SEO 2.0

What is Content? It’s not Your Sales Copy

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:23:23 +0000

It’s not the packaging, it’s what’s inside. Here it’s anti-gravity from Brooklyn Superhero Supply.

A few weeks ago I published a list post about the 10 most common content strategy mistakes most businesses make. I promised back then to go deeper and to write a post on each item in that list. Here we go. Let’s start with one, the definition of content.

What is content? Everybody seems to know it. Most people seem to agree that it’s the monarch. Large corporations and their CEOs have spread the “content is king” mantra for decades, even before the Internet really started out.

Most people in business seem to prefer the broadest definition there is: Anything that is “contained” by or on a website is its content.

Following this logic an online shop showing only small product images and short descriptions along with prices and shipping methods is a content rich site no doubt. In short most decision makers assume that they already have content on their site, it’s their sales copy.

I guess the issue here is that a website can be quite abstract.

Just try to compare it to real life products like magazines, books or even groceries. Can the description of a magazine, the cover text, maybe even a table of contents be the actual content of magazine? No,

the articles
the photos
the reports
the interviews
the opinion pieces

are – to some extent even the classifieds are.

The same applies to a book. The actual novel is the content not the description of it on the back.

With groceries it’s even easier to visualize. The content is not the description of what’s inside once you buy it. The content or contents is the actual food you see once you buy the product and open it up. Nobody would stuff even more descriptions of the content into the package and claim that it’s the content. Would someone suggest to “Eat the paper inside.”? No. It’s obvious. The content has value by itself and is not just a description of what’s inside.

On the Web most potential clients who ask me for SEO services do not seem to understand that they need content in the first place.

Or like in real life they want their customers to pay first to get the content. On the Web they only display the descriptions of what you get once you pay. The Web is different though. It has been built by and for scientists who exchanged their papers where they described scientific phenomena.

Scientists wanted peer review. So what did they show on their sites? Did they just publish the table of contents of their papers? No. They published the whole paper. Later when the salesmen appeared on the Internet they did not study the medium but just used it as packaging. They published only the description of the content to be bought. They still try but that’s like displaying books on TV sets. You have to adapt to the medium, the medium doesn’t adapt to you.

So you have to understand that content is not packaging.

Content is what you see once you open the package. On the Web you have to display open packaging so that people can look at it and share it. You don’t sell the content like in real life. The content has to be free. You are selling products and services while the content is valuable by itself.

Content helps to solve problems
it makes people laugh
it’s eye opening and intriguing.

Once the people love your content they will buy your real life products and services. Not necessarily the same people who read and spread the content but others who trust them. So please don’t consider your sales copy to be your content.

40 Cutting Edge Social Media & SEO Services to Invest in Now

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:03:14 +0000

Unless you lived under a rock for the last decade you already invest time and money in

web design
social media
SEO
link building
analytics

services. It’s 2012 though and the social media and SEO landscape is changing at an alarming pace. What can you do about it? Invest in SEO services that bring you ahead of the crowd in 2012.

This a a list of 40 Cutting Edge social media & services to invest in now and in future.

To make it easier to you I sifted through hundreds of social media and SEO services offers to find you those that are reputable, where the descriptions are in-depth and make sense.

I tried hard not just to promote my friends from the industry so that I linked out to plenty of agencies that are lesser known but nonetheless trustworthy.

Of course you can’t invest in all these services at once unless you want to spend millions. You have to specialize. Choose a set of similar services and focus o them.

The services linked above are in most cases those that have explained what it’s all about in the best possible manner.

I have considered also numerous other factors before I linked each company though. I don’t know all of them but many agencies mentioned are already established household names.

As you see I haven’t linked to all services yet as I haven’t found proper offers for some of them yet. In case you offer the above mentioned but not yet linked services and have an extra page with the exact description of the service add your URL in the comment section.

* Creative Common image by urbanfeel.

30 Hands On Google Search Plus SEO Techniques for Getting Personal

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:28:18 +0000

Image above: I’m only ranking at #113 for [seo] in “people and pages” but some of my best friends are around me

While everybody was writing posts what the new Google personal search aka “Google Search Plus Your World” means for SEO I almost started to write one about what Google Search Plus means for SEO 2.0

Then I decided to be more conservative and just summarized a few common sense hands on SEO techniques for Google Search Plus and personal search results.

Neither personal search or social search is new to Google. It’s just a huge leap forward this time after it has been a bit neglected in recent years.

Google+ and +1 are part of the main motivation behind this new move. Also, the so called link economy where many webmasters are buying links to game Google is the target.

Google wants to know who you are and what you like in order to ensure that low quality web sites do not get the attention they sometimes mistakenly still get on Google search.

We have to understand first that Google Search Plus has a two tiered approach. You get still in a way organic results where personal/social search results are mixed in prominently and you can click on the “personal results” link below the search box to see solely your own search results nobody else sees in that way:

Everybody who is logged in into one of the manifold Google services will see the the new personal search results sooner or later. Logged out users will get some very broad suggestions too. They mainly see suggested profiles on the right of search results:

To really use this feature you at least need a Google Profile and a Google+ membership

if you ask me. Then you need to have some people connect to you via Google+ or other services you are using with the notable exception of Facebook it seems. These services have to be linked on your Google Profile to count.

