While Facebook may be a hot marketing tool right now, there is danger in putting too much effort into making it the center of your marketing efforts.

In a recent post I spoke about publishing paths and tailoring your content and selectively publishing it to different websites. It can be dangerous, though, if you take it too far and focus only on building your content on one website (particularly one you don’t have absolute control over) because you leave yourself and your business open to whims and decisions of others. I see this happening withTwitter to a certain extent and now, with increasing frequency, with Facebook.

At the time this post was written, VitaminWater.com 301 redirects to a Facebook page for Vitamin Water. I’m all for trying new things, thinking out of the box, and experimenting. After all, I was one of the few people who liked the skittles redirect stunt. But it was temporary. When you redirect your website to a twitter page, facebook page, wikipedia page or any other page not under your absolute complete control, you are no longer your own master. A lot of web 2.0 companies have a spotty track record and have been known to make some really bad decisions in the past, and I’d put Facebook near the top of the bad decision makers list. Anyone remember the beacon fiasco,  holocaust denial incident, or recent privacy kerfufle? When you put all your marketing eggs in the Facebook basket you put the fate of your company under the guidance, regulations, and terms of service of a company that has shown increasingly poor decision making with alarming regularity.

Let’s be clear: Facebook wants to rule the web. If you don’t think the deactivation of several high profile Google engineers facebook accounts wasn’t a warning shot across the bow, you really need to open your eyes. Facebook and Google will be at war for the web very soon, and you don’t want to be collateral damage in that war.

Facebook should be a tool in your marketing toolbox … just not the only tool.

If you are looking for information on how to get more out of Facebook, check out this presentation from Brian Carter at Pubcon 2010. It’s really good.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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In the past I’ve spoken about why I turned off blog comments, but it was mostly from a time/labor perspective. Now I have another reason, one that affects everyone from an SEO Perspective. In some cases. leaving comments on will negatively impact your rankings and traffic.In case you missed it, in yesterday’s post I spoke about how Google is being more aggressive in trying to figure out the proper date for a post and displaying it in the SERP’s. Comments are one of the key tools they use. So is having a date in a Google SERP listing a bad thing?

In some cases, having a date in your SERP is a good thing. If someone is looking for an answer or information and comes across a listing with a recent date, they are more likely to click that listing. If your listing happens to have a date and it’s recent, that’s a bonus for you. If your listing shows up and has an old date, you’re more likely to not get clicked because readers feel that your information might be old and outdated. Is this fair? No. But it’s the truth.

I’ve spoken before about the value of creating evergreen content for your website. But if you play by the rules and do that now, you’re leaving yourself wide open to Google slitting your throat under the misguided premise of user experience. Let’s have an example. Is a post that’s 5 years old about how to paint your living room better or worse than a post from the past year about how to paint your living room? The correct answer is you don’t know until you’ve read them. But if you don’t think the post with the newer date will get more clicks, you need to get your head out of the sand. Are there queries where date plays a role? Sure. In a query about what dress a celebrity wore at the recent awards show, the date plays huge factor. But for a lot of queries it doesn’t matter at all. However, Google’s algo isn’t smart enough to know when date plays a role and to only show the date when it matters, so they show it all the time. Those publishers who are collateral damage get screwed … unless they do something about it.

My recommendation is to remove any and all dates from the page after 3-6 months. Removing the post date from the article meta information area is easy. If you have comments, you have to monkey with the code to remove the date, or you can go hardcore and turn them off entirely. You need to remove any traces of publication dates from the page. Now if you were really aggressive, you could actually forge the publication date on the page … Not that I’m encouraging that kind of behavior. I’m just presenting it as an alternative for educational purposes and to be thorough

This is the kind of information you need to be aware of and decide how you are going to deal with when going forward. You could sit back and wait and hope no one steals your traffic, or you could feed Google the info you want them to have–and nothing more. Personally, I don’t like leaving my fate up to chance.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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For websites that are going to participate in social media in a big way along multiple channels, I find it helpful to set up what I call publishing paths. These publishing paths require you to think about your content before you publish it, what is the best channel for it, and how to cross promote it.Some publishers take a different approach. No matter where something is published, it gets cross promoted across all channels. For example every blog post goes to twitter and facebook. Every youtube video or flickr picture will also wind up on the blog and cross promoted onto twitter. While this approach does guarantee maximum distribution and the most traffic, it doesn’t allow you to tailor specific content to each medium. It’s the difference between a shotgun blast and single sniper shot.

