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.

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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.

Developers VS Users

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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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I love competition. I compete against just about anyone, at just about anything. For the last few years, competitive webmastering has been my focus. I like to start a site in a small to medium sized niche, and outrank everyone. There are two niches that I hold the top 5 spots for, and it’s exciting. Let me give you a few secrets that you can implement right now to help you outrank your competition.

1. Do what they do.

The first step is to try to get all of the links that your competition has. If they’re linked in Wikipedia, you should try to get linked. If they pay $299 for a Yahoo Directory link you should too. If they put out a little cash for regional web directories like WoW Directory and Ezilon Web Directory, so should you. The point is that in order to beat your competition you need to have everything they do, and more.

2. Grab the easy links they don’t have.

There are generally two sides to the linkbuilding argument. One side says to focus on quality links, the other says to focus on large quantities of links. I agree with both. Since it’s easy to get junk links from sites like Twitter, blog comments, forum profiles, wikis, etc, go get those links! When you’re burnt out with those junk links, move on to the next step. Don’t discount quantity, I have sites that rank #1 with mass junk links.

3. Start getting the difficult links.

For the last couple years I’ve been following viagra SERPs. If you browse the top 20 sites for “buy viagra” you’ll see interesting trends. Right now I see a site that is 6 months old with 4k links, PR 2 ranked #4. Below it is a 2 year old site with 29k links, PR 6 ranked #9. Why does that new site outrank that older better linked site? Link quality. This site went the extra mile to get links.

4. Make the quality links if you can’t find them.

I’ve got burnt out on buying links. Instead, I’ve been making quality websites with the purpose of linking them back to my money site. These sites are generally built on existing WPMU domains (like these). I build links to these blogs and seed them with some generic spun content. Once they start getting some age and trust I link them to my money pages. This enables me to have good old blogs linking to my money pages without paying for those links. It does take extra time, but I can continue using the same blogs for additional projects after I get my #1 rankings.

In order to outrank the competition you have to go above and beyond what they are doing!

Over the last 5 years, Brandon Hopkins owns over 150 content-rich websites. When not building links to his own websites he does linkbuilding for clients as well as Fresno website design. Brandon can also be found blogging (rarely) at Brandon-Hopkins.com as well on about 5 different webmaster forums, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and most other social networking sites.
photo credit: ianmunroe

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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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Now, don’t get me wrong. Google Local and Google Maps are extremely valuable tools that I use a few times every week. But every so often they get something wrong–so wrong, in fact, that I’m not sure where the wires got crossed.

Let’s assume I wanted to stop by a local pub on a Saturday night. Maybe I’d want to check out the website first to see what was going on, so I’d type in the name and town [molly blooms amityville] and get this result:

For those of you who might not remember, I live in New York (more specifically on Long Island). The last time I checked I’m pretty sure that’s part of the United States. Not Canada. However, sometimes odd things happen and, for one reason or another, maybe the domain is somehow connected to Canada. But a quick check of the Molly Blooms location page reveals locations in Canada not the US (thanks Rae).

Granted, there are probably a hundred or so bars across the country name Molly Bloom’s, so this isn’t entirely out of left field, but you know that PhD’s who can figure out how to connect you to your abusive ex husband should be able to figure out what country something is in. I clicked the “is that accurate” link and said no it wasn’t. Since there was no form, however, I couldn’t tell them what was wrong. I have to hope the person on the other end can figure out Amityville (famous for the Amityville Horror House) is actually a few hundred miles away from Canada and is not connected to the right domain name. If only Google had put search wiki technology someplace where comments might be useful …
photo credit: frielp

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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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There’s a trend of editors in the SEO world uptight about linking out.

A friend in the industry who guest blogs recently told me that he was told by his editor he couldn’t promise links to contributors who participated in guest interviews. Others have been seeing the same, and writers I work with have seen their editors take forever about updating bios [with the attendant links] …

WTF?

