Yes, deliberate mistake It grates when people write poorly, huh. When writers write well, the words almost become invisible. The focus shifts away from technical details, and onto the message. Is there an easy way to write better blog posts? E-mails? Web copy? Let’s take a look at three guidelines for web writing. 1. If You Can Say It, You Can Write It The Dilbert Mission Statement Generator - sadly now offline - comes up with convoluted gems this: “Our challenge is to assertively network economically sound methods of empowerment so that we may continually negotiate performance based infrastructures” Satire, one would hope. However, the US Air Force uses the following mission statement: “The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests - to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace” “Deliver sovereign options”? Who talks like this? Well, apart from the US military. Nobody. Good web writing is the same as good spoken language. Use short sentences, short words, simple structures and a natural, predictable flow of ideas. Avoid waffle, hyperbole and words that hide meaning. Whenever you finish a piece of writing, read it aloud. Cut or rephrase phrases that sound clunky, because they’ll read clunky, too. Your writing will sound warm and human. The human voice is especially important online. Communicating at a distance, particularly two-way communication, is relatively new to humans. To help people connect with one another more easily, it pays to write in a warm, conversational style that mimics personal conversation when conducted in close, physical proximity. When you think about how you would say something, especially to a specific person, you choose words, expressions and structures based on that personal context. Try to imagine that person in front of you as your write. This approach works well for all applications - from formal legal sites, to personal sites. 2. Planning Planning what you’re going to say helps you to complete any writing task more quickly and easily. 1. Identify and list your goals. What is the message? What is the desired action you want your reader to take? What is the key thought you want your reader to take away? For example, a goal list might look like this: *inform people the last project went well, even though there were problems *highlight the good aspects about the project *highlight the problems *present ideas on how these problems can be overcome in the next project *get everyone revved up and excited about the next project 2. Think about the audience. Who is your audience? What do you know about the person or group? 3. Determine the right tone and format based on answers 1& 2 4. Write quickly. Don’t edit, even if your writing is a mess. Separate out your writing and editing functions. 5. Draw a solid conclusion. Calls to action work well. 6. Read aloud what you’ve written. Cut, fix and tighten. Writing comes alive in the rewrite. Solid blog posts sound spontaneous, but they’re not. They’re often structured, worked and reworked. 3. Hyperbole Doesn’t Work On The Web Hyperbole means extreme exaggeration. i.e. “All the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand”. Web readers tend to gloss over the flowery and the convoluted. On the web, people scan, so the shape of your writing - how it appears on the page - can be just as important as what you say. So think about the shape and form of your writing. Can you use bullets, headings and images to break up large blocks of text? Sometimes, the best thing to do is not write at all. Can an image convey your message? If so, use it. Also consider context. When visitors arrive on a page, a page deep within your site, do they know what your site is about from glancing at that one page? If not, consider using chunks of content to provide context. These chunks of information can be repeated on every page of your site, and should be self explanatory. Think directory entry. Your repeat visitors will become blind to it, but your first time readers will appreciate it. We could go on all day about web writing. However, we’d like to hear your tips. How do you approach writing on your site? Do you plan? Do you wing it? What style of writing gets the best results?

