This blog at Huffington Post about the perils of free labor poses interesting questions in a humorous way about how the workforce uses interns and the purposed lawsuits and regulations that are currently being discussed. It turns out that interns are an economically friendly way to get work done for free with little or no risk. Uhm, yeah, we who have been through more…
What makes good content? I can wax on and give you the latest ten tips for making great content, but instead I’m going over simplify it because I’m in that kind of mood. Content is just like art. There’s good art and there’s bad art, depending on your perspective. My perspective is I like the kind of art that takes an everyday object and gives it a twist that in turn gets a reaction out of me. Any reaction will do. Here’s an example; I came across a post that documents unique street signs in Lyon, France. I’ve passed street signs with the international cross-out symbol like these in my travels abroad and here at home as well, yet I have never stopped to take notice of the design. In a matter of milliseconds, my eyes see the sign, synapses fire off registering it as a sign, I may or may not heed the instruction, then the eyeballs get bored and find something else to feed off of. Poof, forgotten seconds after the experience. But these French signs are memorable. There’s a lesson here. Content should be thought of in the same way. Why not approach your next article, newsletter, video, social media campaign etc., with the same kind of goal? Take the everyday concept and put your own personal spin on it. Recycling the same old information that anyone can find on the intertubes is easy. Coming up with a unique angle on a concept takes a heck of a lot more effort and creativity. Do the latter. If you do it right, people may just stop and take notice.
The field of SEO was created by a need to optimize websites based on reverse engineering algorithims coming from the major search engines so that a website would rank higher on a search result page and be more findable on the Internet. The process by which SEO practices were (and still are) developed depends on which search technology is reverse engineered. Best practices rely on the ability to keep up with the latest technology offered by the major search engines. And those search engines who are in the top three don’t let you peek behind the curtain to see just how their algorithims function, so most of it relies on SEO experts who share information and build their own models that are later tested to see if they work. That means SEO is an ongoing, never-ending process that relies on expertise and on-going management. But as search technology becomes smarter and smarter, things like keyword density on a website becomes less and less important. Some may argue that the days of search engine optimization are over. In an informative article titled “The End of Search Engine Optimisation” writer Fran Molloy suggests that the sophistication of how search engines index content has made keyword density less relevant and contextual content more important than ever before. In the article, Kate Gramble, search manager with Bruce Clay Global Internet Marketing Solutions says,
“we discovered last month that the US site redsox.com ranked very well for ‘baseball’ – despite no use of this keyword on the site”
Does this mean SEO copywriters have their days numbered? Perhaps. But if history has a way of repeating itself, I believe SEO copywriters will still have a roll. I have seen a similar trajectory within the world of traditional advertising. It was once common to repeat sales copy in a television commercial or radio ad repeatedly to get the message across for a particular advertiser. This is known in the advertising world as frequency. In 1959, one little print ad changed that kind of thinking. The advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach’s 1959 “Think Small” ad for Volkswagen proved that for the first time, a major advertiser could get your attention by content rather than frequency. Today, most advertisers use a mix of both content and frequency to get our attention. But that doesn’t stop some advertisers who rely on frequency only. Sham-wow and lowermybills.com are fine examples that frequency is here to stay. But alternatives that rely on the message can be just as, if not more than, successful and more affordable to boot. I think this is what we are seeing in the world of SEO. We are just realizing that you can get the attention of the search engines via creative content. So will keyword density (frequency) still have a roll in helping websites get ranked in the future? It all depends on how small you’re willing to think.
Whether Apple knows it or not, they have just demonstrated how to script powerful SEO copywriting that can be both effective and entertaining. It comes in the form of a recent spliced up video of extracts taken from Apple’s Keynote address in September 2009 (below).
You have to wonder if the people at Apple have a keyword strategy for their keynote addresses that mimics what you’d expect to see in SEO copywriting. What is SEO copywriting? SEO copywriting is the art (some would say science) of crafting compelling copy on a web page that strives for keyword density which can be used as a factor in determining whether that web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. Obviously keyword density is helpful to have so that when web crawlers visit the page, your keywords will be indexed and ranked higher for those searched terms. This means you can organically grow your ranking for certain search terms if you have the right keyword density. In the case of the Apple keynote address, the keywords/keyword strategy would include implementing the following words into the copy: great, incredible, amazing, beautiful, awesome, easy, nice, cool and wonderful. When you watch the full version of the Apple keynote, the above listed keywords are not so evident and even add a flare of enthusiasm to the presentation. When I saw the original video, I didn’t notice the overuse of any one of the words until the spliced video pointed it out in a humorous way. Considering the spliced video is inching toward half a million views in just three days, perhaps others will see it more clearly too.
I thought it would be interesting to go back to the originanl un-spliced version and see just how many times each word was used. Here is a breakdown:
Great (54)
Incredible (26)
Easy (18)
Amazing (17)
Cool (12)
Beautiful (7)
Nice (6)
Awesome (5)
Wonderful (5)
I don’t really know if the Apple presentation was intentionally scripted with these keywords in mind or not. That’s not the point. The point is this is a nice illustration of how you can write compelling content with a handful of words as long as you implement the words naturally, and keep in mind that what you’re writing about must capture the attention of your audience. Hats off to the people at Apple for giving us a great, incredible, amazing, awesome, nice and wonderful things to think about. Cool.
