Get more traffic by writing content for natural lanuage question searches

Posted by stuart as , , ,

Something I’ve been noticing more and more in the referrer logs of this blog and other sites I own in the use by my visitors of natural language question search terms to find my site.

A few examples include:

• what is ……….?
• where is …………..?
• how do I ……………?

etc etc…

Now I’m not sure whether this is a result of searchers becoming more stupid, or their expectation that search engines might be smarter than they actually are, but there’s a potential goldmine of traffic hidden in these searches.

If people are searching in this way, are you providing content which will rank for these searches? Do you know how to present content for these searches?

It’s simple - just ask questions in your posts, then answer them:

“So how do I build a google maps mashup site?” I hear you ask:

It’s simple, just follow these simple instructions……..

You’ll still hit your search tems such as “google maps mashup site”, with the added bonus of the longer tail natural language question search as well.

Why does Sphinn outrank me for my own content?

Posted by stuart as , ,

Check this search result out:

So Sphinn outranks this blog, the original source, for that article.

I guess this is to be expected, as Google probably saw the article on Sphinn first, so if anything, my post shouldn’t be in the index at all, flagged as duplicate content.

but….

Surely Google realise that sites like Sphinn, Digg, Technorati do not produce content in their own right? Surely there should be some sort of ranking penalty handed to these sites so that the producers of the original content have a chance to rank for themselves? Social Networking sites should be given a zero authority by the Search Engines.

I guess I should be happy that my article in effect grabs the top two spots for that query (not that it gets any search volume).

Are Big Bucks SEO’s worth the money?

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SEO is a service industry. Service industries survive on one of two basic principles:

1. The average punter is incapable, due to any one of a number of factors, including (but not limited to) skill, knowlege, physical strength, availability of tools and materials, and many more, of doing the job required.
2. The punter is capable, but it would be financially inefficient for him to do the job himself. ie he could do the job, but he’s better off concentrating on his core competencies, and contracting someone else to do the work.

So for the average business owner, where does the Search Engine Optimization of their online presence fit into this paradigm? (yeah, that’s right, I said paradigm)

Well, once again, there are two types of business owners:

1. Those who understand search engine optimization, and…
2. Those who don’t

After watching the fallout from Shoemoney’s post about 95% of SEO’s being slime, I’ve given a bit of thought to the big end of town SEO’s, and what value they bring to their customers.

There’s no doubt that top ranking for your main keywords is of great benefit to your business. But how much is it really worth?

The narrow minded view would be something like this:

“As long as I get one dollar’s more worth of conversions from my SEO campaign than I spend, it’s been successful”

…but isn’t that a little like saying to your kid as he drives your new BMW to work on his first day:

As long as you earn one dollar more than the total of the damage you do to my car, I’m in front, so that’s OK

The equation is not about making just a little more than you spend, it’s about maximizing the difference between spend and income.

There are two ways to widen the gap between spend and income:

1. Decrease the spend on SEO, whilst acheiving the same results, or
2. Increase the conversions whilst spending the same on SEO

I’m going to talk about decreasing the SEO spend rather than increasing the conversions, as I assume you’ve exhausted pretty much every avenue to convert the traffic you’re getting.

This is where the questions need to be asked of the Big Boys of SEO.

What value are you providing me?

If the answer is anything other than “Getting you the highest possible ranking for your chosen keywords at the lowest possible cost”, I believe that your SEO is on the wrong track.

Yes, they may provide monthly keyword ranking lists, but do you really need them? Chances are you’re targeting something in the vicinity of a dozen keywords or less. Sheesh, pay someone on digitalpoint $25 to write a script to track your rankings, hell, pay me $25 and I’ll write you one! (or just use the free keyword ranking script here)

Yes, they may provide you with multi-page briefs outlining their strategy, but do you need them? When you employ a printer to do a job for you, you don’t ask them how they’re going to do it for you, you just want to see the results.

Yes, they may have access to a pile of high PageRank sites where they can drop links to your site. But what happens when you stop paying them? Do the links stay? Or do they disappear, taking your rankings with them?