Let’s say your company has an event, and you take pictures and publish them to Flickr. Instead of  republishing all of those pictures again on the blog, I suggest picking the 10 or 12 best, publishing those, and providing a link back to the full set. The same goes for videos: don’t republish every video to your blog, only the best ones. Due to the length restrictions, twitter is best suited for short discussions. It doesn’t make sense to republish all of your tweets to your blog or facebook, but it does make sense to do a “best tweets of the week” style recap post.

IMHO the advantage of using a publishing path approach is you don’t overwhelm the people who want your content. Instead, you try to tailor as much of it as possible to the medium for maximum value. The one exception is for your A+ content and things like linkbait. The content that you want to have maximum exposure should be promoted across all of the channels. The people who happen to subscribe to you in multiple places will see this content and react to it differently. When you cross promote everything, though, it loses the ability to be seen as special.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…

Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff. Like everyone, they want to build things that gain the respect of their peers. This aspiration is where the problems get started. Unless you happen to develop for an extremely technical audience, users don’t want cool stuff. They just want stuff that works and makes their life easier. For example, let’s say a developer wants to build a weather dashboard with real time satellite video feeds, an AJAX module that show the latest temperature, barometric pressure and wind speed/direction, the sunrise/sunset times, and tidal data. A regular user, on the other hand, just wants to know “is it going to be sunny or cloudy and do I need a jacket or umbrella today?”

We’ve seen several examples of this played out in public in our little tech-bubble-blogosphere in the past year:

• Google Wave: Google wave is cool. It doesn’t solve any problems that any real people have but it does a lot of great things that developers get excited about. It includes embedded video, sound, and chat from multiple users that a user can enable playback from… Yeah, I was saying just last week how I wished I could do that. The only useful thing I’ve ever seen done with Google wave is the Pulp Fiction movie (1000% NSFW).
• iPad: When the IPad first came out, I (like many others) complained that it was an oversized iphone with less functionality. However what we missed was that it really wasn’t for us. The iPad is for regular users, not developers or techno weenies. In other words, people–in fact, most people– want an internet appliance that just works. They don’t want to have to deal with nonsense like registries, print drivers, patches, updates, and so on. Why does everyone have a refrigerator in their house? Because it’s easy to to use! You plug it in and go. Imagine for a minute if you had to play with the evaporator driver or download and install a thermometer patch update every week. Your refrigerator “works” because 99% of the time it just does its job without any fiddling.
• Google Buzz: Google assumed that everyone wanted to share all of the stuff they are doing, reading, and looking at with people they talk to. Because many Googlers have become victims of their own hubris, they assumed everyone is like them, wants to be like them, or should be like them. However when the realities of everyday life entered the equation, in the shape of something like an abusive ex-husband, it was a condition that didn’t exist in the artificial utopia of the Googleplex. Google failed to test the program in the real world and instead relied on the developer’s vision of what the users wanted. The result? Failure.

So how do you recognize when you are in this situation? If you, your developer, or anyone on your team makes these kind of statements, chances are strong that you are on the wrong path:

• Can’t the users open their eyes and just read? The answer is right there in front of them.
• The users need to use a little common sense. We can’t keep dumbing down the world for them or we’ll end up like (insert tv/movie/pop culture reference for stupid people here).
• They use the term UX to mean user experience or UI to mean user interface in common everyday speech and would feel comfortable using it when speaking to the CEO or board of directors.

What can you do to prevent this kind of mistake from ruining your project? Here are some ideas:

• In most cases, developers don’t make good team/project leaders. They carry with them the bias of wanting to be cool, respected developers. If you have or can find a developer who has a proven track record of placing user needs above cool programming features, ignore this recommendation.
• User testing: find someone who is not involved in the project or, even better, get a NIF (non internet friend) to try out your website. Put them on the homepage and ask them to try and do what your primary goal is, whether that’s to create a gift registry, put something in a cart and checkout, find a specific piece of information, or something else. Whatever it is, ask them try and do it. If you can video tape them, that’s great; otherwise, watch without interacting and take notes.
• Test different options. Use services like Crazyegg or Google multi variant testing to try out different options. See where users are and aren’t clicking then make adjustments based on data not on intuition. (disclosure: Crazyegg is an advertiser here)
• Don’t make changes because they are cool, neat, interesting, or stroke the ego of your developers. Make changes that solve problems people have. This is one of the biggest complaints I have with Wordpress as a platform. They coddle developer’s whims instead of addressing real problems like security.

