SEO Articles

By Kim Roach (c) 2006

There is always great interest within the search engine marketing community whenever a search engine files for a patent. This is especially true for Google, which just recently released a new patent application - System and method for supporting editorial opinion in the ranking of search results.

However, we must keep in mind that just because a patent has been applied for or granted, the search engines may or may not implement the patent within their primary search results.

Nevertheless, these patents often do give us clues about what the search engines are looking for in a website.

Some of Google’s patents have given us insight into the influence of anchor text, fresh content, themes, data history, link popularity, user behavior, and domain-related information.

However, Google’s most recent patent application shows a shift from focusing on algorithm-based changes to the integration of a human editorial process.

Ultimately, Google is striving to create the best possible search results for their visitors. This patent proposes one possible method for doing that.

For the most part, search engine algorithms have reached their peak. We’ve known for quite some time now that an algorithm-based search engine can never permanently deliver excellent results. Why, you might ask. Simply because there will always be people out there trying to reverse-engineer the system.

Therefore, a cat and mouse game is created.

Out of this problem, a number of solutions have evolved. One of these is social search engines, which rank their results based on the wisdom of crowds. Another solution to arise from this problem is a human editorial process.

And now, Google has proposed in their patent application a hybrid mechanism which combines algorithmic search with a human based editorial process. By integrating editorial opinion, they are looking to enhance the quality of their search results.

The patent describes the process of identifying favored and non-favored sources in order to improve search results.

Favored Sources: Websites that are identified as being useful or containing authoritative content on the desired topic.

Non-Favored Sources: Websites that are identified as sources of misinformation or over-promotion on that particular topic.

Basically, Google is trying to patent a system for identifying good sites and bad sites in order to rank them accordingly in the SERPs.

They have proposed a semi-automatic system for determining favored and non-favored sources.

“In an implementation consistent with the present invention, the set of favored and non-favored sources may be automatically determined. To accomplish this, exemplary queries in the query theme may be classified into a set of topics (e.g., an online topic hierarchy, such as Yahoo!, Open Directory, or Google) using the approach for classification described above. Web hosts that appear in the URLs associated with the best matching topics to the query theme may be taken to be favored sources. For example, if the query theme is “sites that help in finding accommodation,” then web hosts listed under the Open Directory category “http://dmoz.org/Recreation/Travel/Lodging” can be taken as favored sources. ”

In addition, they have also combined with this a new system of relevancy and theme-based queries to improve their results.

“For example, for the query theme “sites that provide free downloads,” web sites that actually provide free software downloads would be considered “favored sources” and web sites that mislead search engines with words such as “free” and “download” (popularly known as “spam techniques”), but do not in fact provide access to free downloads, would be considered “non-favored sources.”

The patent application infers that “resource” sites have a brighter future in the search engines, especially Google. Therefore, don’t be afraid to link out to other sites. The more value you provide to your visitor, the more you will be rewarded in the end. Your ultimate goal is to become an authority in your particular topic.

As an online marketer, you should also put more thought into the quality of the pages your site delivers as a whole. This is one of the very few patents that refers to a site as a whole rather than individual pages.

Conclusion:

For the smart SEO, this should not change your methods. As always, quality content is the key. If you are providing your visitors with relevant, quality content, then the search engines will reward you.

A number of interesting ideas were brought up in this patent. It appears that relevancy and quality content play a major role. However, there is still the question of which factors will be considered in determining favored sites. Will inclusion in DMOZ or Yahoo! be a requirement? If so, many webmasters may take a dim view of this approach.

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how Google changes over the next few years. Algorithm based search results will continue to be problematic because there will always be those who try to beat the system. Implementing some sort of human editorial opinion into the ranking process seems inevitable.

In the end, this is true for all of the major search engines. Yahoo, Google, MSN, and AskJeeves must all provide quality search results to compete within this industry. To be truly successful, they will have to go beyond algorithm-based results to deliver the most value for their visitors.

Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews and SEO-News newsletters. You can also find additional tips and news on webmaster and SEO topics by Kim at the SiteProNews blog. Kim’s email is: kim @ seo-news.com

Many people out there said that “content is king” when it comes to web traffic generation. Even though, IMHO, content is not the only king, I tend to agree with them. If done properly, content can attract free, long term, targeted traffic to your website.

Here are three ways on how content can attract free, long term, targeted traffic to your website:

1. Content attracts free search engine traffic

It has been well-known that the search engines love content. The more content you have in your website, the more keywords you can rank for, and thus the more traffic you can get from the search engines. However, not every content can do well in the search engines.

The search engines have sets of rules (also known as algorithms) to rank websites in their indexes and some of these rules go beyond content (off-page factors). You need to “optimize your site” to meet these rules if you want to rank well in the search engines.