What more can you do?

Google Profile

Connect other sites – Link all your other profiles and sites even less obvious ones like Friendfeed or WordPress.com
Describe yourself – Your short “Occupation” description on your profile matters a lot it seems. Also your latest “Employment” seems to have a big impact. Mention your keyword here.
Claim authorship – Use the new authorship markup by Google and link back to your Google Profile from your blog posts or respective bio below.

Images

Use images on your blog – Images on my blog that are properly tagged show up in image results. Michael Gray‘s images do perform even better, they come in second even when I’m logged in
Share images on Google+ – Images shared on Google+ rank as well quite obviously
Upload images to your profile using Picasa – Your profile image but also other images uploaded to Picasa perform very well
Practice image SEO – Consider common sense image SEO best practices like understandable file names instead of numbers.

Google+

Use on topic circles – Create topical circles on Google+ – I write mainly about SEO, blogging and social media thus I created these three circles for examples (and a few more).
Use Google+ actively and frequently – Activity counts, even feeding in Twitter updates automatically, pages and profiles by active people show up much higher
Encourage feedback – Feedback like comments and shares is very important, some profiles with more controversial posts with lots of comments show on top
Make many people add you to circles – The number of circles you are in counts, Danny Sullivan is in 300k circles so ends up being the suggested user for SEO despite listing at as only one topics he deals with
Make sure you’re in the right circles – The names of the circles you are in counts as well so when you are selling SEO use the term to describe yourself not many others
Let people link to you on profiles – The number of people who connect their profile to your site is a factor thus make your employees link, this is one of the reasons the guys from Dejan SEO ranks so well.
Participate in social networking – Socialize with relevant people who are on your level. I don’t expect Danny Sullivan or Rand Fishkin to +1 my posts, I will +1 theirs from time, but I focus on people who are into SEO etc. and have enough time to read my posts as well.
Share circles – You can create and share circles with other people. They can add all of the people at once.

Blogging

Use buttons – Add a +1 button to your blog postings. I use the WordPress extension by Pleer SEO.
Write about Google+ – Blog about Google+ your profile, your page and what’s going on there.
Use a badge – Add a Google+ badge to add you to “your circles” in the sidebar for example.
Call to action – Ask people to +1 your postings with a little call to action in the last sentence and display the button below.
Check shares – Monitor who shares your postings on Google+ using Topsy and add these people to your circles.

Google +1

+1 quality and popular sites – Clicking +1 is a double edged sword. Your authority influences the things you vote up but also the sites you +1 are influencing your reputation. Vote up crap nobody else likes and you get less influential on Google as a whole not just Google+ They call it Agent Rank. I’m afraid by quality sites they mean mostly popular sites so you have to +1 main stream sources not only high quality niche sites.
+1 sites you often use – To see the sites you really like on top you simply have to +1 them. The more you +1 them the more likely they are to appear on top.
+1 your own sites – I don’t like this as I prefer other people to vote for me but it seems you have to vote for own sites and articles. It seems Google doesn’t dislike self-promotion unless of course your won sites are the only ones you push.
+1 what’s on top – To get more exposure on other people’s results it seems you have to +1 what’s already on top in organic search. A woman I follow on Twitter linked to the Wikipedia definition of SEO on her private blog and now I see her on top of my search results. I had to look up who she is, she doesn’t even follow me back.

Google+ Page

Add keyword to name – Use your keyword in the Google+ page description. Point Blank SEO ranks better than just Point Blank of course when it comes to [seo]. The Point Blank SEO team does not only rank because of the keyword, they have a hugely popular Google+ baiting post but it surely helps.
Update frequently – It’s crucial to update your page regularly. You know Google loves content, it’s their business model that you provide free content for them so they reward those who do provide it. Also people like me do not follow empty pages unless they trust the source already.
Socialize using your page – Companies can follow people on Google+ and +1 updates it seems. They can comment and share like any other user.

Other techniques

Use keywords in titles – It seems post titles with the keyword mentioned more than once rank better in personal results.
Use common words – You can optimize for common words again. When I search for car, house or even love I see personal results but most of them are not relevant, they keywords may match but in most cases the whole update may be completely irrelevant to me. So it’s good to provide a few updates using these simple terms if you care for them.
Share off-topic – Do not only share work related content. Google+ is not like Facebook, you don’t have to share baby and per photos all the time but some occasional beauty and humor is great to make people happy and encourage engagement I’ve noticed. It’s better than just talking about SEO.

Thanks Niall Mackenzie for screenshots he provided for this post

These are just common sense SEO techniques for Google+, the SEO 2.0 part of it starts when engaging with people. This is a bit tougher and can’t fit in short list items easily. I think I will elaborate on it in the near future. I’m still testing and trying to find out myself what’s it all about.

I’m looking forward to it. I’m glad that SEO 2.0 has become main stream finally. You can’t ignore it anymore. Social media participation and outreach from now directly affects search results. It’s about time. I’ve got used to it in 2008 already when I added StumbleUpon to my search results. Google+ integration is even better.

You can’t be a bot anymore.

Get personal now. +1 this post if you like it and join me on Google+!

Also please share more techniques on how to optimize for the new Google Search Plus Your World in the comments.

