Much like life, websites have to adapt over time. When they don’t, they risk becoming stagnant, outdated, stale, and boring. As times change, so should your content. Content that was once relevant becomes irrelevant or in need of an update, old products get dumped in favor of new products, and data becomes outdated and needs to be replaced.
There are any number of reasons why content needs to be changed, freshened up, or removed altogether. But rarely, if ever, do you want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Something can usually be salvaged. Previously valuable content can be made valuable again. Here are four ways you can keep good content alive, even when it’s old.
Keep content up to date
Keeping your content up-to-date may sound like a simple task; but, the larger the site, the more difficult it is. Sites with hundreds or thousands of pages often have a lot of little hidden gems that can easily become stale or irrelevant. Over time, you see products and services change. A simple reference to an old pricing structure or outdated way of doing things can really throw a wrench in the works for the reader. Conflicts and contradictions breed mistrust.
Failing to find and correct these nuggets will send your readers a message that perhaps you are stale and irrelevant as well. So, spending time on a regular basis, perhaps yearly, reviewing all your editorial content and brushing it up to keep it current is an important item to put on your task list.
Redirect deleted pages
Pages on websites often get moved or deleted over time. Perhaps you are restructuring your information architecture, removing services that you no longer offer, or deleting tutorials that have become obsolete. Just because this content is considered old, doesn’t mean that it can’t still work for you.
Simply adding “301 redirects” or a building a custom “404″ page can capture that traffic and send them to other areas of your site. This allows them to stick around long enough to see if you still have something that will meet their needs, even though you no longer have exactly what they want.
Adding redirects allows you to keep visitors on your site if they have arrived, say, from a bookmarked page or an old page in the search results. Instead of losing those visitors, this gives you the opportunity to keep them engaged with your site, with the possibility of attracting them to your other excellent content.
Repurpose old content
Blogs are a great place to re-purpose old content and provide an updated spin on it. If you’re running out of ideas for what to publish on your blog, you can go back several years in your archive and find old topics and discussions for which you can provide a new take.
Blog back history can give you a wealth of topics that you can pull from to create fresh, new content for your readers.
Another way to re-purpose old content is by removing excessive content from your site and moving it over to your blog. This can be necessary after years of site content build-up. This happens when you keep adding content to your site and it becomes so bloated that your readers end up spending too much time working through your site instead of being moved through the conversion process.
A couple months back, I worked on the Information Architecture for a client, and they had this very problem. We were able to take dozens of pages of content and move it off of their main site onto their blog. The content was good, but it was excessive. This hindered the conversion process, making the site both convoluted and confusing at the same time. By moving this stuff to the blog, the main site was better able to do the job of selling and the blog became the avenue of informing readers.
Link to historical pages
Content, especially blog content, often gets buried after months and years of time passing. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the content isn’t valuable or even needs to be re-written.
What you can do is write new content that links to this valuable content that was written long ago. You’re giving your readers something fresh, while linking to something historical, that you can use to make your point or provide more detailed information for the reader to peruse at their leisure.
Take advantage of any area of content that allows you to link to another page that provides more information. The web isn’t a brochure, it’s more like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. That historical content can be a goldmine of information, provided you’re giving your new readers a way to access it.
Good content never has to die. If you’re treating it right, it never will. New people are coming to your site every day. These people have not had the benefit of reading all your past or historical stuff. No need to let it go to waste. Instead, keep it alive… and keep it working for you.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.
When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it’s your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town. If there is anything that all the years of marketing research has proven it’s that people need to be told what to do if you expect them to do anything at all.
Think about it. If you’re not telling your visitors what to do next, how can you expect them to do it? Sure, they can guess, make assumptions or “figure it out on their own”. But, for anybody that’s doing anything new, directions are a God send.
I recently spent 2 hours putting together a desk that should have taken me 20 minutes. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m generally more destructive than constructive when it comes to these kinds of things, but with a little help (a.k.a. reading directions), I can usually get the job done. But, on this particular desk, the directions actually didn’t help. Not even a little.
The desk had two pieces: the main desk and a small side table. Both look nearly identical, only the size is different. The directions started you out building the small table…but they didn’t make that clear. I spent at least 30 minutes putting together the larger desk with the small table instructions, wondering why things just weren’t making much sense.