The problem, though, is that there are differing opinions about these rules and it seems that no one can give exact answers about them. Also, these rules often change, which makes them quite difficult to be followed.

That’s why I usually only do little optimization, sometimes as little as putting one keyword in the title tag and getting links. I stopped paying attention to the details because they wasted my time more then they gave me results.

2. Content attracts links from other websites

There are two benefits of having incoming links pointing to your site. First, you can get direct traffic from people who click through the links. And second, incoming links can increase your search engine ranking. In general, the search engines count incoming links as votes to your website.

Now how can content attract links to your website? Well, there are various scenarios on how content can attract links to your websites. But since I only have limited space and time here, let me just tell you the two popular scenarios.

First, you can write articles with link in your resource box and submit them to article directories and relevant websites that accept article submission. Many web publishers out there have a “content deficit” problem, and they’re hungry for your content. You can get your links spread out fast around the Internet by using this method.

Second, if your website contains “linkworthy” content, then other webmasters might voluntarily link to your content or website. However, this is a passive method, and you may not want to rely on this method and wait for someone to link to you.

3. Content attracts viral traffic

Viral marketing works by encouraging other people to transmit your marketing message to the others. If done properly, it can spread your marketing message around the Internet just like a contagious virus spreads around a society.

There are various motivations that can encourage other people to spread your marketing message. One of them is the “desire to obtain material possession.” You’ve probably seen the tactic of giving people incentive to spread a marketing message.

However, not all people are moved by the “desire to obtain material possession.” Many people are moved by mere excitement or other non-selfish motivations. This is where content can attract viral traffic.

If your content (that is part of your website or contains link to your website), is extremely useful, informative, or just downright funny as hell that people will say “Wow!” when they see it, then people might spread or tell others about your content.

You can also try to increase the viral effect of your content by making it easy for people to spread or tell others about your content, for example by using a tell-a-friend script.

About the Author: Mohamad Zaki Hussein is the webmaster of http://www.webtrafficideas.com . To learn how to build a perpetual traffic engine by combining Viral Marketing with RSS and Blog, grab the FREE “Instant Traffic Formula” report.

“SEO is still a tiny portion of the total search marketing spend.” So states MarketingSherpa in its recent Search Marketing Benchmark Survey. I find it hard to understand the under-utilization of organic SEO compared to PPC (pay-per-click) advertising when organic listings are preferred by 5 clicks to 1. The natural organic listings convert better, too. So what gives?

MarketingSherpa also states that organic results are “better noticed, read and clicked on than paid listings.” The report notes that organic listings convert as well as, or even better than, paid listings (4.2%, versus 3.6%). Study after study continue to demonstrate the power of organic links.

Delight and Dismay

MarketingSherpa researchers were both “delighted and appalled by the year over year data on marketing search spending.” Delighted because more marketers said they would allocate larger portions of their marketing budgets to SEO to gain valuable organic listings. But appalled at the “continuing disconnect between paid search spending and SEO investment.”

The keyword is “investment.” SEO is an investment in time, resources and knowledge - an investment that is accountable and yields an excellent return. The benefits of SEO are long lasting when compared to PPC because paid clicks can start or end immediately, depending on your budget and a variety of other factors. Conversely, organic SEO changes to a website stay with you indefinitely.

Requisite Site Changes

Organic SEO takes a lot of expertise, and it also takes cooperation by the client in executing the recommended site changes that allow a site to rank well in the major search engines. A recent JupiterResearch study states there are numerous obstacles to achieving necessary site changes when search marketers outsource SEO to vendors. In fact, 64 percent of the marketers and agencies surveyed said they did not implement their SEO vendor’s recommendations. This leads to the assumption that they didn’t achieve good organic SEO results.

I myself wonder just what the “SEO recommendations” were that the marketers did not implement in this study. Why? Because I’ve seen and heard a lot of inappropriate and/or weak SEO recommendations over the past ten years.

While the reasons cited for not following through with site changes are reportedly varied, the most common were (1) “lack of internal human resources to implement changes,” (2) “timing/ frequency of update issues,” and (3) “lack of outsourced IT budget.” In my opinion, this is by and large due to the SEO vendor failing to set proper client guidelines and expectations.

The Communication Workaround

Can any client trust the advice they receive from any given SEO vendor? It seems like a catch 22 for the politically correct — clients pay big bucks for SEO services, but they don’t get results because they can’t make the site changes. I say horse feathers to this assumption — clients come to an SEO vendor for help. It is the vendor’s responsibility to guide the client to success. Failure occurs when the vendor fails to communicate what is required of the client prior to signing a contract.

A partial remedy for not implementing site changes would be to task the SEO vendor to FTP the site changes, but many companies will not allow outside consultants to access their site. The best solution is for the vendor to be clear upfront in communicating with the client, coming to mutual agreement on a procedure and schedule for making recommended site changes.