At the end of the day, you and everyone involved needs to understand that, for your project to succeed, it needs to solve a problem users have first and foremost. Stroking the ego of the CEO, making the marketing department look clever, or making a developer feel stimulated are not real goals.

Advertisement: Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed! #5

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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When your blog or website becomes successful and starts to get traffic, if you don’t make direct sales yourself or commissions via affiliate traffic, you almost always look for other revenue streams. The most common revenue stream is CPM based advertising or something like adsense. However, once many publishers start down that path, they almost always end up chasing off topic traffic. Let’s look at two of the flagship websites of the technology space, Techcrunch and Mashable.

This week, Techcrunch posted a story about how so many valley entrepenuers in the Valley are now having babies. I’ll take a quote from the article which shows exactly how silly this type of posting is:

To anywhere else in the US, this may sound “So what? People have babies all the time.” But in the Valley, this is a staggering injection of work-life balance into the 24/7 Web space.

This is not tech news. In fact it barely qualifies as a “slice of life” piece about life in the Valley. ZOMG I mean you people in the valley finally realize that 99% of the rest of the population in the US struggles with work-life balance issues… I mean–WOW. Congratulations on peeping your head out of your narcissistic incestuous self centered bubble for nine months and, you know, actually getting  a life. This piece was written to be nothing more than a polarizing, emotionally-charged bit of linkbait designed to drive up page views.

Don’t worry, Mashable. You’re just as guilty as Techcrunch of chasing off topic subjects. Just look at how many Tiger Woods posts you have. And after victims of the recent earthquake tragedy in Chili posted pictures to twitpic, how long did it take your writers to create their articles?  Just because an issue arises doesn’t mean you should start writing about off topic subjects.

Let’s be honest here. You aren’t being responsible journalists. You’re becoming ambulance chasers, hoping to make some page views and few dollars off of a time sensitive spike in search terms. Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with being a traffic whore. But you can’t act like a traffic whore then turn around and claim you’re a journalist. It just doesn’t work that way.

As a publisher, how do you decide what to cover and what not to cover? Ask yourself this question and answer honestly. Am I writing about this subject because it’s part of my industry or because it’s kinda connected and there is a lot of traffic? Every so often there comes a story that is too good to pass up. But remember that, every time you bite into that juicy little bit, you sell out just a little.

Nobody ever sells out all once. They do it slowly over time until, eventually, there’s nothing left…

Decide which side of the fence you want to be on. Every time you cross from one side to the other, you lose the respect of your peers and your readers.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Today’s post is question from Hicham Damahi of beezid.com/ who asks “How to handle expired product pages on a classified / auction site.” I’m going to expand the topic to cover expired product pages as well, since the concept it basically the same.

I touched on this briefly in my Shopping Cart SEO Tips post, but there are a couple of different conditions that require some finesse so let’s run through the most common cases:

Product Goes Temporarily Out of Stock: If a product goes out of stock temporarily, but you do expect to get it back in stock,  you’ll want to leave the page up from a search engine perspective. You want to make sure that you let the customer know the product is out of stock. If they can order it or be notified when it comes back in, that’s great. But taking the page up and down–that’s bad mojo right there. Don’t do it.

Product Goes Out Of Stock Forever: If the product goes out of stock forever, you have a couple choices. You can leave the page up with a discontinued notice on the page. IMHO that’s not the best way to go for search engines. Ideally I’d like to not lose any link equity and 301 the product page to a similar product, category/department page, or home page.

Product is Replaced or Updated: If a product is replaced or updated, handle it the same way you would handle a product that goes out of stock forever. Unless there is some value in maintaining an un-purchasable archive page, 301 it to the new product, up one category/department, or back to the home page.

Expired or Completed Auction Page: Handle this the same way as a product going out of stock or being replaced.