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How To Write Good

Everyday it seems like a new SEO tool or toolset is launching. I’ve been quite impressed with the improvements and enhancements to Raven’s SEO Tools since they launched. There are so many features in Raven but I want to focus on some of the really unique ones which make Raven a must have for me. Link Research Tools Raven has 2 powerful, time-saving tools in their Link Research toolset. Site Finder and Backlink Explorer are 2 tools that really help me quickly assess and work through link profiles and the link landscape of a particular keyword. Site Finder Site Finder is keyword driven and the reports are saved under the website profile you are working on in Raven. While the tool is fast (my auto insurance quotes example took about 6 seconds!) one of the workflow features that I really like is that I can run a bunch of these and go off to do other things within Raven rather than waiting for the reports to come back. On to Site Finder! : To use Site Finder, just navigate to it under the Links tab, enter your keyword, and hit “Run”: Here are the results returned for my query on auto insurance quotes: Site Finder gives you quite a bit of data and options in an easy to use interface, here’s how it breaks down: Search Box - search for a specific domain or reset the results post-search Display Settings - show anywhere from 25 - 1k results on the page, show links that are “hidden” (links you “hid” via the options column), or show all links with no filters Display Settings Option Box - click “Display Settings’ and you’ll get a box where you can toggle ACRank, MozRank, Page Authority, and/or Connections off and on Domain- the name of a domain which is linking to at least 1 site in the top ten Google Results. Click on the domain link to get a slick drop down of the sites that domain is linking too Link Icon - click the icon to display the domain in a new Connections - number of sites in the top 10 for your keyword that have a link from that domain ACRank - a quick, simple data point which aims to show how important a specific page is (0-15, 15 is the highest) based on referring domains. A more in-depth definition can be found here MozRank - SeoMoz’s global link popularity score. It mirrors PageRank but SeoMoz says it updates it more frequently and is more precise (scaled 0-10, 10 being the highest). A more in-depth overview can be found here Page Authority - a predictor of how likely a page is to rank based on a 100 point, logarithmic scale independent of the page’s content. The higher the better Backlinks - total number of links the domain has going into the top 10 Google results Options Tab - if you want to hide a domain from the report (maybe not a link you want to go after, you or your team members can click “hide” and the link will be hidden from the report. If “add” is clicked then the link is added to the link queue in the Link Manager (more on this shortly) Export Options - export your report to PDF or CSV (really helpful, especially when running reports on hidden links to gauge how well a link builder might be doing in terms of assessing the appropriate links to hide So that’s Site Finder. The flexibility, power, speed, and collaborative features of Site Finder make it one of my favorite tools to use. Backlink Explorer Researching competitor’s link profiles is usually a time-consuming piece of the SEO puzzle. While it still involves time, especially on larger link profiles, Backlink Explorer delivers some pretty impressive results quickly and efficiently via a 3rd party tie-in to Majestic SEO. Another nice thing with Raven is a consistent, clean user interface across the toolset. Here’s the spot where you enter the domain you want to research: Just like Site Finder it will save the report in the history of whatever website profile you are saving the report in. You can explore it at anytime or delete it at anytime: Continuing on with the auto insurance theme, I ran a quick report on GEICO: Backlink Explorer gives you the following data points and options: Search Box - search for a particular domain or words within a domain Display Settings - group domains (this is really helpful for cutting down duplicate results from domains with more than one link to the site), show/hide hidden or already linked from domains, filter by ACRank, and display up to 1,000 results on the page Display Settings Box - display or hide no-follow, image, or date data fields Source URL - the site the link is from Link Icon - open page in a new window ACRank - as discussed in Site Finder’s review, more info here Anchor Text - the anchor text of the link No-follow - whether it’s no-follow or not Image - whether it’s an image link or not Options Box - hide the domain or add it to your link queue Export - export results, filtered or non-filtered to CSV What’s really great about this tool is that you can do some pretty heavy filtering to get rid of the noisy links and quickly add the good ones to your link queue. On its face it may seem like it’s not that big of a time-saver, but it really is if you are combing through a large profile or multiple link profiles. You could really buzz through some fairly thick link profiles with the filtering options and put them right into your link queue for you to work on later or for a team member to work on. Once you start working with it you’ll quickly see how efficient it is for you or for you and your staff. Link Management This is probably my favorite tool in the toolset. Prior to utilizing this tool, I was using lots and lots of spreadsheets to track link building campaigns which got to be pretty time consuming and tough to collaborate on. It’s built in to the Raven SEO Toolbar which allows you to quickly add a link to your link queue, right from your browser, rather than hand copying the website’s data to a spreadsheet for further processing. This is a slick feature for a one person show and really sings when used in a collaborative link building environment. The last 2 spots are where your site would be listed and your account profile name: When you are researching link partners, simply click that Add Link button and you are presented with this screen: The link manager in an of itself is worth the price of admission in my opinion. So here you can: Set the status