The big three engines encourage you to link out to quality sites and resources.

(From Matt Cutts, on the death of nofollow PageRank sculpting:

“Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.”)

(Found via SEO 2.0’s “Matt Cutts [admits] linking out [is] a ranking factor.“)

Google’s Librarian Newsletter featured an editor of the Librarian’s Internet Index – one of the highest quality and most exclusive directories around, today the ipl two – telling readers that linking out to good places is a positive signal.

Here’s a really simple question:

If you trust your writers enough to publish their articles, why don’t you trust them enough to publish their links as is?

Baseless Fear

In my opinion, there are a lot of editors and sites who are scared silly – especially in SEO and more generally in internet marketing – of offering links, and of offering links with quality anchor text.

They’re scared because they think this will mark their sites as bad or spammy. They’re scared because they’re thinking of search engines first and humans second.

When you link out with generous anchor text, you’re doing your readers a favour, too. They know what the subject of the page they get to is going to be. And those that click through will accordingly bounce less.

Imagine if Google sold AdWords and said you can only use brand-awareness copy, even on generic keywords. So you’re advertising car loans but you can only write copy like, “Visit ABC Lending Co. In business since 1905. A financial co you can trust.”

a) The CTR would be lower.
b) If the underlying page is actually about car loans (or SEO services etc.), then you’re creating a disconnect between your ad and the landing page. People expect to find out about ABC Lending and instead get a car loan application form.

On CTR: Sending visitors out to other sites is akin to scoring karma points. You always get more than you give, so creating a high CTR is a good thing – don’t worry about visitors leaving your site. They’ll be back.

To wit, if your name is Ann Smarty, and your profession is SEO consultant, which of ‘Ann Smarty’ and ‘SEO consultant’ would make more sense for me to use as anchor text when I link to your SEO consulting page?

If you’re Ontolo and your business is link building, doesn’t using link building as anchor text make sense?

If you do a group interview, shouldn’t you link to the interviewees’ sites to thank them? If they’re good enough to be cited, how can they not be good enough to be linked to?

And then SEOs will whine about newspapers not linking out. Geeez…

Gab Goldenberg wrote this on behalf of the Ireland search engine optimisation company, Red Fly Marketing. Their various divisions also play in the general fields of digital marketing and search-conscious web design.

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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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I’d like to say thanks to the people who sponsored the blog this month. Without them, there wouldn’t be regular posts here.

Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.

CrazyEgg.com – Supplement your analytics with action information from click tracking heat maps.

BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the Internet’s oldest directory.

KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites, read an Interview with Michael Streko.

Interested in seeing your message here? There are banner and RSS advertising options available. Find out more information. Be sure to check out our new Sponsored post option.

Here’s a list of some other programs and products I reccomend

Thesis Theme for Wordpress – Hands down the best theme on the market right now, read my Thesis Theme for Wordpress Review.

Scribe SEO – Improve your blog posts with this easy to use built in tool, read my Scribe SEO Review.

TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price, read my Tiger Tech Review.
photo credit: nosha

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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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The question for today’s post comes from Meg Geddes aka NetMeg. She wants to know more about setting up caching on Wordpress.

Ok, let’s get the big question out of the way. What is caching and why do you want it? Basically, caching will store copies of pages that have already been served from your webserver so that they don’t have to be called from the database every time they are requested and don’t have to be parsed through the PHP engine. The whole process is very similar to browser caching, except it works in reverse. Caching can be beneficial if you have a very busy website with lots of traffic or are experiencing burst traffic, which might happen from something like the Digg Effect or Slashdot Effect. Caching can also help because it addresses some performance issues that occur within Wordpress. If you do things like not including numbers in your permalinks structure, serving the pages from the cache really improves performance.