Once I figured that out and moved on to building the desk with proper directions, I found several pieces that all looked similar, but with subtle differences. The directions didn’t make those distinctions, neither verbally nor visually. Luckily, I was able to stay calm and keep the cursing to a low mumble that my kids couldn’t hear!
Your content should work like directions. It needs to inform and make clear what the next step is. Giving your visitors clear directions doesn’t have to be difficult. You don’t have to re-write all of your content, adding in long prose of “here’s what we want you to do next”. All you have to do is some simple re-working of key areas.
Action Words: We often tend to write passively. We talk in terms of how things are, not in terms of what we are doing, what we’ve done, or what we want to do. This makes our content stagnant.
Instead, use words that convey action. Tell visitors how you achieved your knowledge or skills. Tell them how they will benefit from your product or services. Give them examples of the results they will see. And, most importantly, give them some calls to action.
Calls to Action: Using action words is never more important than ensuring your work calls action into your content. These are the directives that you provide to your visitors that lead them down the path to the conversion.
If you are not providing these directives, or are providing the wrong directives, you won’t be getting the response you want from your visitors. Keep in mind that there are multiple paths to the goal. Customers need to see your products before they can buy them. They also need to know product details. Trying to move your customers to the conversion too quickly simply won’t work.
Use your calls to action to lead visitors down the path of information they need to take the desired action. Some may need to see product reviews, others need to read more about your company, and still others might want to read more about what you offer. Provide calls to action to whatever your visitors might need… because they may not even know they need it.
Textual Links: Adding calls to action directly into your text is simply the best way to get visitors to heed them. Your navigation is important, but sites often put too much faith in the navigation getting the visitors to the information they want. If the visitors know where they want to go, and if they are willing to take the time to click through the navigation, then that approach would work. But, why force the visitor to disengage from your content to hunt through the navigation for what they want? Not a good idea.
That’s the biggest problem with not using textual links. You’re forcing your visitors to figure things out instead of providing them the directions they need right there where they are. If they are reading about your team’s experience, then link to your “About Us” page. If you mention a related product, link to it. If you discuss a significant achievement, place a link to the page that provides more complete information about it.
Visitors are curious. Providing links helps them satisfy their curiosity, which in, turns gives them more satisfaction that you have “what it takes” to provide what they need.
A website that’s not getting any action is a dead site. Conversion rates will be low, and bounce rates will be high. Using action words, calls to action, and textual links gets your visitors to “put out”. But, unless your content is willing to provide the goods, you may not even get to second base.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.
If you see yourself as a technologist, or marketer, then selling may not come easy to you. But we all need to sell something, even if it is just our opinion! If you’re a consultant of any description, it comes with the territory.
So it pays to know a few techniques. Luckily, sales isn’t something you have to be born to do - it does not require supernatural charm, charisma, a hide as thick as an elephant, and a superhuman drive.
Selling can be like a doctors consultation.
A Visit To The Doctor
When you go to the doctor, do you expect the doctor to just guess what is wrong with you?
A doctors consultation involves the doctor asking you a series of questions. This questioning is to help determine what the problem is, and how it can best be solved. At the end of the process, the feeling is probably one of relief and assurance i.e. that the doctor has your best interests at heart, and will cure what ails you.
It’s the same in business.
Any client you encounter has a problem. Like a specialist doctor, it is your job to ask a series of questions to help nail down the problem and find a solution. The very act of questioning - known as consultative selling - helps build trust and rapport with the client in the same way you may experience with a doctor. This works especially well in the field of consulting, which is based on information sharing.
The emphasis is on clients needs, as opposed to getting a signature on the dotted line. You first establish a client’s needs, then you provide a solution, if you have one. You’re building a relationship, based on trust, by asking a series of questions.
Not so hard, really.
The Mechanics Of Consultative Selling
Ok, so how do you do it?
First, you need to understand the buyers buying process. You then match your selling process to their buy process.
All buyers go through a specific process. For example, if a company needs internet marketing services, do they go to their established provider - possibly the web design company who built their site - or do they go direct to the SEO market? Do they attend conferences? If so, which ones? Hint: they may not be SEO conferences. Do they ask other business people in their business network? Do they go with a known brand?
It’s pretty simple to determine the buying process if the buyer comes straight to your website, fills out the contact form, and requests a call-back. But life often doesn’t work that way.