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

The Stone Age of Blogging is Over – What’s Next?

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:47:04 +0000

Lately many influential bloggers have written about the end of the golden age of tech blogging. They say “tech” but in a way they mean blogging in general it seems. Some people were furious and asked whether “over” is the new dead. I didn’t really care.

Then over the recent weeks as I considered my own blogging “career” I realized that indeed an era is over. It’s the stone age of blogging that is over now. Also I recognized partially what replaced the Neanderthals of blogging and what’s next.

I want to summarize what really happened in the first decade of blogging.

Who am I to look back at a decade of blog history? I was quite late to blogging. I think I tried Blogger when it came out in 2001 but I was only reading blogs for two years when I finally started my first real blog in 2003. It was a private blog about art, design and activism. I had written it in German. I remember that at some point in 2004 I was even among the top 100 German blogs in two separate Technorati-like lists.

I tried to convince my very first SEO client in 2004 to establish a blog and even started one for him. In 2005 I finally started to blog professionally aka for money and clients. One of the clients back then was the largest union of the world. I created a whole blogging portal with dozens of blogs for the youth organization of the union. Ironically I worked up to 80h a week for the union or the “agency” that actually paid me. This union is known for the “35h work week” demand.

In 2006 I created my first full fledged blog for a personal client of mine. In 2007 I started this blog – SEO 2.0 and the rest is history.

I’m still one of the most well known bloggers in the SEO industry, mostly due to my contribution over at SEOptimise. From 2008 to 2011 I have written hundreds of flagship blog articles for them and made them the best SEO blog in the UK, both by the number one ranking in Google.co.uk and by winning the UK Search Awards. Sadly I wasn’t even notified or invited to the ceremony. The SEOptimise team has received the price instead of mine. I only got an email a few weeks later that they don’t need me anymore in 2012.

Meanwhile I have established and written for two flagship blogs for German clients. One of them is profitable for more than 2.5 years now. The other is the top ranking cycling blog in Germany despite me not really having the time to take care of it a lot. Additionally I have started a blog about science fiction in 2011. Last but not least I update a private Tumblr blog for two years now.

Internationally I have written for all kinds of SEO blogs and beyond like the Hubspot inbound marketing blog, Google Blogoscoped when it was in the top 30 of the most successful blogs worldwide. There many many more I can’t even remember. So indeed I know something about blogging despite being a late adopter.

So what has actually changed in the last decade, the time I consider the stone age of blogging?

The definition of a blog has changed itself

When you look at the Technorati Top 100 blogs these days and compare it to those from just a few years ago you will wonder why there are almost no blogs on the list or in other words how a blog is defined now. A blog seems to be a popular corporate news site with a team of writers who publish items almost every hour. Real blogs like BoingBoing or Kottke are the exception. Even they have transformed or lost in popularity.

Blogging is a multimillion business not personal anymore

In the early days blogs were not much more than personal diaries. Over time they become more and more like corporate media until corporate media swallowed them or outmatched them on their own turf. The CNN Political Ticker is the #11 most popular blog these days. Some blogs were bought and sold for many millions of dollars. Others earn millions of dollars or venture capital by the millions. I rarely see personal diary-like blogs of importance now anymore. People still care for opinion but not for the person behind it.

Blogs are about topics and teams not bloggers

I was really astounded when AOL bough the seemingly anti-corporate activist site Huffington Post. When they sacked Michael Arrington, the original founder of TechCrunch I was still somehow shocked but when it happened to myself on SEOptimise I wasn’t even surprised anymore. Blog readers today don’t care anymore who writes the stuff they read on their favorite “blog”. It’s just a site or news source like any other. The unthinkable, removing the main blogger from a blog, is not an issue by now. Bloggers get hired and fired. People read blogs not bloggers. The teams are interchangeable as long as the topic stays the same.

Everybody blogs today but people do not consider it blogging

What do people on Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter? They blog. When I started blogging a blog posts was the size of the typical status update of today. A short sentence with a link was a perfect usual blog posting for years. The flagship blog post aka huge well written article is a relatively new phenomenon. So in a way most people have embraced blogging but without the attitude attached to it. Today companies like Facebook or Google own your updates and they can remove them any day. They even decide what you are allowed to write about or what “profile” picture you use.

WordPress is a full fledged advanced CMS

When I first used WordPress I was late again. I think I switched to WP when it was in version 1.2. It was clumsy and ugly back then but still it was the most advanced, user friendly and popular blogging tool at the time. I didn’t like the backend code of it but I was glad that I didn’t have to code everything myself. Yes, I have coded my websites by myself! Today WordPress is a full fledged CMS you rather use for your whole site where the blog is just part of it. Many people do not use the blog “module” at all. WordPress is really advanced when it comes to features, extensibility and customization.

WordPress themes are high quality web design today

In the early years I hated all WordPress themes. I’d take a theme and styled it completely new until it looked a bit better. As I’m not a designer I just stripped most styles. Over the years the themes got better and better but most of them still looked like diaries for teenage girls and poor poets. I’ve recently been looking around again for a great clean and minimalist theme and I was overwhelmed be the sheer number of highest quality themes that look a design for a few thousands of dollars. Many of the best are premium themes but you also get outstanding free themes.