Why would you want to 301 the product/auction page instead of letting it expire and issuing a 404? Two key reasons: link reclamation and conservation of  existing link equity. Are all of your products/auctions going to get links? No, but some will. Links are like money: once you have them, you don’t wan to waste them or throw them away. You want to keep them. I wouldn’t advise trying any tricks with rel=canonical either. Search engines have said they will make their own decisions when it comes to  rel=canonical and IMHO the last thing you want to do is leave things to chance. Take the easy method that works and 301 the expired page.

If you are going to have a high volume of items that do this, you’ll want to work out an automated system to take care of as much of this as possible. Use product names, SKU’s ISBN, tags, or even product categories if you have to. Just don’t let them expire.

The danger of leaving up expired products/auctions is that you create a lot of useless pages. Your site only has a certain amount of inbound link equity, so don’t squander it on product pages with no value. Now if you sell unique collectibles and you want to keep the archives up, that makes sense, but if you’re selling consumer goods like an iPod or Samsung LCD TV, there’s just no point to it.

Lastly I’d like to bring up something called predictive SEO, which I wrote about in 2005. If you know that a product is coming, why not put up a page about it in advance? Don’t be a spammer and put up an empty page. Try to put something up that has some useful information: when is it supposed to be out, what are the specs, the price, etc. I also think it’s pretty smart to try and capture leads if you can as a way to lock in some future sales.

So, to wrap things up, here are the take aways:

• Put up and leave product pages up where you will be selling or restocking an item in the future.
• Capture leads for future sales on out of stock products wherever possible
• Redirect out of stock or discontinued products via 301 to replacement product pages or appropriate department pages
• Automate redirection as much as possible to cut down on maintenance

Advertisement: Find out how to get your bloggers talking about your products ViralConversations.com. #8

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Today’s post is question from Hicham Damahi of beezid.com/ who asks “How to handle expired product pages on a classified / auction site.” I’m going to expand the topic to cover expired product pages as well, since the concept it basically the same.

I touched on this briefly in my Shopping Cart SEO Tips post, but there are a couple of different conditions that require some finesse so let’s run through the most common cases:

Product Goes Temporarily Out of Stock: If a product goes out of stock temporarily, but you do expect to get it back in stock,  you’ll want to leave the page up from a search engine perspective. You want to make sure that you let the customer know the product is out of stock. If they can order it or be notified when it comes back in, that’s great. But taking the page up and down–that’s bad mojo right there. Don’t do it.

Product Goes Out Of Stock Forever: If the product goes out of stock forever, you have a couple choices. You can leave the page up with a discontinued notice on the page. IMHO that’s not the best way to go for search engines. Ideally I’d like to not lose any link equity and 301 the product page to a similar product, category/department page, or home page.

Product is Replaced or Updated: If a product is replaced or updated, handle it the same way you would handle a product that goes out of stock forever. Unless there is some value in maintaining an un-purchasable archive page, 301 it to the new product, up one category/department, or back to the home page.

Expired or Completed Auction Page: Handle this the same way as a product going out of stock or being replaced.

Why would you want to 301 the product/auction page instead of letting it expire and issuing a 404? Two key reasons: link reclamation and conservation of  existing link equity. Are all of your products/auctions going to get links? No, but some will. Links are like money: once you have them, you don’t wan to waste them or throw them away. You want to keep them. I wouldn’t advise trying any tricks with rel=canonical either. Search engines have said they will make their own decisions when it comes to  rel=canonical and IMHO the last thing you want to do is leave things to chance. Take the easy method that works and 301 the expired page.

If you are going to have a high volume of items that do this, you’ll want to work out an automated system to take care of as much of this as possible. Use product names, SKU’s ISBN, tags, or even product categories if you have to. Just don’t let them expire.

The danger of leaving up expired products/auctions is that you create a lot of useless pages. Your site only has a certain amount of inbound link equity, so don’t squander it on product pages with no value. Now if you sell unique collectibles and you want to keep the archives up, that makes sense, but if you’re selling consumer goods like an iPod or Samsung LCD TV, there’s just no point to it.

Lastly I’d like to bring up something called predictive SEO, which I wrote about in 2005. If you know that a product is coming, why not put up a page about it in advance? Don’t be a spammer and put up an empty page. Try to put something up that has some useful information: when is it supposed to be out, what are the specs, the price, etc. I also think it’s pretty smart to try and capture leads if you can as a way to lock in some future sales.

