! Here are some guildelines for article submissions:

1) Make sure the front page is in the google cache.

2) Check the ‘retrieved on’ date to see how active Google sees the site. Google appears to be skipping directores and web pages that are duplicate content. Which makes sense for them, since it is less work.

3) How many articles and authors? If a site has over 100,000 articles (ie the main article dashboard site www.articledashboard.com) Google isn’t going to penalize it, even if they are ‘getting links to increase PR etc. etc.’ They are too big now.

4) Traffic. Check Alexa. Anything under 20,000 is good.

Any suggestions? Experience?

Google Spamcop Matt Cutts has produced a series of instructions Q & A video on a variety of topics of interest to webmasters. See the Full list of Videos

I was particularly interested in a few comments that he made regarding a good site. When asked how to increse visibility on Google, he replies,

1. The #1 thing [problem] is not making their site crawlable. Look at your site using a text browser. Sitemaps are important.

2. Good content that is interesting and that other people will want to link to.

3. Think about the people that are relevant and make sure they know about you. ie get relevant links.

He goes on further,

When I was setting up this video I was looking for tutorials and there was a site with all the tutorials, oh and by the way, you can buy our equipment to do that. That is really really smart.

Sage Luce, President of SageRock.com shares his thoughts on what to expect from a brand new search engine optimization campaign.

1. A brand new domain will not come up on Google for 6 months - 1 year.
Absolutely — it is a long hard slog, and it is all about quality and content.

2. Getting good positions on Google is harder than ever. You must have good quality links and you have to have a good site to get good links.
Quality is everything now. Who you link to and how you link to them, and who long you link to them — plus who links to them, and how long.

3. You have to have lots of content — you have to be a resource and offer something that is unique. Absolutely. What separates you from the pack? Why should anyone visit your site when there are a million others to choose from?

4. You have to use phrases that you want to rank for in your content. If the keyword phrase you are targeting for doesn’t appear on the page, you won’t rank for it.

5. It takes as long as it takes. Every industry is different, and every website is different. The older your site, the easier it is, the newer your site, the longer it will take. I tell client expect 2 - 3 months for MSN, 2 or 3 months after that for Yahoo, and a year for Google. Maybe we will get a pleasant surprise and it will be earlier, but coun’t on a year.

6. Stop the multiple domains — this makes your project exponentially different. Have one site and focus on it. As each domain gets tougher and tougher to place on the first page, it is less and less attractive to operate multiple sites.

7. You have to have good content and lots of it. Some people even say SEO is dead and it is all about content optimization now. Maybe that is a little strong but they do have a point. Content is very very important.

8. Trust your SEO for a least a year. If they have done their keyword research, they are building links, they are building content you are on the right path. Give them 365 days.

After all that, he does say, the ROI of a good position on Google is better than any other advertising medium.

See the Full list of videos from Sage Rock

Comments? Suggestions?

Ok so I have finally broken down and setup a blog. Oh great — another SEO Blog! I write a lot of articles about SEM/SEO and the feedback is very good, and clients tell me that’s why they hire me because they like my articles.

They also tell me they want to hire the freelancer that wrote them — sorry — freelancers write a lot of content for me, but i write the SEO articles.

Anyway — since clients find these articles useful and I find so much more interesting stuff relating to SEM, I am expanding my article writing to other things like posting video clips and other stuff.

Hope you enjoy and let me know what you think.