Blog writing is almost of journalistic length and depth

As noted above blogging in the early days was often like tweeting or writing Facebook updates today. Short sentences with a link were quite common. Adding images or even videos did not happen a lot at first. I remember that I rarely added images in the first months of my blog in 2003. Blogging and journalism were like two opposite sides of the same coin, they never touched each other.

Over the years not only journalists have embraced blogging but blogging itself has become more journalistic and in-depth. Some blog posts over at Search Engine Land are so long I rarely have the time to read them in their entirety. Also journalism itself has degenerated. Today most journalistic articles are just republished agency news reports from AP, Reuters or DPA. Blogs posts are often much better than actual newspaper articles.

Blogs are interfaces and hubs in a social Web environment

Without a blog a site is like a dead end. There is nothing really you can offer to make people used to social media engage with your site unless you have at least a blog. Forums or communities are of course even better but a blog is the easiest one of them to set up and maintain. In a social Web environment people are not keen on reading your sales copy or pseudo-objective press releases and news articles. They want to know who you are and how you think. Blogs are interfaces between companies and customers. Journalists and readers. A site that doesn’t have such an interface is effectively dead. The blog is also a hub for all your media related endeavors. You cover or announce it on a blog. You get popular via your blog, the rest of the website is just the structure.

There is no such thing as a blogosphere anymore

I seldom hear the term blogosphere anymore. Do you know what it is? It was something I felt in the early days of blogging in Germany. The blogosphere was like a virtual family. Whenever you wrote a post you knew everybody else in that huge family will in some way relate to it, even by not reading or noticing it. When a post didn’t get linked by other bloggers, when it did not become part of the blogosphere everybody knew that it wasn’t really on point. When I started blogging in English around 2007 I didn’t feel really as a part of it but I felt that it was still there. Today I feel nothing. There are people who write for blogs they work for. There are many blogosphere if there are at all.

Every niche and industry has its own blogosphere and rules

Every niche, industry or topic seems to have a blogosphere of its own these days. When I started this blog I wanted to cover many topics at once, blogging, social media, SEO but also “make money online” topics or web design. Later I added usability, freelancing, self improvement. Today there is a whole sphere of blogs for each of these topics, some of them already imploded, for instance there are just a few good and active freelancing blogs left.

On the other hand I can’t “compete” with all social media all the time blogs anymore. Web design blogs are filled to the brim with resources lists I can’t match either. Every topic requires a different kind of writing, strategy and even design it seems. Self improvement blogs are clean and sell ebooks. Architecture blogs show off building by architects all the time instead of writing about architecture. Web design blogs do now describe the practice of web design either but they list tools and resources on how to design for the Web yourself. Every niches has its own rules of blogging.

Consolidation, a few blogs dominate each niche or topic

Every blogging topic has one or a few blogs that dominate it. Search Engine Land dominates search blogging, SEOmoz does it for SEO, Mashable for social media and Social Media Examiner for social media marketing. TechCrunch still dominates tech blogging even though the founder is gone. Nobody needs him, his new blog is nowhere as popular as his old one. There are few other blogs who still try to compete but unless you have a team of dedicated bloggers you can’t really compete for attention with them.

I follow people on social media who share SEOmoz articles every day it seems. I’ve followed those who did it with Mashable. I prefer to use an RSS reader for that purpose. I don’t need people to shove the most popular blog down my throat each day. Most other people seem to like it and use Twitter instead of RSS. So even a renowned figure like Arrington can’t compete with the giants anymore.

Commercial blogs that use blog software and are full of ads abound

There are not only the huge corporate blogs you have to compete with for attention these days. There also myriads of blogs that are technically blogs, as they use WordPress or Blogger but they are just a collection of keyword driven commercial content mixed with undisclosed affiliate links to lure search engine users and make them click. Finding a real blog with a real human behind it gets more and more difficult. Either the authors are not really associated with that particular blog or you don’t even know who the “Admin” is.

Blogging is the new normal, nothing to talk about

What I have noticed about blogging in recent years that you don’t have to talk and write about it that much anymore. In the early years blogging was new, amazing and still unfolding. Right now blogs are the most common form of regularly updated publication on the Web. Corporations websites add blogs because people are used to read like that. Almost everything about blogging has been already said and written numerous times. That was one of the reasons why I didn’t even care for the “golden age of blogging” meme.

Blogging is about personal branding not writing anonymously

My first blog was anonymous in a way. I just didn’t mention my real name on it. It was like Tumblr today. Nobody cared for my name. Also I didn’t want people to expect certain kind of content and opinion beacuse I was a pole. Today blogging is personal branding. You are somebody if you blog. Or at least you should try to be somebody when you blog. Otherwise blogging will become frustrating quickly.

People won’t trust you as much as they trust bloggers with real names. Even Google won’t rank you as high as an author who discloses who s/he is. These seems to contradict same of my former points when I wrote that people do not care about the bloggers abnymore. They indeed don’t unless you make them. You have to highlight the fact that you write and not “Admin”.

These are the changes that came to my mind right now. I could write on for hours. What I want to stress is that as you see above some of the changes are rather positive, others can be viewed as negative, some are ambiguous. Overall they show that blogging has evolved beyond the stone age.