So, to wrap things up, here are the take aways:

• Put up and leave product pages up where you will be selling or restocking an item in the future.
• Capture leads for future sales on out of stock products wherever possible
• Redirect out of stock or discontinued products via 301 to replacement product pages or appropriate department pages
• Automate redirection as much as possible to cut down on maintenance

Advertisement: Find out how to get your bloggers talking about your products ViralConversations.com. #8

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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It took Leo Tolstoy six years to craft the 460,000-word War and Peace. A cheap copywriting service could churn out as many words for your website for just $9,200 (at 2 cents a word) over the course of a few weeks.

Added to this, standards of literacy and attention spans on the web are plummeting.

• We’re all illiterate More than half of American college students nearing graduation can’t understand the arguments in newspaper editorials.
• Google fixes our grammar anyway Google mostly ignores punctuation and these days it corrects spellings and shows synonyms. There’s less and less incentive for people to search using correct grammar or spelling or to even think about the search terms they use.
• Your brand’s probably invisible People don’t  know which website they’re on half the time, anyway. If you’ve never seen people in usability testing fail to realise they’ve moved to a different site, check out these people trying to log into facebook last week on readwriteweb.

Given all this, what’s the point in investing in well-commissioned, well-researched, well-written, well-edited, and well-subbed copy for, say, 60 cents a word?

At that rate, War and Peace would have cost $276,000 to commission.

Despite this, here’s when you should use an experienced, pricey copywriter, rather than a value service or an agency with claims like:

• “our inhouse copy writers will produces unique, keyword balanced content …”
• “[we're] skilled in the art of SEO Copywriting as is evidence by our clients top search engine rankings”?

(Really – Google them if you don’t believe me).

When to pay professional rates

When you need expertise

If you want your site to demonstrate expertise (or passion for that matter), you’re going to have to pay.

First up, you need some proper expertise. You don’t want to end up like eHow where people avoid its pages in search results because of bad experiences – such as an article on how to cure a cold by someone whose credentials turned out to be “having an English degree and loving to write for fun, but I’ve never made a profit yet”.

But you’re not just paying for the expertise – most writers can knock out a quick “how to” with a bit of background research.

Real experts know their subject in depth, can demonstrate this, and have lots to say.

The problem is usually getting them to shut up.

I’m not one of these people who reckons there’s some ideal length for a web page of about 400 to 500 words. The ideal length is however long it takes to say what needs saying (and SEOmoz found that 1,800+ word posts were more likely to earn links).

The issue is saying what you need to say in the fewest words. People read 25% slower on the web. And for every 100 words you add, only 18 are read on average.

So the trick with expertise is to have genuinely insightful copy that’s edited to as few words as possible – and, for obvious reasons,  few copywriting services  charge on the basis of giving you fewer words than you asked for …

If you want unique content that gets people to stay

The key measure of SEO is not rankings or traffic. It’s conversion (however you choose to measure it). So the actual cost of content doesn’t matter – what matters is your return. You can’t tell whether cheap copy is better value without experimenting.

Also, you need to ask what’s going to make your copy do well in the search results, and whether you want visitors to return? Have a look round the competition – there are 30,900 articles on ehow.com about ipod playlists, for instance, 1,550 about the ipad, 28,000 about changing a tire, and 36,300 about face painting.

Let’s take an ehow car-tire article at random – this one was 2nd in their on-site search. You think anyone’s going to naturally link to an article that essentially says “take the tire off, then put the new one on”? You think anyone’s going to think “Blimey, that ehow article was the money. I am so going back to ehow next time I need to know something”?

Yes, you can throw up some cheap, me-too copy, build links to it and wait for traffic to click on your affiliate links. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But to build an audience – repeat visitors and people who value your brand, want your newsletter, and follow you on twitter – you have to give them quality and you have to be distinctive.

Your tone of voice matters

There’s something about the guidelines for web writing that drains the life from copy. Take this example, which Demand Media were showcasing on their home page (is this really the best they’ve got?).

Leaving aside the apparently broken return key and missing bullet-list button, is that dry, monotonous, soul-destroying copy really how you want your brand to express itself?

