Content is the Linking King!?

One of the reasons that I prefer adding content to other link building methods is that, done properly, it combines so many of the other methods at the same time. You simply get more "bang for your buck".

Let me explain. Here are just some some of the link building methods that can be used while adding content:

1. Content invites IBL's and natural deep links. People will link to really good (or really controversial) content. They usually don't link to mediocre content. This is as natural as it gets.

2. Content adds internal backlinks. When you add content to your site, you are adding additional internal linking opportunities. I once moved a client in a very competitive search term from nowhere to number 2 on Google simply by removing an "s" from one of the words in his navigation structure - the sheer number of pages in his site containing that nav structure did the rest for me. In this case, the search term was "widget" but he had placed "widgets" in the navigation structure.

3. Content provides marketing opportunities. Adding, for example, some unique research to your site provides not only the content for your site, but also provides an opportunity to do a press release or article about the research (or both). This is usually accompanied by a link.

4. Content increases your ability to capture niche phrases. Even a low link weight page that is, nonetheless, focussed on a niche keyphrase can bring in very valuable traffic.

5. Content allows you to focus and funnel PR and other forms of link weight. If you hardly have any pages, then your ability to funnel link text, PR, etc to certain pages or areas of your site is severely limited. If you have enough content, you can use the structure of your site to focus on marketing opportunities.

6. Content can allow you to get multiple listings for the same site. If you focus and organize your content into discrete catagories, you can often find that a vertical hobby directory that would never list your flower shop may very well list your sub-section on flower arranging. DMOZ policy, for example, also allows multiple listings for the same site IF the content is sufficiently unique to justify it. Wiki and encyclopedia listings are an example of this.

7. Content can get you a more visible, stronger listing. For example, if you have content that provides useful and unique information on a city, then you will find yourself listed in the city section of the directory. If you have it for multiple cities, then you can get the state area (which is usually higher and has more link weight), if you have several states, then you can get the country wide listing, which is yet higher on the link weight scale. If you had just tried to focus a few pages of content on "country-wide" stuff, the liklyhood of your site getting listed at that (or any) level is remote at best. The wider the base, the higher the pyramid. Directories use a pyramid structure (hint).

8. Content allows you to talk about the same subject in different ways. You can have a stuffy, "official" tone of voice for most of your site, but that may limit it's appeal for certain groups of searchers, and limit the types of keywords you can use. By adding chatty, informal articles or user reviews and feedback, you can increase the potential range of your audience reach.

9. Content attracts and converts. People are more likely to trust a site with more content than the infamous "web brochure". People are more likely to link to sites with more content than sites that don't. Content not only attracts and converts buyers, it attracts and converts linkers.

10. Content differentiates. If you are selling the ACME Mark VII and so is everyone else in your niche, or worse, you have an affiliate site, then your ability to attract links is severly hampered by the fact that good directories don't link to the same content over and over again. Good search engines also do not display the same content over and over again. Go ahead and sell that Mark VII, but add unique content that avoids duplication filters and encourages people to link to you. You may even find that your competitors will get bumped lower (or off) if your content is better than theirs. People link to different points of view, not the same point of view (or information) over and over again. Want to get into a competitive directory category? Offer a series of well thought out content that "goes against the flow" of the rest of the sites in that topic area. It's an editors job to seek out and add that kind of information, NOT to help people list their "me too" site.

The reason that "content is king" is because it not only affects your relevance (content and keywords) but ALSO your authority (links).

Ian

SEO is Dead... Long Live SEO!

I'm Old.

Well, not THAT old, but old enough to remember that newfangled "desktop publishing" craze, followed by the hosting craze followed by the web design craze and now followed by the SEO craze.

I think there are some similarities, if you will be kind enough to follow along with me.

There comes a point with almost every technology based skill set where it dies, merges with something else, or becomes specialized. Sometimes all three. It's the nature of the beast, and part and parcel with progress.

When desktop publishing came along, I was still manually typing news stories into a Linotype machine, having it printed in a big roll by a custom print shop, then using an Exacto knife to cut the roll into columns, and pasting them onto a big, newspaper sized board. If there was a spelling error we painfully cut out individual letters and corrected them letter by letter (not a job for the clumsy!). For photos, we had to send things off to a PMT shop to turn the photograph into dots, which was after we took the photo in black and white and developed it in our own darkroom. Turnaround time for even small changes was measured in hours or days.

Then along came this little Macintosh computer with an 8"x8" inch black and white screen, a program called Pagemaker, and the joy of Adobe, a fairly unknown company that specialized mostly in fonts . And a laser printer! Suddenly, all the skill needed for the old process went out the window, and the skills needed for the new one were far easier to attain, with better and faster results.