We do not live in cages anymore. Indeed a new WordPress with a modern theme is like a condo compared to a cage of WP from a few years ago. I welcome this change.

On the other hand I do not consider AOL or CNN to be bloggers thus I don’t have to identify or even compete with them. It’s a bit sad that the categorization of weblog is a bit meaningless these days. It can mean anything and everything.

So what’s next?
Will only corporations blog?
Will we just “blog” for corporations like Facebook or Google?

Remember that some things haven’t changed. What I have learned over the years is that bloggers care for other bloggers. Not all of them some will actually attack you just to position themselves in a better light but overall blogging connects.

I may not be a particularly gifted writer but people who like me, other bloggers, tell their friends and followers and thus my blog posts get shared. It’s as simple as that. I read and share postings by other whenever I can.

Half a year ago I wrote about what I called then “smart mob SEO“. The smart mobs of the early blogging era are still there. They might occupy public places but they also can form and support bloggers. Often when other bloggers link to me or I link to them we outrank huge corporate sites. So it’s possible. Real people are always better than mindless corporate drones or just employees who happen to blog.

I don’t want to return to my cage but I still like sitting occasionally around the virtual fireplace

and convene with other bloggers to change the world. Facebook and Google are not replacements for blogs, they just parrot them without the inherent meaning. For real bloggers Facebook and Google are only tools to promote their own blogs.

You can still or now more than ever create your audience. You won’t get as much traffic as the AOL blogs but you don’t need that much. You want a small but dedicated audience. The 1000 true fans who can feed you are not a myth.

* CC image by Roger Smith.

Words that Damage Trust in Your Blog

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:18:21 +0000

These words may be correct English but nonetheless they make you appear like an idiot when you use them on your blog. Why? They have obviously negative or hidden meaning that influences your readers. Thus they damage trust in you and your blog or site.

if – If this is true I’m probably not lying. Sentences starting with “if” sound awful but the “if” makes you sound strange even in the middle of a sentence. Why? Saying “if” means that you do not trust yourself. You are not writing the truth. You are not sure. The rest of the text only applies if…
tips – Did you mean ideas, techniques or advice? Tips means only shallow advice, low quality techniques and stale ideas everybody knows already. Why not being specific? Tips are for waiters not bloggers.
insane – What’s even more amazing than awesome? It’s insane! More and more bloggers try to outperform their peers by adding superlatives to their post headlines. Who wants to read about insane web design? Not me. When it’s great, outstanding or fantastic say it but don’t act crazy and call it “insane” just to sound better. Insanity is nothing to be proud of.
basic/s – Whenever you cover the basics or write about the basic this or that it’s either an excuse for not being an expert yet or just proof that you don’t believe in yourself. Telling your audience that something is only basic means half of them won’t read it at all. Nobody wants to share basics on the social Web. People you target with your basics would prefer to read “advanced blogging techniques” instead of “basic blog tips”.
daily – Do you really plan to blog daily, 7 times a week, even on holidays? Then don’t call your blog Daily something. Otherwise the first day you don’t publish a post you out yourself as a liar or at least unreliable.
Amazon – Many people on the Web do not notice but I and other Web savvy readers do, whenever you add a link to Amazon in a post I know that you are trying to sell something to me and the link is an affiliate link you earn money on.
Wikipedia – In a recent post someone on TechCrunch has written “according to Wikipedia”. Wikipedia is no source you can cite. Wikipedia is just the lazy bloggers’ source. Also, even in case the cited article is worth being cited, next week someone might have already changed it. Moreover it shows that you have no clue about that topic and had to look up Wikipedia. At least when googling do not click the first result and find another more reputable source.
expert – Do you consider yourself an expert? Maybe you write that you are a social media or SEO expert. In most cases you aren’t. When you have to proclaim yourself that you are you most probably aren’t one. Don’t call yourself guru, star or genius either.

Are there more words that damage trust? Tell me about them. I might add them to the post and will credit you as the source.

Are Category Keywords in the URL a Significant Ranking Signal Now?

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:56:06 +0000

Above: Not personalized search results for the query [content strategy mistakes]. I rank at #7. Look who ranks at #2 and #4.

While trying to assess the impact of stolen and otherwise copied content on my rankings here on the SEO 2.0 blog I’ve found an anomaly in the Google results I want to share with you.

A post from a popular web design blog, indeed a blog I like very much, Six Revisions outranks other far more relevant search results.

How does it do it? It succeeds by a single keyword mention below the posting:

and most importantly a category named after part of the keyphrase in question: “content strategy”:

http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/5-common-seo-mistakes-with-web-page-titles/

So the most significant onpage ranking factor seems to be the category keywords in the URL.

The site has lots of backlinks, the post itself as well. There are no incoming links with the keyword combination in the anchor text according to Blekko though:

Above: Blekko showing the inbound link anchor texts. None of them contain the term “content strategy”

Still it outranks other pages that really deal with content strategy mistakes while itself the post does only cover SEO mistakes.

What do you think? Is this an exception from the rule? Are category keywords in the URL a significant ranking signal now or does Google favor authority sites so much these days hat they need only slightly relevant content to outrank the competition that covers the topic at stake directly?