I’m sure there are some great writers in cheap content agencies. But they’ve got no incentive to write creatively, or even to write like a human. Most, though, have probably had drummed into them some half-baked writing-for-the-web guidelines presented as if they were universal truths, without thinking about the context – and they are desperate to strip out any adjectives or signs of human life from their writing because, hey, that’s what everyone wants on the web, right

If you pay by the word, that’s what you get – words. If you pay for tone, you get tone. Last time I checked, cheap copywriting services were all missing a checkbox where you could pay extra for signs of human life.

(If you’ve ever referred to the contents of the folder containing your draft web copy as “assets”, you probably won’t get this point.)

Your press releases have a purpose

Press releases should be judged on their ROI. Why are you putting out a press release? Let’s assume you’ve got something newsworthy to say – and you want journalists to pick it up, because you want to earn links or promote your brand.

Here are two options:

• Pay someone who knows nothing about your company, the market you’re operating in, the journalists involved or their publications. Get them to write something. Maybe you can stick it on some online PR site? Then you can start a news section on your site, too. No one will pick it up, and you’ll go off the whole press-release idea. In a few months, anyone clicking the news section of your site will think nothing has happened at head office for ages.
• Or do some proper research into who is likely to cover the story and how you can grab their interest – and pay to craft the release with care to appeal to those people.

I’ll let you do the math on that one (as I believe you say in America)

Quality costs

Adweek wrote in December about how:

“the race is on to use data and automation to produce content that people (and advertisers) want at as low a price as possible.”

One of the commenters despaired:

“Every time I click on one of [AOL's] business stories, their “content” is filled with obvious typos, grammatical errors and completely unfocused, unorganized writing throughout. How can you trust anything written in a story so poorly put together? AOL is starting to resemble a cheap blog produced in some kid’s basement vs a professional content provider. “

The problem for you is that if you’re commissioning cheap content, you’re probably not investing in editing or subbing. (For that matter, you’ve probably not given that much thought to what you want in the first place, and how appropriate it is.)

These stages cost money too. If you skip them, you’re not going to improve the quality of what you produce.

Journalism.co.uk, the UK site devoted to journalism, recently worked out that it cost them £37 ($58) on average to produce an online article, and estimated that a national newspaper would pay nearer £400 ($630). That is what quality, original copy really costs if you want it done properly.

Which end of the pay scale is suitable for your website?

Short-form content is even harder

Hemmingway famously came up with this six-word story:

“For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”

Similar attempts by copycat storywriters are invariably lame. But short-form copy can be the most compelling. Whether you want to just do it, get the best a man can get or are after the real thing, you’re not going to get a great six-word slogan for 12 cents.

In fact, for a given subject X, you’ll probably end up with something with “matters” at the end. Subject-X matters – get it? It means “it’s about subject-X” and that “subject-X is important”. Brilliant.

(That’s not to say the professionals always get it right – Warner Bros managed to use “Titans will clash” as the tagline for, er, Clash of the Titans. Inspiring. And UK retailer Dixons used “the last place you want to go” as its slogan, hoping to suggest that you’d visit its shops after checking online. Or as most people read it, that it was somewhere to steer well clear of.)

Want to see this in action? Dustin Curtis demonstrated how, in 4 steps from “I’m on twitter” to “You should follow me on twitter here”, he increased clickthroughs by 173%. That is copy advice worth paying for.

The same applies to meta descriptions. They affect clickthrough rates – so don’t make the work-experience guy type them mechanically into a spreadsheet. Lavish the same care and attention to them as you would to a magazine front-cover strapline.

Again, if you pitched a need for 20 150-character meta descriptions to a cheap content agency then they won’t be that interested, and very little thought will go into it.

Strategy? Huh?

One of the advantages of a professional, experienced copywriter is that they are likely to ask questions. Why is a blog a good idea for your site? What’s the long-term plan for your content? How should the content be structured? Have you thought about the artwork? Is your site structure ideal?

If a cheap copy service asked any of these questions, they’d cost themselves money. As the answers will often be, “You’re right – no one will be remotely interested in our blog”. Or “No, we haven’t given any thought to how people are gong to find this stuff – we thought we could throw it up and maybe someone would give it a twitter for us. My nephew’s on twitter, you see. Time for a rethink.”

To sum up

I’m not obsessed with ‘content-is-king’. The internet isn’t a monarchy. You can write great content, and no one will ever see it if you don’t have a way to get it found. Yet you can scrape other people’s content and clean up.