A prospective client may ask their web design company. Their web design company may not have had a clue, had you not been in to see them a week earlier. You asked the web design people a few questions about whether they had an SEO capability in house, found out they didn’t, and found out they had a lot of clients who quite possibly needed SEO. You proposed a joint deal whereas they would refer their clients to you, for a 10% commission.
Try to find out how your prospective clients buy SEO services, and position yourself accordingly. Think business associations and clubs, their existing providers in related areas, and the other companies they have an association with.
You need to get yourself positioned correctly in their buying process.
If you’ve managed to get in front of them, you then need to think about the questions you are going to ask. You should be asking about their business, where they see it going, what problems they are having, their place in the market, and their competitors. Business owners typically like doing this, and will welcome your interest, so long as you’re seen as a “doctor” i.e someone they trust to help. You’ll also need to make a presentation, which, depending on the context, need not be formal. It could consist of showing them case studies of how you’ve helped solve this problem before. Let’s face it, most SEO/SEM problems and solutions are going to look pretty much the same.
It’s all about trust relationships. It’s a fact of life that people buy more readily from people they trust.
But how do you know if you can trust your prospective buyer?
Screening Buyers
Consultative selling is also a great way to screen out tire kickers. A person who is just pumping you for information will reveal very little about themselves. The conversation will be one sided.
If they are genuinely interested in your service, they are more likely to answer questions. They do have to trust you first in order to do this, so try to think like a doctor if you encounter resistance. i.e. “I want to help you get more traffic, but I can’t do so if I don’t know more about your business before I can devise an appropriate solution”.
Be prepared to walk if they don’t volunteer the information you need. Even if you did land the job, you may end providing a substandard solution to their problem, which will likely end in tears. Better to find clients who you can work with, rather than against.
Another method of screening is to pre-close the sale. When you are gathering needs, ask that if you can solve their problems to their complete satisfaction, as a result of this discussion, that they will buy your services.
This will sound to them like a fairly safe bet i.e. you have to propose something that solves their problem. However, it also creates an implied obligation on their part to do so. There is no risk on your side, as you can either solve the problem, in which case you’ll likely get the business, or you can’t, in which case you’ll walk anyway.
If they are hesitant, it is either an opportunity to walk, and thus stop wasting your time, or an opportunity to find out something more about their buying process.
In short, when thinking about sales:
You are not a salesperson. You are a “doctor”
Focus on the needs of the client, not landing the job. Sale hucksters typically focus on the close too soon, which can destroy trust
It’s ok to walk away. You won’t be able to help some clients
Insist that the client engage in conversation. A client who asks you questions, and volunteers little information, might be pumping you for information
Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community.
Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz.
1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?
At SES I was reminded about my problem with A.F. (analytics forgetfulness) and a few things that I personally should be doing to not only be better at my job, but to help the company and community. Marty Weintraub from aimClear was the one that initially got me thinking in the “Deep Dive Into Analytics” panel on the first day.
How often do we look at traffic sources and focus on which sites are sending traffic… ok always. But what about looking at the actual people from those sites that are sending traffic. Let’s take Twitter for example. When most people are tweeting they’re usually either in an app or they’re on the web looking from their own page, which shows up as “/” for most referrers.
But sometimes, people are viewing a specific person’s twitter page and THEN click your link. In those instances, Google Analytics will show the actual twitter user page as the referrer. This is a quick and easy way to find out WHO is sending you traffic. This person is also probably someone who is an influencer in your community. Finding who the top referrers are is the first step, next you’ll want to use Klout (or another service) to see what their actual reach is. This doesn’t only work for Twitter though, check out the example below that I found looking at delicious referrers.
This is a list of referrers from delicious.com. Let’s see what Chris Brogan, an influencer in the Social Media space bookmarked.
More and more website owners are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content. For example, if you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue?
What happens if you syndicate content through RSS? Will other sites be considered the “real” site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results? This Search Engine Strategies San Francisco session looks at the issues and explores solutions.
Moderator:
Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc.
Speakers:
Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive
Kathleen Pitcher, Senior Manager, Acquisitions Marketing, Pogo.com/Electronic Arts, Inc.
Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service
Shari Thurow, Founder & SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive
What can happen with duplicate content?
It lowers the indexation count on Google, which means the best converting pages might not appear in search results.
Web pages from your shared-content partners’ sites may actually end up getting better search visibility.