Yes, they may have some kind of “fast indexing” strategy. But what’s that really worth, that can’t be achieved by linking to your site from a frequently spidered blog?

So let’s break the whole SEO thing down to its basics. Three (controllable - there are others such as domain age which can’t be controlled) factors influence how a page ranks for a specific keyword:

1. On-page SEO. This is all about getting page titles, H1, H2 etc, and file names/URL’s right. There’s a lot to be said for quality, CSS driven design here as well. Making pages easily spiderable certainly isn’t going to do you any harm.
2. Page Copy - Good, original copy, targeting the keywords in question.
3. Off-page SEO - link building. Getting links from authority sites, varied but targeted anchor text backlinks etc.

I’m thinking that these are all things that the average reader of this blog could do standing on their heads. (You are, after all, an intelligent bunch, are you not?)

So next time you read your company’s hired SEO talking in their blog about attending some great SEO conference, lunching with Matt Cutts, or understanding the Google algorythm, ask them what they’re doing for your organization that’s not included in the three above points.

Are you making money, or making money for the people who are telling you how to make money?

Posted by stuart as

I had one of those lightbulb moments yesterday when reading SlightlyShady’s bitch about Shoemoney being a hypocrite for slagging off the majority of the SEO industry.

I quote:

Let me define the “Make Money Online” niche for you. It’s largely a bunch of guys talking about how wealthy they are, leading inexperienced newbies on, pretending like someday they’ll reveal their “big money” secrets, and you’ll be wealthy too. In reality, they just use their blogs as newbie traffic channelers, selling it off to the highest bidder. The newbies take forever to realize that they ARE the “big money” secret the author has.

Wow! Them’s powerful words Shady….

The question I ask before I add a newly discovered blog to my feed reader is this:

“Am I actually going to learn something, I mean really learn something I didn’t already know, that’s going to help me, if I subscribe to this blog?”

If the answer is “yes”, I’ll subscribe. If it’s “probably not”, I don’t.

As a result of this, I only have about a dozen blogs in my reader at any one point in time.

So what about you? Do you actually learn anything quantifiable from the make money blogs that you read? Have you learned anything that you’ve actually put into practice successfully and made money from?

Google caving on referrals? Gimme a break.

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Interesting read over at Problogger today. Apparently Google have changed their mind on (some of) the changes that they recently announced regarding their referral program.

You know about the original changes, you’ve read about them everywhere, so I won’t go into that here, but the new changes raise some issues:

From the AdSense blog:

The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You’ll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan…. (my emphasis)

WTF???

This is a joke, right?

So a US Dollar, Yen or Peso is worth more to Google than my Australian Dollar, A Krona, Yuan, or a Rupee?

The combined populations of the USA, Latin America and Japan is around 993 million, around 15% of the world’s population, and apologies to my Latin American friends, but you’re not by any stretch of the imagination an economic or population powerhouse.

One must wonder whether these changes are the result of an oversupply of AdSense publishers and an shortage of AdWords advertisers? Remeber, for every AdSense ad you see, there’s an AdWords advertiser somewhere. Another thought is that Google is struggling for advertisers prepared to expose themselves to the low ROI clicks and outright click fraud on the content network, so they’re using changes to the referral program to slow down the number of new AdSense publisher signups.

Might I suggest that they get a bit tougher on the sites they allow to show AdSense ads as a way of evening up the balance between ad supply and demand instead of punishing genuine content publishers because of where they live?

My fear here is that this is the start of a very slippery slope. With Google being so secretive about the commissions it takes from every ad click, how do we know that publishers who don’t live in the above “Axis of AdSense” are not already being smartpriced on their clicks. Maybe Google is paying different CPC’s based on where the “clicker” is located?

We just don’t know this shit.

As so many are now saying - Don’t rely solely on AdSense for your income, especially if you live outside the Axis of AdSense. It may only take a simple change of policy on Google’s part to kill your business model.