SEO vendors need to be more explicit in delineating the IT vs. marketing tasks necessary. They also need to consider the expertise and knowledge factor. SEO experts can likely accomplish the site changes in less time than the client IT technicians; however, there is tremendous value to in-sourcing SEO in the long run. Vendors can provide a realistic time schedule for accomplishing changes and factor in time for unknown contingencies due to client company operations. Explicit communication between the SEO vendor and its client’s IT and Marketing departments will lead to much better SEO results - a win-win for both parties.

The SEO Mystique

The MarketingSherpa report stated that “SEO under-spending” is a trend that will continue in 2006. The researchers asked, “Why don’t more marketers invest in SEO?” The major reason given by respondents was “Don’t understand SEO, overall complexity.”

Despite the fact that users prefer unbiased organic links, and the conversions from organic links average higher than those from sponsored links, some marketers won’t invest in organic SEO because of its ambiguity and complexity.

That’s why it is necessary to educate marketers and technical people on SEO, demystifying the process. It is really not difficult to understand when examined step by step, but the problem lies in identifying qualified SEO vendors. SEO requires specific knowledge of appropriate methodology and a bit of perseverance. Some of the vendors with marketing visibility lack such traits, leaving a lot to be desired.

Another obstacle to the widespread adoption of organic SEO is that experts in the field offer conflicting advice. A lot of what you hear on the Forums is rhetoric and hearsay. Then there is the lack of SEO standards and a code of ethics, which further erodes the integrity of the industry.

Some SEO experts talk in very general terms, e.g., all you need to do is write your site content for both your customers and the search engines, give each page a keyword-optimized Title and Description Meta Tag, and get as many quality inbound links as possible. Others will say it’s more a matter of technical changes, “you need maintenance.” Very few know what goes on behind the scenes, and this contributes to the SEO mystique.

SEO Made Simple

First, you need a site review. This includes establishing your business goals with respect to search engines, leading you to measurable organic SEO results. I’m talking about Server Header Status, your IP C Block, dotting the (i) and slashing the (t) in the basics of server-side status, site architecture, page construction, content and inbound link popularity.

Next, a competitor review tells you what you are up against. Your site is obviously lacking several criteria or you wouldn’t have such poor positioning. This will also wake you up to the reality of what is required to achieve good positioning. Hello! I think Wake Up is the keyword here, get specifics from your vendor and don’t settle for rhetoric or marketing lingo. Here’s your script.

I want evidence that my IP address is not IP blocklisted, I want to know why a robots.txt file should be in my root directory, I want to see I have a site status header 200 when you ping my server and not a 400 or 302. I want to see if my HTML is being read properly by a spider read, a browser read and a request read. I want to know how to determine what my odds are of acquiring my strongest competitor’s best positions in Google. I want to know I will be spam free, and I want to know how my site should be arranged so that spiders can find, crawl, index and rank all my data.

And if you need more info on demystifying SEO, drop me a line.

Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Principal Business Analyst for Bruce Clay, Inc., he is responsible for strategizing and implementing business development activities. Paul is well-known in the industry, having written articles for ClickZ, Search Engine Guide, Pandia, iMediaConnection, MarketingProfs and SitePoint. He has also been a featured speaker at the Search Engine Strategies Conference and eComXpo.

Ever since Google introduced its latest algorithm update in September, a fair amount of column space has been dedicated to telling webmasters and small business owners to wait until the update is complete. In so much as it can be said that the Jagger Update will ever be complete, the final cycle of the immediate update appears to be playing out.

Jagger was a different sort of algorithm update for Google. Its infamous predecessors, Florida and Hilltop were generally limited shifts in the values Google assigned domains based on content and links. After the immediate punch of previous updates, the search engine results pages (SERPs) would generally return to a stable and predictable state. SERPS generated by Jagger are expected to constantly update themselves with a greater degree of flux and change.

So, what exactly happened during the Jagger Update and what might it mean to your website? Quite a bit as it turns out.

The Jagger Update was introduced for three main reasons. The first was to deal with manipulative link-network schemes, sites generated with scraped content and other forms of SE-Spam. The second was to allow and account for the inclusion of a greater number of spiderable documents and file types. The third was to allow and account for new methods of site acquisition beyond the use of the spider Googlebot.

The update made its first public appearance in late September but had its greatest impact in early October. At that time, hundreds of thousands of websites that enjoyed previously strong listings were suddenly struck and sent to the relative oblivion found beyond the second page of results.

Most of those sites lost position due to participation in what Google obviously considers inappropriate linking schemes. This was actually one of the first conclusions we came to in late September based on the experience of a few clients who joined link-networks that had not been recommended or vetted by our link-experts. This is now backed up by discussion in various search engine forums. While most of those hurt by this part of the update are good people running honest businesses, Google put out notice that irrelevant link-networks, no matter how simple or complex, are unhealthy additions to what might otherwise be a good website.

