Content sites are a great way to soft sell your way to high conversion. I keep producing content for my own sites and client sites and watching the traffice increase slowly but steadily.

Something I have been noticing recently is sites jump in and out of the rankings for no apparent reason. Reading one of my favorities blogs recently BlueHatSEO, I found an article which goes into all the gory details of how Google handles fresh content.

Similar to BlueHatSEO, my sites would disappear completely from the Search Results, then appear a week or so later. I watched this several times, and the disappear/re-appear schedule was exactly in sync with the Google’s Cache date.

So what is going on here in plain language?

Google loves fresh content, but not too fresh it seems. And it gets more complicated. To understand that we have to look at some of the factors Google uses in ranking sites. Google uses the history of your site as one component in the ranking algorithm. Things like how long your site has been online, and how often it has been updated, and how big the updates have been, on average since the first day. As well, the history of other sites in your sector are analyzed and their update history and frequency are compared to your history.

All of this goes into the mix of several hundred factors that are used to assign rank. So, for example, if your site is never updated, and suddently you start updating every week, and the other sites in your sector are only updated every 3 months, then Google of course notices and your site is penalized. Once the next index cycle comes around, all of the averages have normalized to some extent and your site goes right back to where it was.

OK, so what to do? Here are some tips and guidelines to staying just fresh enough:

1) Look at your competition and see if you can find out how often they update. I just realized I was updating every week, after few updates over the last year, and my competition are all old sites that almost never update. Generally I am #3 for my target keywords, but I kept getting penalized for a week or so then back to #3 — all because my update schedule is out of sync with my competitors.

2) Work to a schedule of updates and stick to it. First, as in #1, figure out how often your competitors are updating and use that as your starting point. Next, work out a plan to gradually move toward more frequent updates, keeping the averages in mind. If everyone else is updating every 3 months, say, then start off with every 3 months, then every 2 then every month.

If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. You don’t have to do it yourself though, and can easily hire a freelance writer or hire a blog writer.

4) Consider other ways of using content besides updates. If everyone else in the top 10 is updating every 3 months, why work harder? Content can be used in dozens of ways. Use your content for syndication, or for email followup. Set up an auto responder that sends out 10 tips about _____, or a series of articles followed by a special promotional offer.

Ok so you have a website now and an SEO guy has just told you it will cost $2000 – $5000 to get your site on the first page of Google. And it doesn’t stop there! Even after you have paid that much, it will take a year or more.

Those are unfortunately the facts of life. Probably you can get some traffic from MSN and Yahoo in 4 – 6 months, but generally the traffic from Yahoo and MSN doesn’t convert as well.

So, what can small business owners do in the meantime, without a big budget, that will increase their visibility?

Here are a few suggestions:

1) Make sure your offline customers know about your website. Publish your URL everywhere.

2) Offer discounts to offline customers when they order online.

3) Who are the leaders in your niche online? Draw up a list and make sure they know about your site. Offer to exchange links, articles, or content. If they have forums or blogs, participate in the discussion.

4) Write articles and publish them everywhere. Use content syndication sites, as well as contacting webmasters and offering them ‘free’ content with a link back to you.

5) Contact friends, customers, suppliers (anybody) and make sure they know about your site and/or link to your new site.

6) Submit your content to social bookmarking sites. Do a search for “Social Bookmarking List” and open accounts and submit your content.
If you use a creditcard and are stuck in a debt problem, solving it by the way of credit card consolidation is not valid solution. Give priority to free business cards that comes at deals like fixed rate mortgages. Believe in timely investments like medical insurance. Abstain from giving into whims to just having a look at homes for sale when you know that you cannot afford it.

Surveys and statistics released this week show that Web2 continues to explode and Web1 brochure sites are stagnating and getting left in the dust. Consider:

* Blogger.com is the web’s fastest growing service at 528% over last year.