What duplicate content does to a searcher, is they end up seeing duplicate pages over and over again which translates into a poor user experience.
How do you deal with duplicate content?
1. Information architecture, site navigation and page interlinking
Are URLS linked to consistently?
Are the links labeled consistently?
2. Robots.txt file
Are you preventing the web page from being spidered?
3. Robots meta tag
If articles are shared across the network of sites, are you implementing noindex, no follow appropriately?
4. Canonical tag
5. Ensure redirects are good (301s)
6. Use of webmaster tools
The idea behind all of this is consistently. Don’t say one thing in webmaster tools and then submit a sitemap that says the opposite. Be consistent with search engines and they will reward you.
Kathleen Pitcher, Senior Manager, Acquisitions Marketing, Pogo.com/Electronic Arts, Inc.
What does duplicate content look like?
There are two camps when it comes to duplicate content. The first is the malicious, bad kind of duplicate content. The second is the good kind that serves a purpose.
Good:
Find content on different URLs
Print
RSS
Blogs
Forums
Retail site with products in multiple categories
Bad:
Same content and multiplied across your site
Blatantly stealing content from other sites
What are the consequences?
There are no specific penalties, but you may notice your organic search visibility slipping. I.E. – content could get filtered into their supplemental index.
Learning’s and best practices
1. Determine if you have duplicate content
2. Leverage resources
Talk to other departments
Consult with your agency
Research industry sites
Review webmaster forums
Talk to industry peers
3. Be proactive
Write unique page content
Identify authority pages
Be aware of engine updates
Manage syndicated content
4. Manage syndicated content effectively
Allow ample time for your content to get indexed
Require links back
Require condensed versions
Use generic meta data
And don’t forget not to freak out, there are always solutions.
Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service
As opposed to the other presenters who shared how to fix duplicate content, Michael discussed how to make it work for you.
There are some circumstances duplicate content is a good thing if you use it as a weapon. When you syndicate content, many will take it “in whole.” Use this as an opportunity to gain links, especially if the sites picking up your content are more trusted and authoritative. Try to set up arrangements with people in your space (blogs, magazines, etc.) so they will pick up your content.
How to potentially outrank someone for their own content:
Take content or a data feed that someone else has legally syndicated or allowed to be re-used
Place that content on a different domain
Build in-links with very keyword focused anchor text to the content
If you can build more trust than the original website, you may be considered the originator in the eyes of Google
This is a very common tactic in shady/aggressive affiliate industries
Why I love web scrapers
Most web scrapers are stupid. They search for keywords and leave whatever links they find in posts in place. You should use this as an advantage by linking to yourself with high value focused keyword anchor text in every post.
As long as you offset these low value links with high quality links this works to your advantage. Always insert links back to the original website and/or original page.
Further, change the anchor text, link and surrounding text of links inserted after your content (i.e. from something like Yoast’s RSS footer plugin) every 3-4 months so you’re getting different links to different parts of the website.
Takeaways:
Look for opportunities to syndicate your duplicate content, gain attention, trust and links
Refine your copy to target more keywords
Be on the lookout for people who may be reusing your content who aren’t helping you
Allow your blog and RSS feed to be syndicated with self-referencing and keyword focused links to commercial pages.
Alexa’s Site Audit Report breaks the information down into 6 different sections (some which have additional sub-sections as well)
Overview
Crawl Coverage
Reputation
Page Optimization
Keywords
Stats
The sections break down as follows:
So we ran Seobook.com through the tool to test it out
Generally these reports take about a day or two, ours had some type of processing error so it took about a week.
Overview
The first section you’ll see is the number of pages crawled, followed by 3 “critical” aspects of the site (Crawl Coverage, Reputation, and Page Optimization). All three have their own report sections as well. Looks like we got an 88. Excuse me, but shouldn’t that be a B+?
So it looks like we did just fine on Crawl Coverage and Reputation, but have some work to do with Page Optimization.
The next section on the overview page is 5 recommendations on how to improve your site, with links to those specific report sections as well. At the bottom you can scroll to the next page or use the side navigation. We’ll investigate these report sections individually but I think the overview page is helpful in getting a high-level overview of what’s going on with the site.
Crawl Coverage
This measures the “crawl-ability” of the site, internal links, your robots.txt file, as well as any redirects or server errors.