The problem Google faced was some webmasters misunderstood what links are for and how Google uses them to rank documents. For some unknown reason, many webmasters or site administrators participated in wholesale link mongering, bulking up on as many inbound links as possible without consideration of the most important factor (in Google’s estimation), the relevance of inbound links.

Now, Google appears to be applying filters based on historic data it has collected about all sites in its index over time. In other words, Google likely knows a lot more about documents linking to a particular website than the person who placed or requested the link in the first place. SEOs and webmasters should brush up on the “Information retrieval based on historical data” patent application Google filed on March 31, 2005 for highly detailed information.

Google is judging sites on who they link to along with who links to them. Before the update, a link from your site to an irrelevant site was more a waste of time than a waste of opportunity. Today irrelevant links seem to be both. Google’s desire to offer stable and highly relevant SERPS while preventing outright manipulation of those SERPS was the biggest cause of the shift.

The second and third reasons for updating the algorithm at this time is the allowance for indexing documents or information obtained through alternative sources such as Google Base, Froogle, and blogs and other social networking tools. Google’s stated goal is to grow to include reference to all the world’s information. That information is being expressed in multiple places using several unique file formats, some of which are difficult to weigh against others. By checking the file or document in question against the long-term history of documents linking to it, Google is better able to establish its theme and intent.

Mass adoption of blogs, while promoted by Google gave the search engine a number of problems. Webmasters and search marketers will take almost any opportunity to promote their sites, by any means available. Blogs provided ample opportunities and soon issues ranging from comment spam to scraped content Splogs started to gum up the SERPS. By comparing document content with the history of other related documents in its index, Google has become much better at spotting blog-enabled spam.

Google faced problems with forms of search engine spam such as fake directories and on-page spamming techniques such as hiding information in CSS files. The Jagger Update seems designed to deal with these issues by applying Google’s vast knowledge about items in its index against every document or file it ranks. A site that scrapes content, for example, might be weighed against the documents that content was originally published on and the intent of the republisher. One that hides information in the CSS file will similarly trip Google’s memory of how the same domain looked and operated before the spam-content was inserted.

The third reason for the algo update comes from the expansion of Google itself. Google is now much larger than it was when the Bourbon update was introduced in the early summer. Audio and video content is spiderable and searchable. Google’s comparison shopping tool Froogle is starting to integrate itself in with Google Local, just as Google Local and Google Maps are beginning to merge. There is some speculation in the SEO community that Google is preparing to integrate personalized data into the search results served to specific individuals. A strong assumption is that Jagger is part of Google’s movement towards personalization though there is little to firmly point at to support this idea.

If your website is still suffering the lagging effects of the Jagger Update, your SEO or SEM vendor should be able to offer good advice. Chances are, the first thing he or she will do is a point by point inspection of your inbound and outbound links associated with your website. Next, they will likely suggest making it easier for Google to spider various document file types in your site by providing an XML sitemap to instruct Google’s spider cycle.

Lastly, they will likely suggest a look at how website visitors behave when visiting your site. Site visitor behaviours will play a part in Google’s view of the importance and relevance of sites in its index. The introduction of Google Analytics provides webmasters with a lot of free information regarding site visitors, along with other information on how the site fares on Google’s search engine. It also provides Google with a lot of information about sites running it. More on the effect of Google Analytics on the SERPS next week.

Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time for StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at “jimhedger@stepforth.com“

There are millions of dollars and multiple hours spent every day trying to increase website traffic, by both ethical and unethical means. There is so much demand for traffic solutions that people will go to any lengths to get ranked higher in the search engines. But did you know that you could increase your traffic by about 20% right now, with virtually no effort?

Most times when you hear something like this I suggest that you turn tail and run as it will normally lead to your site’s ranking demise. This particular method of boosting traffic, however, is not a scam; it’s not an unethical ploy; it is a genuine method of increasing traffic via a future internet standard. The reason that you can increase your traffic so vastly is because you are getting in on the ground floor of a new technology which will revolutionize the internet and the way that traffic is distributed.

To understand what we’re about to tell you, you need to understand what an RSS feed is. Put simply, it’s a standard format for sharing your content instantly with users and other websites. People can quickly get access to ‘teasers’ for your latest newsletters, articles, blogs, content and more, and click through to see the full version. This method of distributing your information is very helpful because it basically generates dynamic newsletters without spamming and without causing your visitor any grief at all. In fact, many users find RSS to be their preferred way to hear about updates as RSS is so fast, user-friendly, and (most importantly) dynamic.