Nor am I opposed to platforms that match low-cost writers with those who need words (it’s easy to find examples of bad writing from content mills – but that doesn’t exactly prove anything as you can do the same on mainstream media sites.)

It’s horses for courses. The key when commissioning content is to think about what it’s for. If it can affect your brand, you want to build an audience, or if you want something unique, pay for quality. If not, then don’t.

Right, now what rate did I agree with Michael for these 2,000 words … Eh? What’s a guest post?

Malcolm Coles wrote this post – he does internet content strategy. You should follow him on twitter here. He’d quite like some more links to his UK website on setting up a business – as it’s currently a shining example of how good content without any promotion gets no visitors.

photo credit: Photos8.com

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Earlier this week there was a post on SEOBullsh*t that talked about how Wordpress was inadequate for anything more than a personal blog. Since I’m a big advocate of Wordpress and use it more than any other platform, I thought I’d provide a little balance to the argument.

Let’s get to the core of the argument. Can Wordpress scale to handle high volume sites with lots of traffic? I can say that, yes, it can … as long as you are careful about how you implement it. The plugins are one of the biggest issues with using Wordpress. They can solve a lot of problems; however, sometimes they can create just as many problems as they solve. Sometimes this even happens with savvy programmers/developers, such as when Alex King’s Popularity contest jumped off the rails. So as your website grows more and more popular, you have to be careful about which plugins (if any) you run. I’ve seen Wordpress sites handle between 80,000 to 100,000 uniques a day without a problem–as long as you keep an eye on things.

The next big issue is the permalinks numbers/categories debate. To be honest there was a grain of truth in Robert Rolfe’s critique of  permalinks with only category/pagename set ups; however, Dan lost the ability to make an effective critique since he came out with a guns blazin, damn the torpedoes full speed ahead approach. Is there some performance benefit to putting a date/post-ID/number in the URL? Yes. However, that advantage becomes meaningless with things like caching.  You can make a real improvement by using a better htaccess setup instead of the one that Wordpress does by itself. The details are available on this excellent thread on WebmasterWorld. For small low traffic sites the increase will be negligible, but when you get into those high traffic numbers, it becomes more important.

Another limitation of wordpress is the number of pages. When I say pages I mean actual pages not posts. There’s a mounting body of evidence that Wordpress doesn’t do such a good job of handling lots of pages (like 1,000’s ). Using the modified htacess configuration above can help, but you’ll still have issues. A better solution is to configure Wordpress to put posts in a straight URL configuration and ignore directories (something SEOBullsh*t talked about recently) .

So with all of these disadvantages, why would anyone want to use Wordpress as a CMS on a project with heavy SEO considerations?

Most people who choose to use Wordpress as a CMS do so because they are making compromises and tradeoffs. Let’s be honest: it takes very little skill level to set up a Wordpress blog. In fact, some hosting companies offer it to you pre-installed with your hosting order. Wordpress is also tremendously easy to administer. If you want to run Drupal or Joomla, you’re going to need a higher skill level and be more involved. Me, I’m lazy efficient: I strive for low maintenance projects. I can keep high double digit websites running on Wordpress with a bi-weekly sweep through. That’s not something I could do with the other systems while keeping the same time investment.

Another advantage is the access to wider range of writers. If you run a multi-author project, using something like Wordpress allows you to add/change authors with zero training, as most of them have worked with it before. If you use another platform you get a learning curve or the possibility of needing an editorial staff.

You also have access to large library of pre-existing customizations. Are there tutorials and how-to’s for Joomla and Drupal? Sure. Are there more for Wordpress? Absolutely. You really should pick a platform and stay with it, since doing so allows you to leverage the knowledge and scale very effectively. I’ve written a bunch of tutorials on Wordpress and Thesis, and I leverage them on new projects. I’ve gotten really good at taking Thesis and making it not look like an out of the box Thesis install without much effort.

So is Wordpress the ultimate CMS platform for an SEO’s website? No, probably not. But it does solve a lot of the problems and issues with setting up, running, and maintaining a website. At the end of the day, it’s a trade off, but if Wordpress allows you to publish more websites in less time with less man power resources and less technical skill, then it’s a pretty easy choice to make. Especially if you take a little time to make Wordpress search engine friendly. However, if you are on a database intensive application, have the technical skill, and have very high loads, it might not be the right choice.

