SEO Hosting Blog

After blogging for over three years I have learned a lot of things about search engine marketing and keyword ranking. And one of the things that I have learned is that it really doesn’t take a lot of content to rank for keywords in Google. Granted, there are a lot of contributing factors towards ranking for keywords, but I am finding that the amount of content written doesn’t really hold too much weight in the equation.

Content adds quality to a page. It adds value, and typically, it provides people with what they are looking for. I believe that that is what Google and other search engines seek. They seek, index, and rank pages that they feel will be important to people. In doing so, that makes their search engine favorable because people find what they need. So, in most cases, as a publisher, writing content is what’s needed to achieve ranking. But the question remains, “How much content is needed?” Many publishers feel like a lot is required, when in many cases, it’s not.

A large amount of content isn’t always necessary to achieve ranking. Content is very important, but publishers should be aware that thousands of words on a page isn’t always required to achieve keyword ranking. The point I’m aiming to get across here is that writing content is difficult, takes a lot of time, and requires a lot effort. So, putting in more resources than what’s needed is a waste. With many jobs, it’s the duty of managers to control costs and expenses, to manage payroll and control hours, and oversee that excessive materials are not being used to complete the job.

The same should apply with content writing and search engine ranking. Don’t assume that content is always “King” when it comes to targeting keywords in Google and other search engines. I have learned that the “King” is with identifying alternative keywords and phrases that have low levels of competition with high search counts. The second part is identifying what it will take to rank above the existing competition on the search result page.

When you have it set in your mind that you want rank for certain keywords and phrases, take time to study your competition on the search results page. Ask yourself, “How did they rank for this keyword?” and investigate. Once you discover how your competition achieved their ranking, then you will have a better idea of knowing how much of your own resources you’ll need to use towards ranking above them.

My point is this: The amount of content is only a small factorization in the equation of search engine ranking. Content is much like butter on toast, milk in cereal, or sugar in coffee. Content really only adds flavor to a page. And with keyword ranking, it’s your job to figure out the ingredients needed to make toast, cereal, and coffee. After you do that, then you’ll know exactly how much butter, milk, and suger to add.

Back in May of 2009, Google launched Search Options, which is the side panel that lets you apply filters and view search results in different ways. This might not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but Google actually put in quite a few long years into the development of this technology. The concept surfaced in 2001 and was later unveiled in May of 2007 as universal search. Fast forward two years, and today we have very enhanced and beefed up search options available at only a few mouse clicks away.

So you may be wondering what can you do with the new search options. The simple answer: a lot! The better question to ask would be what can’t you do with the new search options. The more important question to ask yourself – assuming you’re a site owner interested in increasing organic search traffic – is how can I enhance my SEO to capitalize on these new features. Let’s look at a few of the new features and then I’ll offer some suggestions on how to take advantage of them.

The search options available are as follows: All results, videos, news, blogs, books, forums, reviews.

Additionally, you can add these filters to the first six: Any time, recent results, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year, specific date range.

On top of that, you can then filter your view: Standard view, related searches, wonder wheel, and timeline.

The last filter allows you to change your view even further: Standard results, images from the page, fewer shopping sites, more shopping sites, and more text.

So now that we’ve broken down the search options and defined each filter, let’s talk about some SEO tips. Here are a few things that you can do to make the most of the new search options in Google.

Videos: Creating and uploading a videos in YouTube and embedding them in your web pages will increase your chances of pulling up in the video results.

On video sites, such as YouTube, be sure to put the URL of your web page into the description. People as well as spiders will be able to travel from the YouTube video page to your web page. Both activities influence your web pages rankings.

Blogs: Creating and maintaining a blog, and publishing unique and high quality content related to your brand, business, products, and services can help you increase your chances gaining top ranks when users filter and show blog results only.

Don’t discount the possibility of running multiple blogs. The cost and time invested into maintaining blogs is much less than most people believe. Also, I recommend running blogs using multiple platforms. For example, you should have a blog on self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and LiveJournal. Lastly, I suggest that each blog appear independent and seperate from the others.

The most successful blogs are blogs that grow off the reader’s activity and contributions. Try to write content in a way that captures attention and makes readers feel compelled to take an action. The desireable actions you seek are backlinks, comments, and social network sharing. These are all activities that influence how well your blog post ranks for keyword phrases in search. Also, content can be carefully shaped and molded in a way to attract the attention of people as well as search engines. And that leads to my next tip.