RSS feeds are often used by news sites or blogs, as the content changes often enough to make it worth while. By using highly targeted RSS feeds, you can improve your site’s web content without having to write it on your own – if someone offers you an RSS feed of their site, you can add it to your site easily. This provides you with a good content base which will keep visitors coming back.

The more information that people associate your site with the more important they consider your site. The more important they consider your site, the more important search engines will consider your site. Providing RSS yourself will get lots of people to link to you and so potentially improve your search engine rankings. Why?

1. RSS feeds can provide good, relevant content for your website – there are plenty of RSS publishers with themed content for you to choose from. These highly-targeted feeds will often contain your keywords, and so increase the keyword relevancy of your website. This helps even more than you may think as the key words will be within link or “anchor” tags. Search engines value anchor tags almost as much (if not more than) header tags (h1-h6).

2. RSS feeds can provide new, fresh content. When new content is added to them, the old content drops off, making sure that your website’s content doesn’t go stale. Most of your visitors will not visit your site if they find that there is nothing new between the first and second time that they visit it. If you want to keep your visitors where they belong, you have to have a good selection of content that is updated on a regular basis.

3. RSS feeds can get search engines to crawl your site more frequently – daily in some cases. This helps your site to rank higher in the search engines, and gives you an advantage over your competition. Your RSS feed can do your SEO work for you.

RSS feeds can be great for getting your newsletter, articles, or blog onto other people’s sites, and that’s very powerful, as long as you make sure that your RSS feed is adding more to your business than it takes. In some situations, you might find that including RSS on your page makes visitors click away from your site, as they find that site’s content more interesting than you – and people who click on RSS links might be less likely to click on ads. Use caution with RSS feeds, or you could be in for a shock.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about
SEO and PRL.

Web logs, popularly known as blogs, have become one of the hottest communication tools on the Web. Offering the opportunity for anyone to create their own free Web site, encouraging opinions and interaction, blogs provide forums for individuals to create their own highly personal presentations to the Web audience, and for consortia of all types to experience the sort of online community feeling that was pioneered by early newsgroups and by the phenomenal success of AOL in the 1990s.

Blogs have reached into the corporate and government sectors as well. A prominent federal magazine suggests that some company employees spend more time blogging than on personal e-mail, an average of over an hour a day. What started out as an outlet for teenage expression and grassroots journalism has turned into a lucrative communications tool for small and large businesses alike.

General Motors’ Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz, turned to the company’s blog when rumors surfaced about the discontinuation of the Pontiac and Buick brands. It became a means for a direct response, a way to talk to their consumers unfiltered.

Other companies such as Sun Microsystems and Microsoft are also recognizing the impact of blogging in their relationships with their customers and employees. In an article dated June 5, 2005, The Washington Post proposed that there were more than 100 official corporate blogs in existence, with hundreds more on the horizon.

Although a major newspaper called blogging “ephemeral, fast-paced and scathingly opinionated,” blogs continue to grow steadily in the corporate world and companies are realizing their value.

Corporate Blogging

Internal Communication

Corporate Blogging refers to a company producing or supporting a blog that it uses to accomplish business objectives. A blog can serve many purposes in a corporate setting. Internally, a blog can be a forum for discussion about work-related issues.

The informal atmosphere is encouraging to internal corporate communication. From small-scale discussions to virtual “town meetings,” in which employees at all levels feel that they can be heard, blogs promote collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Blogging can help establish a company or employee as an expert in their field. By posting information about a certain topic, a person exhibits their knowledge of the subject matter, setting himself up as an authority. People will come to equate the site and the author with that topic. This reputation for subject mastery and expertise can boost your sales and consumer opinion.

A blog can be an interactive addition to an intranet or e-mail newsletters. Since automatic update notification is possible on blogs, people are more likely to stay on top of the latest postings.

Public Communication

Blogs can be used to communicate to prospects, clients, employees and the media. Press releases and project updates can be posted, as well as job opportunities or information that the company wants to distribute outside of the normal news channels.

A blog can strengthen the bonds between the company and its customers. When a company presents itself honestly and transparently, it not only builds trust, but instills loyalty as well. Customers are more likely to work with a company they feel they know better than another. Blogs allow for that informal communication. They create good word-of-mouth among customers who don’t read the trade magazines or business pages. The nature of a blog fosters that image of transparency and openness for a company. Most people prefer companies who are honest in their dealings and frank about their issues. As seen in the media with the Dan Rather case, a blog can illuminate the truth through encouraging people to share what they know.

Blogging also reflects forward thinking. By staying current with the technological trends, you give your company a fresh image.

A blog can serve as a recruiting method. Interested job seekers can examine the company by reading its blog.

When testing a new product or service, a blog is an excellent place to give more detailed instructions or receive feedback.

Although, comments can be negative. Not everyone will agree with what is said on a blog. Instead of preventing them, welcome the constructive criticism and edit comments only to remove profanity and personal attacks.