Reachability
The Reachability report shows you a break down of what HTML pages were easy to reach versus which ones were not so easy to each. Essentially for our site, the break down is:
Easy to find - 4 or less links a crawler must follow to get to a page
Hard to find - more than 4 links a crawler must follow to get to a page
The calculation is based on the following method used by Alexa in determining the path length specific to your site:
Our calculation of the optimal path length is based on the total number of pages on your site and a consideration of the number of clicks required to reach each page. Because optimally available sites tend to have a fan-out factor of at least ten unique links per page, our calculation is based on that model. When your site falls short of that minimum fan-out factor, crawlers will be less likely to index all of the pages on your site.
A neat feature in this report is the ability to download your URL’s + the number of links the crawler had to follow to find the page in a .CSV format.
This is a useful feature for mid-large scale sites. You can get a decent handle on some internal linking issues you may have which could be affecting how relevant a search engine feels a particular page might be. Also, this report can spot some weaknesses in your site’s linking architecture from a usability standpoint.
On-Site Links
While getting external links from unique domains is typically a stronger component to ranking a site it is important to have a strong internal linking plan as well. Internal links are important in a few ways:
The only links where you can 100% control the anchor text (outside of your own sites of course, or sites owned by your friends)
They can help you flow link equity to pages on your site that need an extra bit of juice to rank
Users will appreciate a logical, clear internal navigation structure and you can use internal linking to get them to where you want them to go
Alexa will show you your top linked to (from internal links) pages:
You can also click the link to the right to expand and see the top ten pages that link to that page:
So if you are having problems trying to rank some sub-pages for core keywords or long-tail keywords, you can check the internal link counts (and see the top 10 linked from pages) and see if something is amiss with respect to your internal linking structure for a particular page.
Robots.txt
Here you’ll see if you’ve restricted access to these search engine crawlers:
ia_archiver (Alexa)
googlebot (Google)
teoma (Ask)
msnbot (Bing
slurp (Yahoo)
baiduspider (Baidu)
If you block out registration areas or other areas that are normally restricted, then the report will say that you are not blocking major crawlers but will show you the URL’s you are blocking under that part of the report.
There is not much that is groundbreaking with Robots.Txt checks but it’s another part of a site that you should check when doing an SEO review so it is a helpful piece of information.
Redirects
We all know what happens when redirects go bad on a mid-large sized site
This report will show you what percentage of your crawled pages are being redirected to other pages with temporary redirects.
The thing with temporary redirects, like 302’s, is that unlike 301’s they do not pass any link juice so you should pay attention to this part of the report and see if any key pages are being redirected improperly.
Server Errors
This section of the report will show you any pages which have server errors.
Making sure your server is handling errors correctly (such as a 404) is certainly worthy of your attention.
Reputation
The only part of this module is external links from authoritative sites and where your site ranks in conjunction with “similar sites” with respect to the number of sites linking to your sites and similar sites.
Links from Top Sites
The analysis is given based on the aforementioned forumla:
Then you are shown a chart which correlates to your site and related sites (according to Alexa) plus the total links pointing at each site which places the sites in a specific percentile based on links and Alexa Rank.
Since Alexa is heavily biased towards webmaster type sites based on their user base, these Alexa Rank’s are probably higher than they should be but it’s all relative since all sites are being judged on this measure.
The Related Sites area is located below the chart:
Followed by the Top Ranked sites linking to your site:
I do not find this incredibly useful as a standalone measure of reputation. As mentioned, Alexa Rank can be off and I’d rather know where competing sites (and my site or sites) are ranking in terms of co-occurring keywords, unique domains linking, strength of the overall link profile, and so on as a measure of true relevance.
It is, however, another data point you can use in conjunction with other tools and methods to get a broader idea of your site and related sites compare.
Page Optimization
Checking the on-page aspects of a mid-large sized site can be pretty time consuming. Our Website Health Check Tool covers some of the major components (like duplicate/missing title tags, duplicate/missing meta descriptions, canonical issues, error handling responses, and multiple index page issues) but this module does some other things too.
Link Text
The Link Text report shows a break down of your internal anchor text:
Click on the pages link and see the top pages using that anchor text to link to a page (shows the page the text is on as well as the page it links too):
The report is based on the pages it crawled so if you have a very large site or lots and lots of blog posts you might find this report lacking a bit in terms of breadth of coverage on your internal anchor text counts.
