Archive for the ‘content’ category
Using Amazon.com for Topic Research
If you’ve read much of our blog (or our articles, books, etc.), then you know that we are HUGE advocates of using content distribution as a primary search engine marketing strategy. It has many benefits: it establishes your credibility as an expert, it gets your name in front of a lot of people, it generates many keyword links to your web site, and it drives direct traffic. However, coming from the perspective of someone who has to write many articles on all different subjects on behalf of our clients, I can honestly say that it can be a grind. Sometimes it is hard to find the research material you need to write an article, especially with all the garbage that you find in a typical Google search. However, we’ve discovered that Amazon.com can be an excellent research tool to help you write your content.
The way this works is by using Amazon’s Look Inside feature. This feature allows you to view and read passages from books for sale on Amazon that contain specific keywords. Amazon, shrewd business people that they are, only allows you to use this feature if you are a registered user on the site and have actually ordered something. So sign up for an account and buy yourself a good book to read. Then you’ll be good to go.
To use this as a research tool, you will search books by whatever keyword you are researching. Then, scroll through the list of returned results and find a book that has the “Click to LOOK INSIDE” logo on top of the book cover image. Click on that book cover.
On the next screen, you will see a search box labeled “Search Inside This Book.” This is the search box that allows you to specifically search in the book, so type your keyword in that box and perform another search. You will now be returned a list of links to passages in the book that contain the keyword. If you are a registered user with an order history, then clicking on the link will show you that passage. Otherwise, Amazon will tell you Sorry, you gotta order something first.
Searching through a book like this will provide you with all kinds of information about a keyword from a real book written by a real expert. This can be a richer mine of information than other types of online searches, such as searching article directories.
Anyone can be a successful writer of online content for distribution if he takes the time to do his research. This process can be tedious, but using the best sources of information will make the process a whole lot easier.
Article Spinning Software: The Value in Spinning Content
Today’s featured Squidoo lens is on the subject of banner ads. There are times when advertising on search engine results pages for your industry is just too expensive, in which case you may want to turn to content network advertising. You can run text ads on content networks, but sometimes you get better results with graphical banner ads. So obviously, banner ad creation is an important part of that process. Now on today’s main topic…
Article Spinning Software: Should You Use It?
Content “spinning”, or article spinning, is the act of taking seed content (such as an article) and creating different versions of it by changing words, passages, and paragraphs. It is somewhat of a controversial practice because, depending on how it is used, it can result in spam. For example, if I create an article and then use article spinning software to create a thousand slightly different versions of the article for blasting around to various web sites…that would probably be considered a spamming, or “black hat”, technique.
That is not the way my firm practices spinning. I believe if you create spun content that has a large degree of variation that is optimized in such a way to be easily found with different keywords, then the technique is legitimate. So content that we spin has a large amount of variation between versions. It is a time consuming process, but still faster than maintaining a one-to-one ratio between original content and content locations. It gives us leverage on our time, but does not bombard the Web with content that is essentially the same.
This concept is similar to one we have discussed many times before, which is re-purposing content. For example, taking two blog posts that are about the same subject and combining them into an article, and then distributing the article directories. Like content spinning, it gives you great leverage on your time.
Certainly, publishing a blog is a fantastic start to a content campaign. But you need to go far beyond simply publishing your blog. You need to make maximum use of every word you type, and content spinning is one technique to make that happen.
To answer the question of this post: should you use article spinning software?, the answer is “yes.” But do it in an ethical manner. If you don’t have serious time to put into writing your articles so that each version will be very unique, then don’t do it.
For help in making the absolute best use of your writing for purposes of improving your search engine rankings, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Cool New Google Feature: WebCall
Google has a new feature in beta testing that is very cool. It places a button on your web site that lets visitors instantly connect to you on the phone, without showing your phone number. Calls are routed through an online interface and you have the option of answering it or letting your voice mail catch the call. You can even prevent specific numbers from calling you. The feature is called WebCall, and it’s actually made available through a service called GrandCentral.
GrandCentral is a service that was recently acquired by Google. It promotes itself as “the new way to use your phones.” It provides you with one phone number that rings all your phones and one voicemail box that can store all your messages. It also lets you record calls on the fly. This could be a very useful feature for recording audio testimonials for a web site.
Currently, only select people are being allowed to use the service. Select people, that is, and users of Blogger. We’ve stated before that we think there may be an advantage to using Google’s own blogging platform, and this is another one: preferential treatment from Google with regard to new tools and gadgets.