You may wonder why I rank so bad in this example. My blog has been “pandalized” recently during a minor Panda update with the number 2.5.2. I have been removed from the top 10 for all two word keyphrases I have been ranking in the top 10 for years. You won’t find my blog anymore for phrases like

[seo blog]
[image seo]
[advanced seo]
[url seo]

anymore. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t rank higher for [content strategy mistakes]. I only rank for some very long long tail queries now.

Also take note that an aggregator called Scoop.it curated by a friend mine, Gabriella of Level 343 who cites my posts ranks higher than the post on SEO 2.0 itself. I have asked on Twitter whether other SEO people can confirm that keyword mentions in categories are an important ranking factor these days.

I know that the impact of keywords in URLs beyond the domains has been negligible over the recent years. Has Google changed this? Two SEO experts, Shark SEO and Mark of Guava have weighed in that there might be different reasons but were as well surprised by this example. What do you think?

P.S.: I didn’t link out to any of the sites or pages involved here in order not to skew the results.

10 Fatal Content Strategy Mistakes Most Businesses Make

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:30:33 +0000

Everybody seems to agree by now that you need „great content“ to succeed on the Web. Both social media and search engines require quality content as their business model relies on others, us, to produce that content.

The problem is most businesses don’t get it.

Their execs might repeat the „content is king“ mantra and they even might realize there is a connection between SEO, SMO and content but they don’t act accordingly. Their content strategy is either non-existent or fundamentally flawed.

Today I’d like to summarize the 10 fatal content strategy mistakes most businesses make on their websites. I don’t use the ever present buzzword „content marketing“ for a few reasons. The most important one is: marketing is just part of the content strategy. Also by calling it content marketing you focus on a means not a goal.

Beyond not having a content strategy at all these are the most common content strategy mistakes:

No Content or Pseudo Content

Not having content is an obvious problem many businesses face. It can get even worse though. Many people mistake any type of text or other media for content. They assume that sales copy or advertising is content as well. Product or service descriptions are not content. Content is something that has value by itself. Just consider the other meaning of content, does it make you content as in satisfying you? Does it answer a question, solve a problem, entertain you? Does it make you laugh or angry? Does it make you want to scream out loud „hey, look at this!“?

Low Quality Content

What is low quality content? Content of low quality contains of words without much meaning. Sometimes its repetitive for the sake of SEO or rather the SEO of 10 years ago when „keyword density“ still mattered. It’s not meant to be read by people. It has no visible author and it’s barely readable. Sometimes it tries to be content while it actually sound like an ad or sales copy.

Low quality shallow content is often devoid of any emotion. It’s matter of act and solely descriptive or it’s sheer manipulation trying to convince you without explaining its points. It uses ready made cliches and common phrases. Sentence like „content is king“ are a good example of this. They are sheer repetition.

Boring Content

Your content can be very high quality and despite of it or even because of it boring. It can be a scientific paper or a statistic with really important insights but as long as it’s boring it’s a waste of time. Do you want a handful of specialists to read your content or do you want thousands of people to spread it on the Web? As a business you need to attract crowds even if you just sell to a few people or other businesses. Why? It’s the people who you attracts that make or break your website. Without the wave of appreciation by large numbers of people sharing your content your website will stay obscure.

Text-only Content

The Internet is not a book. Even a book has a cover with an image. So don’t treat your visitors like readers of a novel. Make sure to at least add images. With the proliferation of cameras and screencasting tools it’s even by now possible to create good videos by yourself without a whole team of professionals. So why artificially limit yourself? Content creation is not copywriting. Content creation can use a plethora if tools to create content using manifold media. A text that doesn’t even use images is far less likely to be noticed, read and shared on the Web.

Offsite Content

Do you waste your best content on Facebook, Google+ or Quora? Are your best ideas, questions and even problems User Generated Content for services who make their money via the content of others? Are you active on social media and social networking sites on a daily basis while your own site or blog rarely gets updates? This is what offsite content is about. It might be useful to some extent as in guest blogging on important blogs but your Facebook page is not the place to dump your best pieces of content.

Facebook like other social sites is only a way to spread the awareness about you and your business. Working for Facebook doesn’t make sense. Spending half of the day on Quora and „blogging“ on Google+ doesn’t pay bills either. Don’t put your best content and spend most of the time on third party sites. Invest time and effort into your site first to then use them to gather attention elsewhere for yourself.

Irregular Content

Musicians who publish a new album after five years have to explain why they have been away for so long. The press is talking about a comeback. Nobody even notices that you haven’t been blogging for a year. I mean they notice that your blog is dead or your site hasn’t been updated in ages but nobody will come up and ask you what happened. Unless of course you have a very dedicated fan base. Most businesses don’t have it. So what you actually need to do is to publish content regularly.

It may be once a week or even once a month but the visitor has to know that the content is not a one time event. The reader has to have a reason to come back for more. When there is no more there is no reason to return. There are weeklies and monthly publications on paper as well. You will lose your most ardent readers when they have no way of knowing when to expect the next piece of work. They will simply forget about you.

Separated Content

Many business sites have added a blog in the recent years. That’s wonderful. On the other hand it seems that many decision makers were glad that the content problem has been relegated to the „blog reservation“. The bloggers are responsible for it and thus everybody else can take care of „real business“. The only existing content ends up separated on a blog that often is not even visually part of the whole site.