* Myspace.com grew at +318%

* Wikipedia grew at +275%

* Traditional web1.0 sites are losing ground: MSN.com (+1%), AOL.com (0%), ebay.com (-3%), Yahoo.com (+5%) and Google is still positive at +21% but slowing.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes the ComScore Data in New Trends In Online Traffic

Here’s what it means for small businesses with websites:

1) If you don’t have a blog, better get on it. The party is in full swing. If you have a website now, think about converting it to a blog.

2) Content, content, content is the name of the new game. It is all about personal opinion, and ultra-specialized information from experts in their niche. High-quality content floats to the top of the pile. If you can’t write or don’t have time, hire someone to produce content for you. Be prepared to supervise though!

3) The days of hiring a web designer and then hiring an SEO company and then sitting back are long gone (if that was ever a reality). Start thinking about how you can update your site with new information at least twice a week.

4) If you are looking for an SEO/SEM company, ask to see their marketing plan for Social Bookmarking and content creation.

5) Use Multimedia. Audio podcasts, and shared videos online are key to marketing Web2.

The web has always changed, and this is just another change and evolution. Nice to see the chaotic, personal expression aspect of the web winning over the attempts to control and regulate.

Opportunity still abounds online, with more opportunities than time to implement them.

Here is a great plug-in that I have found for increasing traffic from Social Bookmarking sites. This WordPress plug-in automatically bookmarks your site to Social Bookmark sites each time you post, including:

blinklist.com
furl.net
del.icio.us
myweb2
shadows.com
simpy.com
spurl.net
ma.gnolia.com
blogmarks.net
rawsugar.com
smarking.com
linkrolling.com
blogmemes.net
markaboo.com
linkagogo.com
feedmelinks.com

This plug-in avoids spam with a clever option which randomly selects ‘X’ sites for submission, so you aren’t spamming.

Check it out Auto Social Bookmarking

Lots has been written about promoting blogs which covers the basics, of pings, submitting, creating content people want to read and all that. In this article I thought I would take it one step further and talk about some of the techie SEO aspects of promoting an blog, and specifically, avoiding penalties.

For the basics of promoting a blog, the best article I found was Margin of Eric – Making Yourself Known.

This is the place to start and covers all of the basics.


Techie SEO considerations.

Dup Content on Blogs
Google is extremely vigilant detecting and penalizing duplicate content in their search engine results, with often unwanted side effects.

When you make a post on your blog, a page is created for that post with the full text. In addition, the full text of the post is added to a Category page, and also to an archive page. That makes 3 copies of the same text on your site. When Google’s indexing spider (Googlebot) crawls your site, it notices 3 identical pages and assumes that you are trying to pad your content by repeating yourself 3 times.

2 Levels of penalty, SERP filters kick in. One, the allegedly duplicate pages are penalized. The other penalty or filter is trickier. Googlebot takes the total amount of content on your site, and then checks to see how much of that content is duplicated on your site, or elsewhere on the web. If the percentage of content on your site is duplicated elsewhere, Google concludes that your site may be lower quality and may not be of interest to Google’s search/browsers.

The whole thing is a LOT more complex than this but this is a good way to think about it. In fact there is no magic percentage or threshold, but rather a long list of ‘signs of quality’ which Google’s algorithm calculates to assign rank.

The Fix

A discussion at Webmasterworld gives the code to place in the HEAD of header.php.

Also, WordPress Support recommends the same code to fix the issue of dated posts being indexed, and the page disappearing.

Post Regularly and Post Often! — keep going and don’t slow down! It WILL pay off! If you can’t or don’t have time to write the posts yourself, hire a writer.

Some Useful SEO Plugins

Jerome’s Keywords

Allows keywords to be associated with each post. These keywords can be used for page meta tags, included in posts for site searching or linked like Technorati tags.


Social Bookmark Creator

Add social bookmark links to your blog.

Auto Social Poster – automatically submits to social media sites. (A MUST have!)

This is one of the best. This plug-in replaces the built-in ping (works? doesn’t work?) with a function that pings only when you publish not when you save.