The Down Side

There are some drawbacks to blogging. It is not a magic solution to your business needs. Many people feel that blogging popularity is much like the Internet in the 90’s, a promise of money, but not necessarily delivery.

Blogging can lead to legal issues as well. Companies have real concerns about liability, exclusions and limitations, and indemnity. Although there are laws that protect against libel, misappropriations and other injuries suffered as a result of posts on the Web, companies can be held vicariously responsible for statements made by employees that are harmful to others.

In any medium where an employee is sharing information, there is the possibility of leaking trade secrets or financial information. Former Google employee Mark Jen was famously fired for gabbing about life at the company on his personal blog, not sanctioned by Google.

Like all essentially unfiltered communication, blogs can get personal. Many bloggers feel the need to discuss their personal lives as well as their professional ones. Companies must be careful not to stifle communications by keeping personal lives out of the workplace. By doing this, they risk closing down the lines of communication entirely.

Inevitably, a disgruntled employee may use this as an opportunity to badmouth the company. This is not limited to blogs, since an unhappy employee has a variety of mediums through which to vent his disapproval. Blogs just make it easy.

The content may not have enough substance to warrant or hold an audience. Some companies fill their blog with marketing fluff. People can see right through this and will most likely ignore the site. Blogs should be used for transparency, not shameless self-promotion.

Best Practices

Fine Print. Since there are so many legal issues surrounding blogs, it is imperative that the site has some sort of disclaimer and limitation of liability.

Know What You’re Doing. Senior management should be educated by the corporate communications and legal department about what blogs are and how they might affect business.

Create Blogging Policies. A company should have a list of policies regarding blogging to ensure that trade secrets are kept secret and personal lives do not become public. Policies may include keeping financial information from being posted, as well as severe consequences for anyone using the blog for negative publicity.

Avoid the Marketing Blog. Making your blog into a blatant marketing campaign is a bad idea. Customers are looking for real answers and honest opinions. They will pick up on insincerity instantly.

Keep It Fresh. Make content relevant and timely. Update the blog as often as possible with the most worthwhile news. This will encourage people to come back.

Reinforce the Company’s Core Values. Then, make sure the content fits these values and supports the business strategy.

Encourage employees to use it, but remind them of the ramifications of their actions.

Free versus Paid Products

When creating a blog, there are hundreds of services and software from which to choose. The first decision to make is whether to go with a free service or pay for one.

For paid services, the cost varies depending on the features used. The basic hosting fee for a domain is anywhere from $5 to $15 a month. The domain name will need to be registered yearly, which can cost $5 to $35. This does not include the software, which may also have to be purchased.

While free services offer the basic necessities of blogging, paid services are usually more desirable since they have more to offer.

With a free service, the company offers a free site, but it may contain advertisements to offset the cost of maintenance. A paid site will not have any advertisements.

Most free services have a variety of templates to choose from for the look of the site, but paid services offer highly customizable designs.

In addition to the basic functions, paid blogs offer the ability to upload photos and images and tailor links on the site. They also offer better security and allow the creator to censor or control comments. Paid sites normally lead to a higher search engine ranking. They enable the creator to configure search output and there are fewer restrictions placed on paid sites.

Paid news aggregators will often keep a list of recently updated blogs and will rank them, showing new sites and newly added photo albums.

For a simple blog, any free service will do, but to get a truly customized and highly functioning product, it will take paying something for it.

RSS Feeds

With the rising popularity of blogs, it has become increasingly time-consuming to keep track of ones that are of interest. No one has time to check each and every favorite blog every day to search for new content. RSS feeds have become the solution.

RSS feeds are small XML files that contain a headline, date/time and description and link to information published on a blog. When used along with a feed reader, or news aggregator, they give an update on the newest content that has been added to a blogging site to a subscribed user.

RSS was developed in several different versions, each with a different meaning. RSS can stand for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary, depending on the version used. All versions do the same thing, though. They provide a summary of information. They send a blog’s highlights to subscribers instantly upon publication. RSS feeds save the user from having to visit the site for updates.

To receive RSS feed, a user must have a feed reader, also commonly referred to as a news aggregator. This can be software, a Web-based service, extension or built into a browser. It essentially takes the XML code and translates it into readable information. When the “update” button on the feed reader is clicked, it searches all of the subscribed sites’ RSS feed for new information.

Having a RSS feed greatly increases the traffic to a blogging site because it provides an easy way to keep an audience abreast of the latest developments. Once someone is a subscriber, he will continue to be involved in the site. RSS also makes it easier for someone to add a site as a link onto their own site.

Blogging inherently encourages communication and the transfer of ideas. Blogging lets businesses extend their reach and strengthen consumer loyalty, as well as get people talking about their product. It’s a matter of perception, encouraging integrity and strengthening relationships in the corporate world. Blogging has become the trademark of forward thinking companies willing to suffer a few stings in order to get to the benefits it has to offer.