Some business use third party tools so that the blog appears to be a different site than the rest. They blog may even thrive but it doesn’t help the site a lot if there is no real connection. Also giving up content creation for the actual site beacuse of the blog is a huge mistake. What about a glossary, an FAQ, white papers, infographics, educational videos? The blog can’t be an excuse for not creating anything else. Also a blog is just a casual medium in many cases. The types of content mentioned above are much more substantial.

Duplicated Content

Some content by major publications or websites ends up being „reprinted“ on some many websites that in the end there is barely a way to locate the original source. I don’t even refer to content theft. Just think about so called journalism today. Most stories get produced by the whole sale journalistic factories, Reuters, AP or DPA. Then they end up on dozens of other sites with small changes but generally they just get copied. In large organization or companies you will also see press releases redistributed all over the place.

Heck, even Google who allegedly hates „duplicate content“ republishes some blog postings on other blogs. I don’t even want elaborate on duplicate content when it comes to SEO. It has been covered numerous times by others. Just don’t publish the same content using more than one URL. Strategically speaking ensure that you have unique sources of content and that you publish it just in one place. Don’t solely rely on third parties producing content for more than one website.

Wrong Audience

Before you even start creating content you have to ask yourself who you are writing, drawing or filming for. This may vary for each piece of content but generally a publication or site has preferred audience, I don’t like the common term „target market“ as we don’t shoot people here and don’t solely market to them. Imagine being on stage and looking into the audience. Imagine the people you want to see down there. Are they female or male? Are they young and wild? Or are they older and more respectable? Do they have to pay an entrance fee or are you playing at free spontaneous open air festival?

Some businesses create content with no audience at all beyond themselves. They write as if they are the only people they talk to. They focus on themselves, only saying „we are doing this and that“. They use terminology no one else understands. They write impersonal monologues. Who is your audience? Your industry peers? Your potential social media fans? Are your customers your audience? Is it the general public? I can’t tell you. You have to find out for yourself first.

Just Content

As content creators what they do and they rarely will tell you that they are actually content creators. They will be writers, photographers, filmmakers. Do you get the difference? It’s not the focus on the medium, it’s the focus on the outcome. They don’t wake up in the morning and think „today I will create a piece of great content“. When they get inspired the write a poem, a manifesto, they photograph beautiful women or places. For you, the business person, it might be just „content“ at the end of the day. You can’t start the day with the wish to create content because it ends up just fluff. Content is not the goal, it’s the byproduct of creativity and self-expression. Additionally content is just the starting point. It’s like a king in chess. You can’t win the game with just the king. So just creating content won’t suffice.

These mistakes are indeed fatal for your website. Just make one of them and nobody will actually read or share your content. Even if they do they might not even know that you are the author or that your company website is connected to it.

So what now? Now that you know what’s wrong and how to ask the right questions you can start thinking about your content strategy.

I will help you.

I will focus on each one of the above listed points and explain in depth how to actually do it right. So stay tuned and subscribe to my SEO 2.0 blog to read about a proper content strategy in the following weeks and months.

* Creative Commons image by Jon Wiley.

Does Google Index Your robots.txt?

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:05:11 +0000

This is a guest post by SEO strategist Moosa Hemani. It has been slightly edited by myself, Tad Chef.

robots.txt, a protocol that helps search engines to find out which part of a website should not be included in its index. According to Wikipedia

The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable.

As an SEO, you must have tried this search operator in Google: [site:example.com]. This simply returns the pages from example.com that have been crawled and included in the Google index. The Google bot does not crawl any pages that are ‘disallowed’ by the robots.txt file. Everything makes sense till now but what if your robots.txt file started to appear in Google search results?

To be honest I thought somebody is poking fun at me. It doesn’t sound logical at all. After reading a tweet by Peter Handley aka @ismepete I took it seriously though. He is one of the brightest minds in the search industry!

Shocked, amazed and I guess somewhat a mix of both, I quickly jumped over to Google to see it for myself and guess what I found?

You see, Peter is not the only one dealing with this but websites like

Dailymail
Webmasterworld
Last.fm

and many others… all have their robots.txt file indexed in Google.

You see, it’s simply illogical to block ‘robots.txt’ in a robots.txt file. This didn’t make any sense to me:

Why Google actually indexes this file and how to de-index from the search engine?

Why does Google index the robots.txt?

There can be multiple reasons why Google indexes the robots.txt file but I have figured out two as the most common reasons why search engines index particular pages and later show them as results for a query.

Links:

Google follows links, you know it, right? From one link to another and the chain continues. When links are pointing to the robots.txt file from external sources (different websites pointing to your robots.txt file) or internally (some page of your website that points to robots.txt file), Google will probably index it.

Social signals:

The faster way to get Google’s attention to a page I know is to share it on social platforms like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook (Google currently can’t see private Facebook sharing activity). When for some reason you or someone share your robots.txt on social sites this can be another common reason that makes Google index the page file.