To make an analolgy, you can bang in nails with the back of screwdriver, but if you use the right tool for the right job you’ll get better end results. If you know the problems you are trying to solve  and under what conditions you will be solving them, you are better equipped to choose the right tool for the right job, whether it’s Wordpress or some other CMS.
photo credit: geishaboy500

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Google has long been an advocate of “build great content”; however, in reality, it’s turning into “build great content … and if we like it we’ll take it from you, put it on our pages, and deprive you of that traffic. Without compensation.” Strong accusations, sure, but I’m willing to step up to the plate, put my money where my mouth is, and show you how it’s being done.

Let’s say you live in the Miami area or are thinking of taking a vacation there. You might want to bring your family to the Miami Seaquarium, and it might be a good idea to find out exactly where they are and what hours they are open. So what do you do? Fire up your browser, head on over to Google, and search for [seaquarium miami]. You should get a result that’s something like this:

So what’s the problem? First of all, Google gives away the hours right in the SERP. There’s no need for the people to visit the website. While I don’t know for a fact that traffic growth is a success metric for the Miami Seaquarium, I think it’s a safe assumption. By denying the Miami Seaquarium that traffic they deny them the opportunity to upsell visitors to the upcoming aquarium programs. Now Googlers might counter by saying that it’s all about “providing a better user experience.” Maybe at the next conference I’ll improve the movie going experience of some Googlers by telling them the surprise ending of the latest movie before they see it. I mean, I saved them money and two hours of their time, right? That’s gotta be a better user experience.

See that review and link to “more information”? Click either of those and, instead of being taken to the Miami Seaqurium website, you’re taken to the Google map listing page. Google stole the information they wanted from the Miami Seaqurium, hijacked the traffic for themselves, and put them on a page with contextual advertising that puts more money in Google ’s pockets. The only person that gets a better user experience out of that is someone whose paycheck directly results from that advertising. Really this is nothing more than a scraper adsense website designed to hijack traffic away from place it should be going. Because Google controls the SERP’s they make sure they are at the top, guaranteeing clicks, traffic, and revenue from that page.

This is almost the exact behavior I described in my debate with Danny Sullivan a few weeks ago on Sphinn. I stand by my position that giving Google the copyright to the information for free right out of the gate is the same as giving them permission to steal and develop a money making operation based on your labors without giving you any of the action.

Want another example of Google stealing? Sure, here we go …

Let’s say I decide I want to go to nice steakhouse for dinner. I know there’s a Bryant & Cooper here on Long Island. I wonder if it’s still any good, so I type in [bryant & cooper steakhouse long island reviews]. Here’s what I get:

So it’s got four out of five stars based on 48 reviews. That’s pretty good. I can call and make reservation right away and my mission is accomplished.

So what’s my beef here (pun intended)? Another long-standing Google suggestion is to build a website, service, or product that people want to use and place value on. This is what’s called a Point of Differentiation or POD. One way to do that is with user-submitted reviews. I wonder where Google got those 48 reviews? Let’s  check it out.

Let’s see…there are some reviews from Google, but the majority are from Zagat and CitySearch. Let’s review. Google says build great content and a service people want to use, which Zagat and CitySearch did. Then Google went and stole that content from them and put some adsense advertising next to it. If we go back to the original SERP and scroll down a bit … yep, we’ll find Zagat and CitySearch. Google hijacked that traffic, and those two sites got nothing to show for it.

What you need to do is ask yourself a question. Do you think Google is going to use less information or are they going to take more? Are they going to decide they can better serve the customers in your market by stealing your best content and putting it on their servers, where they collect the ad revenue, while they kick you to the curb faster than a no-good, two-timing, philandering spouse? Do you feel confident betting against the all-consuming data borg? Well do ya, punk?

The problem is that, as SEO’s, we’re the canaries in coal mine. We’ll notice trouble before it happens. Probably a few of us are going to have our websites killed by Google before the main stream press and Government notices. But the sooner we see the truth for what it is and stop burying our heads in the sand, the sooner something will happen to change it.

You may have friends who work for Google, but Google is not your friend. Google is like the feudal lord who grows rich off of the peons, serfs, and indentured servants who labor in the fields. No matter how hard you work you will always serve your digital master.

Update Patrick Sexton’s Video Response

watch?v=vZZYJoz5_vQ

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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