I was chatting with a friend who’s an SEO expert and we were discussing the value of video content versus the written word. We both agreed they both have their merits. But let’s face it, video gets the point across in a more condensed way and it infuses a tone that you just can’t get with the written word. The speaker’s mannerisms, way of talking and clarity all effect how you absorb the content. To me, that’s a good thing. But the written word also has benefits. For example, if you’re a fast reader you can easily scan the text to see it’s worthwhile enough for you to read the whole thing… doing that with video means waiting for the vid to download and hoping you can move the slider around with little technical difficulty. My friend and I discussed the power of each format and wondered if the moving picture was more powerful than ink. If you look at the newspaper business versus the news telecast business which one do you think more people prefer? As a test, I thought it would be interesting to wordify / transcribe a video and compare it to the video and see what you get out of each format. The article I have chosen is from SEOmozBlog Whiteboard Friday. Keep in mind that I did not transcribe the video word for word; I left out the conversational bits and wrote it so that you could get the context. Here is a direct link to the video or click on the embed below. When you’re done, scroll down for the text version. Happy reading/watching.
SEOmox.org. The Web’s Best SEO Resources.
Whiteboard friday: generating unique content
by Scott Willoughby Featuring Rand Fishkin/CEO SEOmoz 8:18 sec
Rand Fishkin looked at both the start-up world and large established companies for this video.
He asked the following questions.
What makes content unique.
Why do I have to engage in it
And why do i have to do it.
Why do search engines want unique content?
Search engines want unique unique content because it helps their users.
Users who find repeated results get very frustrated. You see this a lot in the travel world. If you do a search for Kayaks you see the same thing on Expedia and Hotels.com…it’s weak because you get reviews that are coming from the same place. Not a good experience for the user.
Mr. Fishkin mentions a site like Oyster.com , which contains very independent, lengthy reviews of hotels and travel related content. The search engines want these unique kinds of results and they are very very good at identifying them.
if you think you’re going to pull the wool over the eyes of the search engines, think again. Search engines are very good at looking at a page’s structure, identifying elements that are in common navigationally and picking out the completely unique pieces of content inside the page and then being able to determine what percent of content inside the page is unique then deciding if that makes this a worth while page.
Some pages can have tons of content, and just a little bit of unique content and it gets picked up as being very important. Again, search engines are very good at picking out those sorts of things.
Spammers used to take content, run it through an English to French translation, then a French to Arabic translation and then an Arabic to English translation and then claim it as completely unique.
These days you’ll see spammers getting much more advanced by using things like Amazon’s mechanicalturk.com where they pay writers to rewrite content sentence by sentence a penny at a time. But be wary of this method because the search engines are working on how to identify that sort of thing.
Mr. Fishkin suggest that human beings are pattern oriented creatures and they have patterns that they build and if search engines can reverse that method they can try to figure out who is trying to spam.
In terms of the user experience you create with unique content..it is a serious upgrade. Finding something that is interesting and unique is valuable for your visitors and the search engines look at this as a good thing.
There’s an unfair advantage that some outlets get just by their presence and size. For example, if you wrote an article that then later got picked up by CNN, guess who would get the credit for it? It’s on your blog, it’s on CNN, guess who will get more links? CNN will because they most likely will have a much larger audience. The engines want to find who is the original source and they also want to make sure the duplication doesn’t create a “citation worthiness” where only the rich get richer and no one who is unique and interesting and small is getting value out of that. They also want to find a lot of diversity in those results. You can take a search results page and listing one through four are all the same…it’s miserable. Nobody wants to see exactly the same thing. They want to see those unique takes.
Finally, Mr. Fishkin covers some strategies in order to take advantage of the unique content demands that the search engines require and figure out how you can scale that and create content for your business. These kinds of content fall under three categories.
1. The first is Editorial. What is editorial? It’s Mr. Fishkin making this video. It’s a blog. It’s coming up with content yourself or hiring out journalists or copywriters to write content for you. Outsourcing it to South East Asia or Eastern parts of Europe where you can find affordable writers to write content for you. Or using sites like oDesk or those types of services. You can have lots of unique content written by humans and it is considered editorially built content. That brings us to the second kind of content.
2. The second kind of content is machine-built content. This kind of content is usually data-driven. Results you would see Inside an Expedia or Farecast (which is now Bing travel). Folks like payscale.com and salary.com do this in the job world. Simplyhired does this around searches for a particular job and how well the market is rising. They take data sources and produce automated kinds of content. You have to be careful with this. It’s a good strategy because it is scalable, it’s useful and not too expensive. Keep in mind engines can have issues with the uniqueness of the content. Sites like (one of Mr. Fishkin’s clients) zillow.com create data which becomes content. Users find the data useful.
3. The third kind of content is user-generated content. UGC is some of the best kind of content that you can generate, but it’s tough. You have to build a community, incentivize the content creation and you have to get them to do it for free. You have to get people to contribute. Some examples of this kind of content is Wikipedia, digg, readitt and Youtube. UGC is very powerful, and very scalable but difficult to get to get growing in a large network scale manner.
Rand recommends that you sit down and strategize which kind of content is appropriate to your business. For small sites, editorial makes sense. If you are trying to go big and dominate a niche or industry, you will need machine-built and UGC or maybe all three forms of content depending on your strategy.
It pays to have that strategy in mind before you set out to create content instead of while you’re doing it or even after. Strategize and pick the solution that’s best for you.
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OK, as you can see, it’s a lot of text considering that I left out a lot of the conversational words. I first viewed the video and then went back and transcribed as best as I could. I have to admit, watching the video was a more pleasant experience. I was also surprised the video was a little over 8 minutes long. It seemed much less. Maybe that’s because the experience was so effortless, whereas reading (or writing) took some effort. Who likes to read when you can sit back and absorb? What do you think?