Kari White is a Content Developer for Brook Group, LTD, a Web development firm near Washington, DC. For more information about Web marketing, visit Brook Group’s Resources page.

The engines, namely Google, are striking back at sploggers and their malevolent creations, the splogs.

According to media reports Google has taken measures to impede those attempting to use its Blogger service to create and maintain fake blogs.

Blogger’s official corporate blog mentioned the “spamalanche” that has search engines, blog search engines and net advertisers in a tizzy.

They are now working together to eliminate the economic incentive for splogs by identifying them at their source - by domain - and not indexing them.

Can CAPTCHA Stop The Spamalanche?

The “CAPTCHA” test is a method by which automated programs that post or create blogs can be foiled–where the user is asked to type in a sequence of letters from a line that people can read, but computers can’t decipher.

Blogger is currently working on ways to reduce false positives and ensure that once a blog with word verification has been established as legitimate, the blogger will no longer need to solve the CAPTCHA.

Why Create Splogs In The First Place?

Splogs generally fall into one of two categories, notes Mediapost: Link farms, which pack hundreds or even thousands of blogs with gibberish or recycled content, and contain multiple links to a particular Web site, which allow them to game Google’s PageRank algorithm, creating artificially high organic search rankings; and spam blogs that simply recycle content with AdSense or other advertising on them in the hopes of making money from errant users clicking on the ads.

Splogs most often get their content by scraping - the process of sending an electronic copying bot to take everything it sees, recreating it on an unlimited number of instant documents, writes Jim Hedger.

Literally millions of instant sites have sprung up over the past twelve months, most of which are free-hosted Blogs, containing content scraped out from the original sites.

Why Splogs Are Evil

An article in the Wall Street Journal notes that the splogs are a big source of frustration for several search-engine start-ups that focus on blog searches, such as IceRocket.com LLC, Technorati Inc. and Feedster Inc.

Jim Hedger makes some excellent points about why splogs are a menace to genuine bloggers, notably that:

- Splogs are content thieves and can cause honest webmasters to get caught up in technical and financial issues by losing search engine listings and advertising revenue

- Splogs use up blogging resources, especially those of Blogger and Blogspot

- Slogs clog up the search results with crappy and irrelevant sites.

- Splogs devalue the legitimate uses of blogs as communications and marketing tools

- Splogs might lead future blog readers or users away from the growing blogosphere.

Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, a firm that monitors and searches blog content, said that spam blogs make it harder to convince companies to blog.

What Can You Do About Splogs?

It’s not just the engines that are fighting back. There are a few knights in shining armour out there, like Frank Gruber, a blogger in Chicago who became frustrated while encountering splogs in search engines, and recently launched a site called SplogReporter, reports the Wall Street Journal.

SplogReporter lets anyone submit the Web address of a suspected splog. Gruber has created an index to rate how “spammy” a blog is, and is building a database of splogs that he may share with search engines.

Google engineer, Matt Cutts, provided tips on how to report spam to Google on his blog. Use his tips to report spam and do your bit to clean up the blogosphere.

I first wrote about spam-blogs here, and recommended that instead of using blogs for spam, marketers must focus on building content-rich sites and getting high-value links to them.

Don’t restrict yourself to just the SEO benefits of blogging. Appreciate the value that blogs can add to your marketing and public relations strategy and use them the way they were meant to be used - as cutting-edge and “cool” tools for communicating with your target audience.

(CC) Creative Commons License

_______________________________________________

Priya Shah is a partner in the search engine marketing firm, SEO & More and writes an online marketing blog. Request the whitepaper Boost Your Search Engine Visibility With Blogs And RSS.

This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked.
_______________________________________________

There are many ways to market your business on the Internet, and using search engine optimized articles has to be one of the “keeper” strategies for getting pre-qualified ‘natural’ search engine traffic to your web site.

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard all this before, “people search the Internet looking to information (aka articles) on how to solve a particular problem”. People just don’t search the web to buy your ’stuff’!

If you truly understand this search “path” then you understand the meat and potatoes of how the web works, it’s an information resource for people.

To completely understand the above concept ‘follow the money’. Search engines need content to be able to rank web sites, so that they continually get searchers BACK to their engines. The more searchers they have searching for relevant content on a search engine means more revenue for that search engine (e.g. the success of Google adsense).

This is why blogs and RSS have become the “buzz”. Blogs and RSS make the content (copy, words) “fluid”… meaning that the content changes often. This means that the search engine bots love these technologies, visit more often, and then rank the content well (if the blog articles are keyword optimized).

To see how this works go to any news site. News sites have a volume of ever-changing content. For example CNN gets spidered (visited) by the Googlebot something like 28,0000 times a day.