That said, there are some downsides to caching. If you have comments and have caching enabled, the comments don’t show right away. If you aren’t careful about how you configure the cache, the feeds may not update in a timely fashion. Additionally if you use scheduled posts, instead of publishing on demand, caching support is sketchy at best. Lastly, caching doesn’t always play nicely with other plugins. Even with these drawbacks, IMHO it’s still worth activating caching on your Wordpress blog.

I’m going to recommend that you go with the Super Cache plugin from Donncha O Caoimh. Lately, a lot of people have been talking about W3 Total Cache, but I would recommend you avoid using that plugin if at all possible. I tried it out on my blog, and it didn’t work as well as Super Cache. My hosting company TigerTech (an awesome company, by the way) gave me a graph showing how the CPU utilization went up when I switched to W3 Total Cache, so learn from my mistake and don’t go there.(*UPDATE SEE BELOW)

Here’s a screen shot of my settings:

In most cases you want it in the “on” status, unless you are using a plugin that creates conflicts with that setting (more on that below).

Don’t cache pages for local users. It won’t cache pages for any logged in authors and users, so any changes being made will be seen right away instead of an older version from the cache.

I wish the clear cache when a new post is published worked with scheduled posts, but I’ve never been able to get it to work that way.

If you are using a mobile plugin, be sure to turn it on here.

The first time you activate this plugin, it will suggest changes to your htaccess file. I usually just let it do its thing.

I also tell the plugin not to cache the feed. Because scheduled posts don’t clear the cache, feedburner has a hard time knowing when I make a new post. Turning off the option to cache the feed  solved the problem. That setting is down a little farther in the settings page. You can block caching of other pages if for some reason you need to.

With that, you’re good to go. If you know you are working a social story that day, you may want to put the blog in lockdown mode. The benefit of lockdown is that it will help keep your server running smoothly; the bad part is that comments won’t show.

If you are like me and work with scheduled posts, I would also recommend manually clearing out the cache every few days to keep thing working optimally.

WP Mobile

It’s my opinion that every website–not just “tech” sites–should have a mobile version. Why? Because, even if you are a doctor, someone will search for you from a smart phone. I bring this up here because, even though WP Super Cache recommends Wordpress mobile edition, I think the programmer has some issues. I would recommend WP Touch instead. You will have to make some additional changes.  I’ve included a video explaining what they are. One change involves setting the cache to “half on,” which is why mentioning it here seems useful.

To wrap up, putting a caching plugin on your blog is a good idea in most cases. Just be sure you know its limitations and qurks. Also be on the lookout for plugin incompatibilities.

*UPDATE

Several people including the developer of  W3TC have emailed me about the plugin, saying I’m incorrect and that plugin is faster, and I probably had several settings wrong. This may indeed be true, I’m not an expert but I consider myself somewhat technically proficient, and if I can’t get it right easily the chances of most people getting it right are slim to none. So if you are technical and have a better grasp of the plugin and how to configure it properly feel free to try it, it may indeed be faster. Also if you work with a CDN the plugin also may work faster. For me that just wasn’t the case, I like to run a low maintenance website, and finicky plugins aren’t my idea of fun.
photo credit: zenera

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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

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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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Over the past two weeks we’ve taken a look at different aspects of copywriting, including aspects such as the value of good copy, outsourcing your content, and tools to make your content better. To round out the series I thought I’d touch on auto-generated content and how to make it better.

To be clear, using auto-generated text will fall into the gray-hat to black-hat side of the equation.  Again understand that it may be technically in compliance with the concept of unique content, but it isn’t what Google really has in mind when they say “create unique content.” So don’t mix it with your good stuff and don’t come crying to me if it gets you banned or penalized.

The following information is provided for entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as SEO advice…

The problem with most auto-generated text is that it’s crap and easy to spot. People take a mad libs approach to it by jumbling up some words and hoping to cross the magic threshold of unique-enough for Google. So we start out with something like this:

Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a great family vacation idea. There are many family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do your research before hand you’ll have a great vacation.