to queued, requested, active, inactive, ignore, or declined. Most of the time it will be “queued” if you are saving it for further handling Input the date the record was created Select the type of link (organic, paid, blog, exchange, and so on). You can even define custom types in Raven and it will show as an option in this application Note the desired anchor text of the link (great for collaboration with link building staff members) Include the URL of where you’d like the link to point to Add more links if you might be getting more than one link from the page Tag the link for sorting within the link manager application Set it to be monitored automatically from within Raven Add it as a task for you or a staff member Raven pulls in the URL, domain name of the site, and PageRank of the page If available you can list the contact name and email as well as the type of site it is and even leave a note attached to the record Try doing all that in a spreadsheet and a bunch of word or text documents for notes Once again, another solid way to save loads of time doing what is probably the most time consuming part of an SEO campaign, link building. So that was just the toolbar portion of the Link Manager. Within your Raven account you have access to the same “add link” application that you do from the toolbar. Perhaps you have link opportunities that you or a staff member cultivated outside of Raven. You can use this form to plug them right in. You can also import links into your Raven account. You can upload a CSV file with custom data that Raven will recognize up to 20 columns of data points. These data points relate to Raven’s Link Manager application. So you’re able to define all of these (Raven gives you a handy sample CSV to do this from): Status Link Type Link Text Link URL Website Name Website URL Website Type PR Contact Name Contact Email Contact ID Cost Type Cost Payment Method Payment Reference Start Date End Date Creation Date Comment Owner Name Currently the currencies supported are USD, GBP, EUR, AUD. When you upload you can automatically add link monitoring by clicking the link monitoring box. You can also import up to 1,000 backlinks from Yahoo! via your domain or your competitor’s domains (ones you’ve defined in Raven). Raven’s link monitoring service will alert you if any changes occur to a link or a page the link is on. For example, you would be notified if: PageRank changes Anchor text changes Another link gets added to the page They add no-follow to your link The location of your link changes I believe Raven now has about 21 different tools within their toolset now. This one tool, for me, is well worth the subscription cost. It really does save quite a bit of time and there’s really nothing else like it on the market that I’ve seen (in terms of functionality, collaboration, and ease of use). Facebook There are a growing number of applications out there where you can manage your social media accounts (mainly Twitter and Facebook, but Facebook in this example). If you want the most bang for your buck, Raven offers a state of the art Facebook application within its toolset. In addition to the deep reporting Raven gives you from within Facebook you can now integrate with Google Analytics from within Raven. Here are some of the features offered within Raven’s Facebook Tool: Deep Google Analytics integration White label reporting of Facebook metrics Automatic wall post scheduling Fan tracking, customizable by date range Monitor posts, comments, and likes What I really like about the Facebook tool in Raven is that you can really synch up your analytics information and truly get a handle on what’s working and not working over defined periods of time. The reason why I’m a big fan of the integration here is due to the fact that you are likely going to be using either Twitter or Facebook (or both) in your internet marketing campaign(s). So to have this data in one place and integrated, as well as using the deep metrics that the tools provide, amount to a set of game changing features with respect to Facebook campaign management. Sometimes with all in one toolsets you see features like this get added and they are kind of watered down. This is not the case here, it’s one of the stronger Facebook management tools out there. If you are going to allocate resources to search and social then you need a way to accurately track the ROI of your campaigns and that’s exactly what you get with this tool. Twitter Occasionally Social Media campaigns can be tough to quantify in terms of ROI and overall effectiveness. Much like the Facebook Monitor, Raven offers a tool for Twitter users which is a real gem. Raven’s Twitter Tool One feature within the Twitter tool is the ability to post a new tweet right away or schedule it for later, integrate with 3 URL shortener services (bit.ly, is.gd, j.mp, and tinyurl), and set custom Google Analytics campaign variables. Raven also gives you the ability to work with bit.ly and j.mp’s APIs. Monitor Twitter Activity and Engagement If you are allocating resources to Twitter, or being paid by a company to run their Twitter account, then you’ll want the ability to see some pretty juicy stats related to your Twitter campaign. With Raven’s new Twitter tool you’ll be able to see the following: Posts Followers Friends Friend to Follower Ratio Mentions Google Analytics referral data Reply and Retweet reach (a great way to see how many readers are seeing the message Here’s a screenshot of the statistical overlay: What’s really nice about this is the date range comparisons. It’s a huge time-saver to manage this data mostly in one place, you can truly get a handle on what’s working and what’s not working, as well as why it’s not working or working. The level of detail and integration is really unique to Raven’s suite of tools. Monitor Tweets Related to Your Account In addition to viewing tweets from your public timeline you can also see all mentions associated with your account, as well as tweets posted from your account: A great feature here is that if there is a thread associated with a tweet you can click on the “view thread” link and see the entire thread from within the Twitter tool. You can also access this via Raven’s slick iPhone/iPad app Campaign Reporting Much like the link tools are worth the full subscription for