Here is an interesting video from www.intralinkinc.com, which explains their Website marketing plan. What caught my eye about this is they are basically describing a content site, and taking a much broader view of marketing than just SEO.

The key point is they start with the content and force the SEO into the content rather than forcing the content into the SEO. The emphasis is on marketing the content, not marketing and then finding filler content to market.

Here is a recap of their 5 point marketing plan.

1. Product Mix. What is the thesis statement for your website? What is the something special about your site that distinguishes it from everything else?

2. Keyword Research — How customers can/are finding your website. Keywords focus on the Root, and the Long Tail. The root keyword might be,
real estate Denver, and the Long Tail would be keywords targeting communities surrounding Denver

3. Competition Level — 1. determine level of SEO required & 2) Normalization — Look at the top 10 results and their content and match it according to the number of words etc.

4. Search Engine Optimization. Force the Search Engine Optimization into the content rather than forcing the SEO into the content. The emphasis is on the marketing and the content.

Over the last few months I have watched my own sites and client sites increase traffic and sales considerably and largely due to the amount of content being added, so I thought I would take a look at a successful content site and see what they are doing.

Here is the theory first:

The theory of a content site is that almost nobody is going to go straight for the shopping cart, or click on your affiliate links, and pull out their credit card. Nice work if you can get it, but generally it isn’t so easy.

Instead, browsers, who are after all looking for free stuff, want to read subject matter relating to their search, and if they like what you have to say, they will click on your affiliate link. Once they have read what you have to say, and you have helped them, (i.e. they have learned something) they have started to trust you.

If they like what you have to say, then clicking on your affiliate links, joining your membership site, adding to cart or whatever for desired response, is something they want to do, not something they are avoiding.

That is the critical difference.

Here are some examples:

My favorite content site is www.audioloftreport.com .

The site is run by Alan Lofft, whose picture appears on the front page, and who is an expert on Stereos. If you want a good quality stereo system, but aren’t a stereo geek, this site will give you all kinds of great information, recommendations and how to advice for putting together a great system.

There is no footer menu, loads of free information about stereos with recommendations backed by technical advice and information. Affiliate links are throughout the site embedded in the text. You can contact him for advice and recommendations from several different places, including for a custom loudspeaker consultation.

The site has a nice personal touch, saying things like “It will make a world of difference… Take it from me! (Alan Lofft). ”

I think this is a great content site.

Interested in compelling content for your site? We can help

One of the factors Google uses to ranks sites, from among the reputed hundreds of factors, is the breadth of a sites’ content.

The breadth of a site is a factor in Google’s algorithm for several reasons. Google uses some form of Latent Semantic Indexing, LSI (or so I contend). LSI is a complex and exceedingly clever way for computers to understand what text is about using mathematics. This is a gross over-simplification and other people have discussed this issue and all the technical details for a different audience. Nevertheless, it serves our purpose.

One way to think about how the algorithm functions is first the keywords with the highest density are removed from the page. Hence talk of an ‘over-optimization’ penalty. With the highest density words removed, the algorithm attempts to make sense of the page with the remaining text. If the webpage text contains a complete and broad set of related keywords, the meaning of the text can be extracted by a machine.

Another factor in Google’s algorithm that broad content triggers is click tracking. Google is known to track clicks on search results occasionally. When a browsers does a search and clicks on one of the listings, a timer starts. If the browser visits a site, and doesn’t find what they are looking for, they hit the back button and choose another listing to click on. Google tracks this short visit, co-related with the keywords and the site and determines the site is not relevant. If a browser clicks on a search result and don’t come back to the search results, Google reasons that the browser must have found what they were looking for and the site is relevant to the keywords.

By creating a site that covers every aspect of a topic increases the chances that you will have something of interest to browsers using your targeted keywords.

Examples of Broad Coverage

A search for “art” on Google shows the top site is art.com and the next is art.net
A search for “baby” — the top site is babycenter.com and the #2 is baby.com

www.art.com is a great site and a great example of a site that covers their topic broadly. A browser searching for the keyword “art” may have many things in mind, but if they go to art.com, chances are they will find what they are looking for.

Consider some of the things that someone searching for “art” may be looking for:

1. Different types of art: posters, tapestries or canvases, etc.
2. Different styles of art: modern, still life, advertising, photography, etc.
3. Different artists: Picasso, Monet, etc.
4. Different Schools of art: Impressionist, Realism, Romanticism etc.

Consider how this same principal applies to smaller sites targeting 2 and 3 word keyword phrases.

Tips for Making Sites with Broad Coverage

1. Keyword Research. Find variations of your targeted keyword phrases and create content and add affiliate products to increase the breadth of your coverage.

2. Check your competitors. Visit the top 20 sites for your targeted keywords and make a note of the categories on their sites.

For more tips on creating a content site with broad coverage HERE

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.

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.