We will be trying out the new call button. Why not? It may turn out that users who would not otherwise have contacted us will do so just because of the convenience. It is definitely worth trying. You never know what little extra convenience will cause the phones to start ringing.
If you don’t blog, start. If you do blog, use Blogger.
If you could use some help with your company’s content or blogging strategy, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Learning How to Podcast
Work Media has begun doing a podcast. This is definitely a new area for us. We blog all the time (obviously), but to me, it is more difficult to smoothly convey a message with spoken words, rather than printed words. In print, I have all the time I need to compose my thoughts and structure the copy the way I want it. In audio, even if you have what you want to say written out, you can’t just read – you have to talk. It needs to sound conversational. So we’re still working out how to best do the podcast, but we expect to get better the more we do it.
We have found a couple of podcasting resources that may be helpful to you if you decide to get into podcasting:
http://www.podcastblaster.com The most useful feature of this site is that it has a form you can use to automatically create a podcast RSS file. You just provide the details of the podcast and each individual epidose. The PodcastBlaster creates the file you need to supply to podcasting directories.
http://www.podcasting-tools.com This is a pretty useful site that provides lots of information about how to podcast. It also has a nice list of podcasting directories where you can submit your podcast.
http://www.podsubmitter.com A tool that will let you submit your podcast to multiple podcast directories at once. This could save you a lot of time. The caveat is that they require a link to the podsubmitter web site to use the service.
We are still working on a page for our site dedicated to the podcast. In the meantime, there are links to our first two episodes on our home page.
If you need some help implementing a content strategy for your site, including blogging and podcasting, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Powerful Search Engine Advice Straight from the Source
Matt Cutts is an engineer with Google who has become quite famous within the Internet marketing community for his blog posts that help online marketers better understand how Google works. A recent MediaPost article focusing on tips culled from various Cutts blog posts revealed the following strategy for optimizing a web page for a particular keyword:
Once in the title, once in the description tag, once in the heading, once in the URL, once in bold, once in italic and once high on the page.
Brilliant. The above sentence masterfully and simply summarizes how to optimize a web page, at least from a content perspective. Now, certainly there is more to on-page optimization. For example, the way a page is coded can have a significant impact on its ranking. But if you combine clean coding with the above copy writing strategy, your web pages should be very well optimized.
Possibly the hardest part of this strategy is getting the keyword in the URL. The ideal solution is to have a domain name that contains one or two critical keywords. This is often in conflict with a company’s branding strategy, however. I mean, we (Work Media) might possibly generate more search engine rankings if we had the domain name “internet-marketing-search-engine-optimization.com”, but it just doesn’t flow as well as “workmedia.net”. It would definitely be harder for people to remember.
Fortunately, blogging provides a way to generate web pages with keywords in the URL. We use Blogger, but most blogging platforms probably work in very similar ways, in that pages are automatically created based on the content of the blog posts. If you use important keywords early in your blog posts, and use keyword-rich tags to describe your posts, then your blogging platform should create archive pages that contain those keywords in the URL.
As for the other parts of the strategy, it’s easy. Just figure out the best keywords for which to optimize your site (we’ve discussed keyword research in previous blog posts) and use those keywords often in your pages, spread out exactly as recommended above.
If you need some help implementing a search engine marketing strategy for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net. We’re here to help!
Find Ways to Get Content on Your Web Pages
We’re still amazed at the number of times we get contacted about optimizing a BRAND NEW web site that is lousy from an optimization standpoint. Usually the problem is that the site is constructed in such a way that it is very difficult to get any optimized content on the site. For example, it may be an all-Flash site or a site where the text is contained in images.
Please remember this: you MUST have text on your web pages!
Find a way to get some text on your web pages. One technique which is cool is to place text in layers (using div tags) and either hide it off-screen or dynamically display it at certain times, such as when rolling over a link or other object. We have heard that Google may now be checking for this, so it may be a technique that stops becoming useful soon.
Regardless of whether you use layers to hide your text or whatever, you MUST get some text on your page. If nothing else, place it low on the page, below the main section, if your site is constructed in such a way as to not allow text in the main content area.
As smart as search engines have become, they are STILL looking for quality, indexable text. So get some text on your pages!
For help optimizing the content and code of your web site to rank better in the search engines, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.
Anyone Can Be a TV Star – Capitalizing on the Online Video Trend to Promote Your Business
The movement toward online video/entertainment continues to pick up speed. There are a lot of major established entertainment industry veterans, such as Disney’s Michael Eisner and the Coen brothers, who are creating content exclusively for the Web. This is a reflection of the changing entertainment viewing habits of consumers, especially those under 35.