Reviews: Adjusting your writing style can influence your chances of ranking in the reviews only section. Google looks for common writen trends that typically reflect written reviews, such as product reviews. Spend some time studying the content on some of the pages found in the search results and adapt some of their style into yours.

Index Frequency: You should constantly monitor how quickly new content gets indexed from your site. If content gets indexed within a few minutes of publishing, then you should take advantage of that and publish more content. I recommend publishing new content immediately after the most recent content has been indexed. In other words, everytime web crawlers come back to your site, you should have new content ready to be crawled for indexing. Doing so will increase your chances of pulling up in after the past hour, past 24 hours, and past week filter has been applied.

Another obvious reason why I recommend posting new content as frequently as possible is because doing so places your mark in hundreds and in many cases thousands of search result pages. A great pioneer in this strategy is Chris Pirillo. He has multiple blogs, forums, and sites, each being updated almost hourly. Secondly, these updates aren’t done just by hired or team writers. Most of the updates are user generated content. Chris Pirillo’s earns revenue by displaying contextual advertisements off the content created by community members within his network.

Adjusting how you do things and puting yourself more in-line, and in the same direction as Google, can make a significant difference in the amount of organic search traffic your site receives. Just being aware and perceptive of how Google presents information to users via their search results alone can help a lot. And with these new search options available, instantly there is a new resource of traffic that you can be tapping into.

So you’re a Mac user and just like everyone else, you’re probably looking for a quick, easy, and painless way to increase and build links to your website. Before now, finding link building and SEO software for the Mac has been difficult. However, there’s a new program that just got featured on ZDNet today that I think just may help you with your link building needs. The program is called LinkAssistant SEO Tool Version 3.3.3 and you can download it totally free of charge.

Of course, like all programs, there’s a paid version too. And we all know that the paid version comes with more features. However, even the free version comes packed with full with functionality. And in all honesty, I think it’ll do the trick for you, when it comes to building up links on your site.

The software is pretty simple. They first explain that link building is the core of any website promotion strategy. They say that Google and other search engines place trust in sites that have a high number of incoming links. Of course, many of us know this, but what many of us don’t know is how to get these high quality incoming links.

That’s where LinkAssist kicks in. The creators of LinkAssist explain that depending on your niche topic, you may have to attain thousands of links in order to make a difference in the search results. Not only that, but the links attained need to be high in quality. That’s hard to do manually, even for experts.

So how does LinkAssist work? Take a look at their video presentation. You’re going to be amazed to see how powerful this program is and then question why it’s being given away for free. The great thing is that LinkAssist is even available for Mac. What other SEO software have you found available for Mac?

(image from desperate-bid)

In the middle of August, I wrote a post about the AP’s new SEO strategy. Although they were very optimistic and excited about their plan, because it involved creating automatically generated pages, the plan attracted plenty of critics from around the web.

Now, several weeks later, the topic of SEO and newspapers has made its way back into the media. There were two articles related to this topic that caught my eye, and while one of the articles shows that there are newspapers that get it, the other shows that some are still clueless.

The first article that caught my eye was titled “How Tribune Co. plans to rid itself of SEO-killing duplicate content.” This post was published on the same blog that published the post about the AP’s new SEO strategy. After recapping their first post, this post went on to discuss how Tribune Co. plans on getting rid of their duplicate content issues. (more…)

(image from amanda cee)

If you have been following any Internet news lately, then you know the AP has been making a lot of headlines in regards to their stance on copyright issues. However, today I would like to talk about something different, which is the new SEO strategy that the AP is adopting.

As explained by the Nieman Journalism Lab, “The same philosophy is driving their plan to build “news guide landing pages” that will aggregate the AP’s content around subjects, places, organizations, and people.”

Why did the AP decide to take this approach? According to the Nieman Journalism Lab, it has to do with Wikipedia:

“Two of the biggest beneficiaries of that traffic bonanza were Twitter and Wikipedia, a couple of digital natives that would have been viewed as very unlikely news competitors even a few months ago. Indeed, a new pattern of consumption was validated in the confusing minutes that followed the first reports of Jacko’s death: Users shared; they searched and they clicked on Wikipedia….

The Wikipedia page on Michael Jackson is not very pretty to look at, but it has more blue hyperlinks than black type. Forget the “wiki” method of community updating, the key to Wikipedia’s success is that its pages are designed to catch traffic, provide key information and then send users on their way to deeper engagement on the subjects they’re interested in.”

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