Broken Links
Checks broken links (internal and external) and groups them by page, which is an expandable option similar to the other reports:
Xenu is more comprehensive as a standalone tool for this kind of report (and for some of their other link reports as well).
Duplicate Content
The Duplicate Content report groups all the pages that have the same content together and gives you some recommendations on things you can do to help with duplicate content like:
Working with robots.txt
How to use canonical tags
Using HTTP headers to thwart duplicate content issues
Here is how they group items together:
Anything that can give you some decent insight into potential duplicate content issues (especially if you use a CMS) is a useful tool.
Duplicate Meta Descriptions
No duplicate meta descriptions here!
Fairly self-explanatory and while a meta description isn’t incredibly powerful as standalone metric it does pay to make sure you have unique ones for your pages as every little bit helps!
Duplicate Title Tags
You’ll want to make sure you are using your title tags properly and not attacking the same keyword or keywords in multiple title tags on separate pages. Much like the other reports here, Alexa will group the duplicates together:
They do not currently offer a missing title tag or missing meta description report which is unfortunate because those are worthwhile metrics to report on.
Low Word Count
Having a good amount of text on a page is good way to work in your core keywords as well as to help in ranking for longer tail keywords (which tend to drive lots of traffic to most sites). This report kicks out pages which have (in looking at the stats) less than 150 words or so on the page:
There’s no real magic bullet for the amount of words you “should” have on a page. You want to have the right balance of word counts, images, and overall presentation components to make your site:
Linkable
Textually relevant for your core and related keywords
Readable for humans
Image Descriptions
Continuing on with the “every little bit helps” mantra, you can see pages that have images with missing ALT attributes:
Alexa groups the images on per page, so just click the link to the right to expand the list:
Like meta descriptions, this is not a mega-important item as a standalone metric but it helps a bit and helps with image search.
Session IDs
This report will show you any issues your site is having due to the use of session id’s.
If you have issues with session id’s and/or other URL parameters here you should take a look at using canonical tags or Google’s parameter handling (mostly to increase the efficiency of your site’s crawl by Googlebot, as Google will typically skip the crawling of pages based on your parameter list)
Heading Recommendations
Usually I cringe when I see automated SEO solutions. The headings section contains “recommended” headings for your pages. You can download the entire list in CSV format:
The second one listed, “interface seo”, is on a page which talks about Google adding breadcrumbs to the search results. I do not think that is a good heading tag for this blog post. I suspect most of the automated tags are going to be average to less than average.
Keywords
Alexa’s Keyword module offers recommended keywords to pursue as well as on site recommendations in the following sub-categories:
Search Engine Marketing (keywords)
Link Recommendations (on-site link recommendations
Search Engine Marketing
Based on your site’s content Alexa offers up some keyword recommendations:
The metrics are defined as:
Query - the proposed keyword
Opportunity - (scales up to 1.0) based on expected search traffic to your site from keywords which have a low CPC. A higher value here typically means a higher query popularity and a low QCI. Essentially, the higher the number the better the relationship is between search volume, low CPC, and low ad competition.
Query Popularity (scales up to 100) based on the frequency of searches for that keyword
QCI - (scales up to 100) based on how many ads are showing across major search engines for the keyword
For me, it’s another keyword source. The custom metrics are ok to look at but what disappoints me about this report is that they do not align the keywords to relevant pages. It would be nice to see “XYZ keywords might be good plays for page ABC based on ABC’s content”.
Link Recommendations
This is kind of an interesting report. You’ve got 3 sets of data here. The first is the “source page” and this is a listing of pages that, according to Alexa’s crawl, are pages that appear to be important to search engines as well as pages that are easily crawled by crawlers:
These are pages Alexa feels should be pages you link from. The next 2 data sets are in the same table. They are “target pages” and keywords:
Some of the pages are similar but the attempt is to match up pages and predict the anchor text that should be used from the source page to the target page. It’s a good idea but there’s a bit of page overlap which detracts from the overall usefulness of the report IMO.
Stats
The Stats section offers 3 different reports:
Report Stats - an overview of crawled pages
Crawler Errors - errors Alexa encountered in crawling your site
Unique Hosts Crawled - number of unique hosts (your domain and internal/external domains and sub-domains) Alexa encountered in crawling your site
Report Stats
An overview of crawl statistics:
Crawler Errors
This is where Alexa would show what errors, if any, they encountered when crawling the site
Unique Hosts Crawled
A report showing which sites you are linking to (as well as your own domain/subdomains)
Is it Worth $199?