Consider Rishi Lakhani who wrote a letter to Google in his website’s robot.txt file: Check this out, it’s still there on his website. Rishi Lakhani shared his creative robots.txt on Twitter and it went viral. According to Shared Count, Rishi Lakhani’s robots.txt file got:

Facebook Likes: 21
Facebook Comments: 8
Facebook Shares: 33
Twitter: 1232

Now, you know why Google will probably going to index your robots.txt file so let’s talk about action now!

How to de-index the robots.txt?

Don’t link, don’t share:

This is not always in your control, especially not to make people link a specific page on websites like the “Webmasterworld” forum or Last.fm. Theoretically though if you don’t link it and don’t share on social platforms, Google will not show it.

URL removal request:

That’s the only idea I have found, simple yet powerful and safe way to get your robots.txt file out of the Google index. It’s great because the user’s site ownership is verified and shows even the progress for each request.

These are two of the ways I know how to deal with the above mentioned issue. In case you think you have a better solution for the robots.txt indexing problem, please share it with the community in the comment section.

12 Awesome SEO & Internet Marketing Resources from my Blog Readers

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 22:52:41 +0000

SEO 2.0 is for real. I practice what I preach. It’s not just talk to make more people follow me. I really visit every blog or site that my readers and commentators enter in the “website” input when they comment. I also really look out for great content on their blogs and sites and when I like it

I +1 it
share it
link to it.

It’s not just something I have written about in my 101 ways to succeed at blogging flagship post. It’s not just a tactic or technique.

In late 2010 I was a bit disappointed. Many people considered this blog just another “dofollow link”. So I moderated comments even more strictly this year to separate the wheat from the chaff. Now I can reap the rewards it seems.

There are so many great bloggers reading SEO 2.0 and even commenting here or pinging me that I have to share their awesome resources.

I’m really impressed. These are bloggers nobody has ever heard of and who have probably just a few readers each but they deserve lots of them. I hope this article helps to grow their audience.

These 12 awesome posts are about SEO and adjacent Internet marketing topics, I haven’t even included my offtopic readers. I’m proud of you people, you are really getting it. You are doing it right. I see a bright future for all of the below mentioned or rather linked bloggers:

I think I got used too much to reading the same sources over and over. After a while you just visit the same few sites. You lose out on the myriad of great bloggers who haven’t yet been discovered by everybody else but who nonetheless contribute really valuable resources for the SEO industry and beyond. I will be more open minded in future again.

SEO Activism: Detox Campaign by Greenpeace

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:31:38 +0000

For years I’ve been a proponent of using SEO for more than just making money. Even on the Web it’s “people before profits”. You can’t just do business as usual when the planet and humanity with it goes down the drain. Still it’s a rare occasion that you see SEO being used for activism.

Not every non-profit organization is automatically working for the greater good. There is one though that is beyond doubt in this case: Greenpeace. Also Greenpeace has used SEO for its Detox campaign in a way that inspired me to write this post.

One of the reasons I write about it is the lofty definition of SEO Greenpeace offers:

This is SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”, and it’s one of the few fantastic activist tactics that are native to the web. It’s not the online version of something which people were doing already before the internet.

The SEO here is just a call to action to webmasters and bloggers to link back to the campaign site. This is of course the easiest and best way to do it. Also it’s quite inclusive. Not everybody can donate money or take part in actual protests on the streets. Also many people might feel that just giving money is not really activism.

Last bot not least many actions are just too far away for most people. On the Web there is no distance and attention is the currency. Links provide and channel attention. Of course I’d invite readers to share the campaign URL on social media sites as well. On the Web the people have the power to change things and to direct attention where it belongs.

The detox campaign is surely worth your attention:

Greenpeace is campaigning to stop industry poisoning waterways around the world with hazardous, persistent and hormone-disrupting chemicals. Launched in July 2011, the Detox campaign has exposed links between textile manufacturing facilities causing toxic water pollution in China, and many of the world’s top clothing brands.

I think I’m using products by at least one of the brands targeted in it:

H&M
Adidas
Nike
Puma

These are just those brands that have already reacted. Greenpeace has already forced Apple to become more environmentally friendly so I’m quite optimistic that they will be able to stop the water pollution by these and other global brands. We know they they don’t produce or even design most of their garments themselves. They are all made in

China
Bangladesh
Philippines

The people in the countries suffer at least twofold, by ridiculously low wages and by environmental destruction.

These global brands do not have factories themselves. They even outsource the creative process. They only thing they have is their brand image. So in case they pollute the environment we can pollute their images with news about it. It’s that simple.

What can you learn from it?

You don’t need an expensive SEO agency to use SEO for activism.

Just ask and inspire people to link to you and spread the word on social media. Of course some advice from SEO experts is also sometimes crucial. In this case Gareth aka SEO Doctor has pointed pout that the campaign URL Greenpeace requested readers to link to has been redirected by a temporary redirect aka 302 which does not work for Google. So all the links using the short URL would have been wasted.

Does it work? Yes, Greenpeace is already at #11 for the quite competitive term [detox]. Ad some more links to your sites to push it up to the top 10.

Of course SEO is more than rankings. Personally I also doubt that people who are searching for detox are actually the right audience for this kind of topic. It would be better to optimize for the brand names of the companies that are responsible for the pollution. Once potential customers find out about the toxic pollutants their brands produce they may reconsider their purchase. This way the pressure grows.