Why? Because of CNN’s ever changing content, and I guess the ‘bots’ are ‘lazy’? They go to where the good, and changing content is more often.

The SEO aspect of article writing.

Think of SEO as “filing”. What I mean by this is that good search engine optimization strategies help the search engine to “file” your content appropriately. Good keyword analysis gives you the information to enable the search engine bot with the ‘right’ filing.

There are no smoke and mirror tactics here. Your Mother was right when she told you that ‘telling the truth is always better in the long run’. This principle especially applies to good SEO practice.

Now, how do we take this concept of “fluid”, search engine optimized content and turn it into a Links IN bonanza for your own web site (thus sending your rankings through the roof over time, so to speak)?

These are the core principles…

1. Ensure that the link for your article is on a web page hosted on a unique IP address.

2. Ensure that the link for your article is on a web page that has a unique, wholly independent set of backlinks.

3. Ensure that the link is on a web page that is at least loosely relevant to the topic of your own web site.

You see, it’s not just a matter of having your articles on just any article directory. Your articles need to be in a category (and preferably a specialist directory) that is within “theme’. In other words you would never post your article on ‘looking after your cattle dog” on a directory that was focused on Financial Management.

In addition to placing your articles on article directories one can also run your articles on press release service sites, and of course there are RSS strategies (but that’s a whole other story, and another article).

Kenneth Doyle Is A Writer And Internet Marketing Consultant, *Find Out About His [Keyword Optimized] Article Writing And Submission Service Gets Thousands Of Prospects To Read YOUR Web Site Offers, Here… http://www.feedyourhungrymind.com/articlesam4

In this day and age of online marketing, content has been heralded as king, and for good reasons. People flock to sites not because of the flashy graphics nor the astounding features nor the witty domain name of the said pages, but because of the information contained therein that would enlighten them with their queries of the moment.

Content is even more potent in winning visitors than, say, search engine placements. You may derive a tremendous amount of traffic from the search engines, but if your content is junk, your visitors will never come back. But with good content, alas, you’ll have for yourself recurring visitors who will be eager to read your latest update.

You are most probably aware about the importance of traffic. Relying on unique visitors alone won’t give you the traffic that can be considered as sustainable. You must find a way that would encourage previous visitors to return to your site as well. Good content does this with relative ease.

It goes without saying then that your website should have rich, premium, informative content. Content is indeed king, and your web pages serves as the throne. For the success of your business, your website should be constructed as such.

Here are some simple steps that would help you build a content site, and fast:

Develop the layout that is simple and pleasant to the eyes. By keeping away from flashy ornaments, you’ll be able to manipulate the focus of your visitors to the content you want to share. Let your content carry your web pages and let the words speak for themselves.

You cannot rely on words alone, no matter how witty and cleverly used they are. There should be substance behind them as ultimately, the worth of your words is what would impress upon your visitors the true value of your website as a quality resource hub. So do your research. Make sure you know the subject matter by heart before writing your content. If you have questions about the same, do not try to conceal it them with silence. Seek out the answers and leave no bases uncovered. Make your content as comprehensive as possible, and your visitors won’t have to look elsewhere to find the answers they are seeking.

Your content should be presented credibly. Employing good writing skills would be instrumental to achieve this. Pay attention to the intricacies of writing for the web. Write well, but in a simple manner. Avoid using jargons and flowery words. Keep your paragraphs short so that you could make good use of negative space, that blank area between clusters of words which would allow your readers’ eyes to rest. Use bullets and numberings as much as possible. Online users are not really known for their patience, and this is something you have to work on.

When writing your content, make sure that the first part of your piece is capable of grabbing your visitors’ interest so that they would be motivated to read on. In these times of convenient surfing, bear in mind that your readers can always go to another site if they don’t find your content engaging. The challenge lies in capturing their interests and giving them what they want. This would compel them to read on and stay.

Always update your website with new content. Not only will the search engines love this, resulting in a higher page rank for your site, your visitors will likewise be encouraged to return to your site come for the new information you would share.

Consider using blogs instead of traditional HTML designs. Blogs are very easy to set up and update. Once you have typed your entries, all you have to do is to click on a button to publish them. A lot of Internet marketers actually use blogs in creating several mini-sites for their AdSense campaign. Blogs allow them to set up multiple pages in one day. And with the way blogs are favorably getting indexed at the forefront of every search engine result, their value has fantastically increased in recent months!

All hail the king! Content is king, but you wield control. Furnish the king with royal garments and surely, your online kingdom would reap the rewards at a faster rate.

When not on his soapbox, Andrew Wroblewski is doing battle with the thousands of spyware programs that can affect you via his ant-spyware and spyware removal website: http://spyware.pcwash.com where you can get a free spyware scan of your computer system.