Some of the report functionality is handled by free (in some cases) tools that are available to you. Xenu does a lot of what Alexa’s link modules do and if you are a member here the Website Health Check Tool does some of the on-page stuff as well.
I would also like to see more export functionality especially in lieu of white label reporting. The crawling features are kind of interesting and the price point is fairly affordable as one time fee.
The Alexa Site Audit Report does offer some benefit IMO and the price point isn’t overly cost-prohibitive but I wasn’t really wowed by the report. If you are ok with spending $199 to get a broad overview of things then I think it’s an ok investment. For larger sites sometimes finding (and fixing) only 1 or 2 major issues can be worth thousands in additional traffic.
It left me wanting a bit more though, so I might prefer to spend that $199 on links since most of the tool’s functionality is available to me without dropping down the fee. Further, the new SEOmoz app also covers a lot of these features & is available at a monthly $99 price-point, while allowing you to run reports on up to 5 sites at a time. The other big thing for improving the value of the Alexa application would be if they allowed you to run a before and after report as part of their package. That way in-house SEOs can not only show their boss what was wrong, but can also use that same 3rd party tool as verification that it has been fixed.
One of the best ways to add content to your website and boost your search engine rankings is through an optimized press release. You can write about any newsworthy item going on at your company: a new product, an industry award, new hires are just a few examples.
Announcing these events has several benefits beyond search engine rankings too. Journalists and bloggers for instance will come across it and perhaps do a story about your firm. They make your company look active and lively, drawing more interest from prospective customers.
Regularly scheduled press releases do this and more provided they’re properly formatted. Simply writing some text and putting it online will not do a whole lot for you. Many distribution outlets like PRWeb and PR.com will reject your press release for syndication if it’s not properly formatted.
So what’s the proper way to format a press release?
Continue reading for ways you should format a press release for online distribution. Beyond the tips listed below, there are some additional ways you can format your press releases to further its impact in the search engines so check back next time for press release formatting tips from a social media and SEO perspective.
“More and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. … serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.”
What are some of the most bland and most well worn paths in the world? Established brands:
The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.
“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,” he said. “It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”
If Google is so smart then why the lazy reliance on brand? Why not show me something unique & original & world-changing?
While Google is collecting your data and selling it off to marketers, they have also thought of other ways to monetize that data and deliver serendipity:
“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market…” Eric Schmidt continues, “and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
Any guess how that product might have added value to the world? On down days (or days when you search for “debt help”) would Google deliver more negatively biased ads & play off fears more, while on up days selling more euphoric ads? Might that serendipity put you on the wrong side of almost every trade you make? After all, that is how the big names in that space make money - telling you to take the losing side of a trade with bogus “research.”
“All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?”
That exchange helped John Gruber give Eric Schmidt the label Creep Executive Officer, while asking: “Maybe the question isn’t who should hold this information, but rather should anyone hold this information.”
“I think judgement matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” - Eric Schmidt
If you’re ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That’s all you need to see. - Eric Schmdit
Here is the thing I don’t get about Google’s rhetorical position on serendipity & moral authority: if they are to be trusted to recommend what you do, then why do they recommend illegal activities like pirating copyright works via warez, keygens, cracks & torrents?
The days of search engines merely being a middle man are over. Search isn’t about sending users to the right web page, it’s about getting them the information they want as soon as possible — sometimes it’s a web page, but it might also be a sports score, movie showtimes, election information, or some other [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
The team at SEOmoz has been hard at work this week, smoothing out a lot of the initial bumps we’ve seen with our beta launch of the new web app. We anticipated the app would be popular, but I don’t think any of us were prepared for just how many keywords needed rank checking/grading and pages needed crawling/error-checking. Our queue to fetch rankings/crawl URLs had a backup of multiple tens of thousands of requests all week, and the dev team’s been slogging away on parallelization, separation of queing stages and other fixes.
Our next big release is scheduled for August 25 (possibly the 26th depending on how repairs go) and we’re all crazy excited (and more than a little nervous, sleep deprived and caffeinated). Feel free to start marking your calendars; I
Repurpose old content
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.
More and more website owners are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally or overtly because of duplicate content. For example, if you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue?