The most common step is then to go through and looks for nouns, adjectives and verbs you can replace/swap out. Depending on the tool you use, the format varies, but the one I’m using has this format {word1|word2|word3}. The program randomly chooses one of the words to put in that spot. So you might end up with something like this:

Taking your family to {Walt Disney World|Disney World} is a {great|terrific|fun} family vacation {idea|destination|location}. There are {many|a lot|quite a few} family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do {your research|some research|some investigating} before hand you’ll have a {great|wonderful|fun filled} vacation.

When we run it you’ll get permeutations like this:

Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a fun family vacation destination. There are quite a few family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do your research before hand you’ll have a great vacation.

Taking your family to Disney World is a terrific family vacation idea. There are a lot family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do your research before hand you’ll have a fun filled vacation.

Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a great family vacation destination. There are quite a few family friendly hotels like the Contemporary Resort where you can stay. If you  do some investigating before hand you’ll have a fun filled vacation.

While there are some variation between them, there’s really not enough for it to be effective at all. We need to make it better, incorporate more flexibility, so here’s what I do (hypothetically speaking of course):

• Break the text in short declarative sentences or idea chunks
• Rewrite each of the chunks entirely with 3 or 4 variation
• Vary the way each sentence starts

With those tips, we’d end up with something like this:

{Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a {great|fun |exciting|excellent} family {vacation|trip} {idea|spot|location}|{{A great|A fun|An exciting}} {destination|location|spot} for your family {vacation|trip} is {Walt Disney World|Disney World|the Magic Kingdom}|{Walt Disney World|Disney World|The Magic Kingdom} in Orlando Florida is a {great|fun|exciting} family vacation {destination|location|spot}}. {There are many family friendly hotels like the|Choose a family friendly hotel like the|Try to select a family friendly hotel like the|Select a family friendly hotel like the} {Contemporary Resort|Polynesian Resort|Caribbean Beach Club|Wilderness Lodge} {where you can stay|as your location|for your trip}. {If you  do your research {before hand|before you go|ahead of time} you’ll have a {great|fun|exciting} {vacation|trip}|Make sure you check for {discount vacation packages|travel deals|promotional vacation offers|vacation coupon codes} before you {leave for|go on|depart on} your trip|Try to spend some time before you {go|leave|depart} {checking|looking|searching} for {travel deals|travel discounts|vacation packages|vacation delas} {so you can save money|so you’ll save some money} while having a {great|fun|exciting} {time|vacation}}.

I know it looks like a bit of mess but here’s the output:

Taking your family to Walt Disney World is a exciting family trip. Try to select a family friendly hotel like the Wilderness Lodge as your location. Try to spend some time before you leave checking for travel discounts so you can save money while having a great time.

Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida is a fun family vacation spot. Select a family friendly hotel like the Caribbean Beach Club for your trip. If you  do your research before hand you’ll have a exciting vacation.

An exciting spot for your family trip is the Magic Kingdom. Choose a family friendly hotel like the Contemporary Resort for your trip. If you do your research before you go you’ll have a great vacation.

Disney World in Orlando Florida is a great family vacation location. Select a family friendly hotel like the Contemporary Resort for your trip. Make sure you check for promotional vacation offers before you leave for your trip.

While the text isn’t great you can see that it is much more unique than the first run. If you tweaked it a little more, the results could be further improved, especially over multiple paragraphs. Some other ideas include:

• Don’t always link to the same website/page–make that vary with each run
• Vary your anchor text
• Don’t always include a link back to you–obfuscate your intent
• Vary the order of paragraphs or items in a list

To be clear the tactics mentioned above are considered high risk and only to be used if you understand and are prepared to deal with the consequences. No whining allowed. Auto-generated can have value for an SEO, but it’s at the bottom of the link pyramid, not at the top. And never mix the quality content with the bad content in one adsense account. Smart pricing will kill you.

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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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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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