The good news for you is that, unlike broadcast TV, the Web is a space where you can compete. You don’t have to have a large budget. And you don’t have to own a television network. There are two major strategies you can take with regard to using online video: release interesting content to video sources in an attempt to drive traffic to your site; or as content for your site that will result in a loyal audience.
You might want to do both. However, it is unlikely that the same video content will work for both purposes. If you are an accounting firm and create a series of videos about cutting your taxes, those would be excellent content for your web site. However, it is unlikely that there would be wide distribution of the video outside those specifically looking for such information.
For a viral video effect, your video needs to be very interesting or unusual. If it makes people laugh, then it has a shot at being spread around. Going back to the accounting firm example, if the firm could create a video that was short and humorous, that would work much better than the drier material specifically related to taxes.
So what kind of video could you create to promote your business? Just think creatively, and make sure you come up with some kind of unique angle for your content. Also, make sure you tag your videos with keywords – you need people to find your videos!
Work Media has full video production capabilities and would be happy to talk with you about using video to promote your business. Feel free to call us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
How to Use Magnolia.com to Promote Your Web Site
Ma.gnolia is a very nicely designed social bookmarking site that is easy to use. It has a Google Page Rank of 7, so it can be a nice boost to your site to acquire links from it.
To sign up:
1. Visit http://ma.gnolia.com.
2. Click the Join button on the top menu. The URL is: http://ma.gnolia.com/join.
3. Type in the required information and click “Join Free”.
4. In a few minutes you will receive an email from Ma.gnolia that you will click to
activate your account.
To bookmark a web page:
1. On the front page, there is a box on the right side of the screen labeled “Add a
bookmark”. Click the arrow beneath the textbox to expand the box to give you
options to add a title, description, and tags (separated by a comma).
2. Type in the information and click Save. Leave the checkbox labeled “Keep
bookmark private” unchecked.
3. As before, make use of the keywords someone would use to search for your web
site in the tags and in the title.
To see the top tags being used on the site, click the Tags link on the top menu. Then click
the tab labeled “Everyone’s Top Tags”.
To add the functionality to your browser to bookmark sites without having to go do the
Ma.gnolia web site, visit: http://ma.gnolia.com/support/bookmarklets.
We suggest that you create an account and bookmark every page on your site that has strong content. Hopefully some other people will see your bookmark, check out your site, and bookmark it themselves. Another strategy is to get people who know you or are associated with your business to create their own accounts and bookmark your site as well.
For help integrating social bookmarking sites into your online marketing strategy, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.
Web Site Marketing: Choose Your Content Management System Vendor Carefully
I have had a fair amount of experience working on optimizing web sites that were built on top of some kind of sophisticated content management systems (CMS), and my first thought is almost always the same: man, I wish they had contacted me before BEFORE building the site. The very nature of a CMS works against what you want to accomplish with your site from a search engine marketing perspective. I’ve said it a number of times, but it bears repeating: you want to maximize content and minimize code. Unfortunately, when you are dealing with a system that has to flexible enough to accomodate all kinds of different content of different lengths, widths, and attributes, the code to make that happen is often very poorly optimized.
But if you follow our suggestions, you will be more likely to hire a company (and a CMS) that will allow you to effectively manage your content and also rank well in the search engines:
Look at examples of code generated by the CMS for other web sites. If you don’t have a strong grasp on what well-optimized code should look like, hire a search engine professional to do this for you. It will be money well-spent. If the CMS provider can’t provide samples of cleanly coded web pages, move on to another company.
Ask for a list of other companies who have used the CMS. Then search for their web sites in the search engines (by industry, not by company name) to see if you can find them. If they don’t appear in the search engine rankings, then that is a clue that the CMS provider creates web sites that are not search engine-friendly.
Ask the CMS vendor about search engine optimization. They will probably say things like you can insert keywords, meta descriptions, etc. That’s not what you’re interested in. You want to know if they really know anything about search engine optimization – listen for terms such as “keyword density”, “CSS”, “layers”, and “optimization.” Again, it may be very helpful to hire a search engine expert to take part in this conversation.
Call companies who have used the vendor’s CMS and ask about their satisfaction and if they are getting much natural traffic from search engines.
If after doing the above things you don’t feel very confident that the CMS will work well AND will help you establish high search engine rankings, then look elsewhere.
If you need help choosing a content management system for your web site (this needs to be done BEFORE you build your site!), call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.