The next thing you know, it seemed like everyone was a "desktop publisher". You would see signs up on lampposts, ads in newspapers and so forth. It was the high time of public publishing. And with it came some severe growing pains. People with no training, a love of technology and a desire to get rich quick began calling themselves "desktop publishers" and there began a severe decline in a lot of skills in the industry. The same skilled people were still there, but were drowned out by those who would use 12 font types on the same page, had no color sense, and switched clip art styles with gleeful abandon.

The promise of "publishing for the people" quickly became claims that publishing was a dead art, and there was a lot of evidence to support it. But that didn't happen. Why? Because, to use a Darwinian metaphor, the weak were eaten.

Technology didn't stop at Pagemaker and laser printers. The DTP programs became cheaper and easier to use, laser printers became cheaper, newfangled "inkjet" printers became common, and WYSIWYG came to word processing (boy, did THAT cause an uproar! You are not supposed to mix content and presentation, didn't you know )

Suddenly, almost anyone could do simple DTP. It was so simple that no one would pay the so-called DTP types to do something for a lot of money that they could do better and for free/cheap. Most DTP types left for greener pastures.

But some stayed, the best ones. And they formed dedicated shops with high quality printers and demanded the highest quality skill sets in design and typography. Today, they flourish. I don't think twice about printing my own documents off, but I go to a printer for my business cards, rather than use an inkjet, for example.

In short, while it was happening, it looked like technology had created a new industry. In hindsight, it actually transformed the old one into something new.

The same type of thing happened to website hosting. At first, you needed expert knowledge in ISDN modem technology, and the technical skills required to keep a server running and connected were huge. It was a time for highly skilled technicians. Then along came linux packages and apache, internet connections became cheaper, and front ends made things easier. Suddenly "everyone" was a web host. Turns out that it's not so easy to make money if your skills are marginal, you don't invest a lot, and the competition is extremely intense.

Once again, what happened was that a lot of low end hosting is now done in-house, and when people go outside, they look for companies with multiple dedicated redundant connections, tons of technology, and extremely competent staff. The middle men have mostly died out, and spend a lot of time either bottom feeding or offer it was a part of a much larger package of services. The days of the "web host" operating from his basement are over. There are a few holdouts (like me, and I'm slowly allowing attrition to get rid of my clients) but most are gone.

I can see web design going the same way (it's near the tail end) and I believe SEO is heading there right now. It's almost time for the shakedown. 2 years tops.

I predict, based of previous experience, that a lot of what people call "SEO" today will disappear and simply become part of the web design toolset. The so-called "SEO's" that offer to "fix your metatags", who believe that you can achieve long term goals by running a script you bought (as if no one else will buy the same script!) and so forth, will move on to the Next Big Thing (thank god!) and those that have true skills will consolidate and specialize.

A lot of the basic stuff will be done by users, software programs will come "out of the box" with spider friendly designs and tools, and most of the low end "easy fix" stuff will be done by web designers and owners.

I suspect, for example, most of the members of this forum are not "SEO's" but rather people learning how to do SEO for their own sites and maybe to use the basics for their design clients. And good for them! I think they will be the agents of destruction for the pseudo-seos that most people complain about today. Not any kind of "ethical revolution" or central organization. Pure Darwinian selection of the simple and effective over the expensive and weak.

However, the skills necessary to do high end campaigns, to compete in very competitive markets, to keep up with the latest changes in the industry - those will still be needed, and will remain in demand. SEO as a professional service will do very well, and will be run mostly by professionals.

The public will take over the easy stuff, the specialists will deal with the hard stuff, and the parasites in the middle will (mostly - it's hard to kill a parasite) go away.

SEO is dead (or dying) ... Long Live SEO!

Ian

SEO Browser - Online Lynx (Text Only) Viewer

Like many people, I use lynx to test websites as part of my SEO work. Lynx is a text-only browser for the web that allows people to view websites in text only mode. I used in it the old days when I would telnet into a SunOS server in order to access that newfangled fad called the web.

Once graphical browsers became common, lynx lost a lot of popularity. However, text browsing has seen a revival recently due to two main issues: first, people who are vision-impaired can't used graphical browsers, and there is a strong movement among forward thinking designers and companies to make sure that websites can be visited and used by everyone, not just people with good eyesight, fast connections, and graphical browsers. I think this is a very good thing.

The second reason is less selfless and more pragmatic: search engines, which often deliver a huge portion of a websites visitors, are essentially text only browsers. If you don't make them happy, you can find yourself losing a substantial number of potential visitors to competitors whose sites might not have all the nifty Flash that yours does, but instead are visible to search engines. Since that's a direct hit to the pocketbook. it's caught the attention of the business world as well.

Arguably, the single most important visitor to a website is a search engine, and a search engine is, for all intents and purposes, blind. It's kind of sad that it took this type of pressure to get a lot of sites to care about something they should care about anyway, but I take my victories where I can.

Accordingly, the use and importance of having a text only browser to test your website with has moved from "it would be nice" to "it's absolutely critical". A text browser is an essential part of the toolkit of both the SEO and the web designer.

Normally, I've been using the actual lynx executable, but it's kind of hard to use after several years of windows (no, the mouse doesn't work in it! Blind people can't see pointers, silly).

Additionally, when I'm talking to a client or giving a presentation, I can't ask them to install an executable on their system just to demonstrate somethign quickly. Some clients are disallowed from doing so by corporate policy even if they wanted to. Plus, it's hard to use for the mouse generation.

Up until now, the answer has been using the Delorie tool, which is basically a web based lynx viewer. Recently, due to bandwidth issues and hacks, they have discontinued it's easy functionality and required a site to install a custom page on it in order to view pages from that site. Well, clients are not going to do that any more than they would install lynx. Now the tool can basically only be used for sites only under your control, which presumably is the intent.

But that makes it useless for most SEO's and designers, except on personal projects or clients they already have.

Additionally, this tool didn't do what I wanted it to do (I still had to use 10 or 15 sites just to check one site) so I started to develop my own, in conjunction with a marketing company and developer I know. Lynx is close, but it doesen't show you what a search engine sees, only what is intended for text browsers, there is a big difference in the handling of graphics, headings, lists, and other page components between the two.

In short, lynx, is good, but not good enough. I needed a true SEO Browser. So I made one, in conjuction with a marketing company I work with a lot (Anduro) and a developer here in Calgary (Commerx). They are key to the fact that this project exists anywhere outside of my head. :D

The concept is simple, create a tool that mimics what a search engine sees, and then add other tools an SEO needs in conjuction with it.

Due to bandwidth usage, we are planning to make it half commercial, half free. The basic functionality will be, of course free. It's essentially an online lynx-type viewer with some enhancments specific to SEO's (like how it handles some things that a SE might care about but a pure text browser would not).

Then the idea is to have a much more robust version behind a login that will do all sorts of fun things, many of which will require a Google API, etc (thus the login).

The basic functional version is here:http://www.seo-browser.com/

For now, the advanced version is being added to daily and is open to the public for testing purposes. After we get it working perfectly, It will be a paid area (probably along the lines of Wordtracker style - pay by day, week, year, etc.)

One thing I'd like to add once it's done is the ability to get an XML feed from the advanced section that people can use to format their own reports with, etc. Please feel free to test it and provide feedback. We are committed to making both versions (including the free one) available and the best we can make them.

So far, the response has been amazing! Especially in view of the fact that this is still very much in development and is nowhere near being finished.

Some upcoming additional information it will hopefully provide include:

• A link to http header information for the page.
• A link to the CSS file
• A word and character count for the meta data, title and body text
• A link count (how many links are on the page – how many are internal and how many are external)
• An image count, along with how many do not have ALT parameters (alt=”” would count as an alt parameter for SEO purposes)
• A link to check the W3C Validity of the page
• The number of backlinks this page has under Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Teoma (and whether it exists in the index at all)
• Whether the Javascript (if it exists) on the page is on-page or external
• Whether the page contains Flash, Java, imagemaps or DHTML (in red – these are usually bad)
• The Meta Keywords would be links to add extra functionality to the page (explained below) and would also show a number used and density % (example: “SEO [14, 12.5%], promotion [3, 1.2%], mcanerin [5, 4.6%]) I would suggest a limit of 15 keywords – if they have more than that then it should be noted as an error, and only show the first 15.
• A list of cookies requested/sent would be listed. This tool should never accept cookies, however (search engines don’t)
• A link to the robots.txt, and an error if it does not exist
• The IP address displayed. *Page load time displayed.
• A list of comments (how many, and the contents of them – can be an unformatted dump)

Under this is the text only page itself. This page would look the same as the free version except:

Text that is hidden using CSS or in other manners (ie black text on black, or 1 point high text) would be italized. Text that is within a header tag is actually displayed in a header tag (H1, H2, etc) When you click on a keyword in the keyword list, it highlights in bold. Up to 3 keywords can be highlighted at once.

Under this should be another section with 3 links: Compress, Tokenize, and Index.

Compress would popup another window and show the text as a pure, unformatted text dump with no punctuation. Tokenize would popup another window and show the compressed text but with stop words removed (a, the, and, but, etc) Index would take the Tokenized list and display it as a word list with number counts for each word as well as density (like the metatag keywords)