me, if you have a need for custom reporting then Raven’s Campaign Reporting features are probably worth the price of admission for you. In lockstep with their other tools, the Campaign Reporting feature set is super easy to use: You can quickly create white-labeled, customized reports for the following modules within Raven: Link Building Twitter Rankings Facebook Keyword Research Competitor Research Social Media Monitoring (track mentions of your brand and/or keywords related to your service. It also allows you to manage overall sentiment and track daily buzz) Google Analytics The reporting options include the ability for you to use customized descriptions to explain different parts of the report, summary pages for different sections, and Raven will even generate a table of contents for you. Brand Templates Here you can quickly create a completely customized brand template for use with your reports, just click New Brand Template in the campaign home screen. Give the template a name: Assign it to a website, a profile or an account: Pick a custom logo or text header: Customize the colors and the footer text Customize the appearance of your ranking results (keyword and rank alignment, numbers/+/-/arrows) Report Templates Report Templates allow you to configure specific aspects of each report, saving you from having to create them over and over again for each client or each report: Similar to a Brand Template you start by clicking “New Report Template” in the Campaign Report screen. What I like about these reports is that they are fully customizable. Maybe you have clients that just hire you for keyword research, or just links, or both of those and social media (and so on). Well with the customization flexibility of these reports you can set up a custom template for just about any reporting need you may come across. So name your report (I did Test 1) and you’ll see the creation options on the left side: To give you an idea of how deep your customization and reporting options are, here is that left bar fully extended: Every singe one of those tabs is a customizable report So you just click on the ones you want to add and they are added to the report template. Customizing Reporting Fields When you add the fields to a template, or when you are creating the report, you can expand the section and customize each one (the summary page and title are report-wide options, but they each have other options depending on the piece you are reporting on). Here’s the customization options you get with the link detail module: Once you add more than one, you can collapse them and reorder them in a drag and drop fashion: Scheduling and Auto Delivery Maybe you want to auto-deliver reports to employees for further customization or presentation work, or maybe you want to set and forget the delivery of reports to your clients. You can send reports as attached PDF’s or as trackable download links. You can do monthly, daily, weekly, or quarterly reports and select a day between 1-28 as well as define a custom date range. Create the Report It’s really easy to create a detailed, customized report within Raven. Name your report, select your brand and report templates, set you scheduling and delivery options, and create! It is really that simple. As mentioned in the Report Template section you can add, customize, and arrange all those reporting areas to suit your reporting needs. Additional Features While I focused on key areas that sold me on Raven, I also utilize their other tools. In addition to the tools mentioned above Raven’s tools also include Blog Manager - manage unlimited WordPress blogs (or any blog that supports XML-RPC Competitor Manager - track competitors and see key metrics like PageRank, pages in Google’s index, and links. Contact Manager - this is where Raven stores (via this feature and via the Link Manager) contact information (mailing address, email, phone number, username, company, etc) which you can assign to different links, websites, and tasks Content Manager - a place where you can manager articles, website content, and posts. You can add keyword analyzer features to check frequency, density, and relevance. You can also list where the article or post was used (quite handy for link building campaigns) Design Analyzer - what I really like about this tool is the ability to look at your website in a Lynx browser Event Manager - similar to GA annotations, the event manager can help you track any type of event related to your site. You can even include these in your reports, which is great for in-house record-keeping and/or client reports. Firefox Toolbar - a killer link building assistant as discussed in the link section of this review. You can easily switch between your site profiles in the toolbar, use the analyzer features, and use logins for different social media personas. Keyword Manager - a place to store potential and active keywords. A handy tagging system can be used to group keywords and you can add them to your rank tracker in one click. Persona Manager - store multiple social network profiles and logins. In addition, you can also share these with staff members. This functionality is also available in the Toolbar. Quality Analyzer - you can use this in your Raven account and from the Toolbar (which is a nice feature when scouring the web for links). It measures the site’s indexed page count in Google and Yahoo, links from Yahoo, .edu links, .gov links, domain age, domain expiration, Google PageRank, Alexa Traffic Rank, and whether or not the site is in DMOZ. It assigns a numerical score based on this data. Research Assistant - enter a domain to see data regarding the site’s paid keywords, organic keywords, and competitors in both. You can one-click add a keyword or a competing URL to either the keyword/competition manager or to your SERP tracker (rank checker). Enter a keyword to see matching keywords and related keyword with data from SEM Rush, Google, and Wordtracker. View a page to see semantic data powered by OpenCalais.Com and keywords (related to the page’s content) from AlchemyAPI.Com. SERP Tracker - Raven’s rank checker, runs once per week automatically, has historical chart and data viewing capabilities, and supports a bunch of international versions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google Analytics Integration - tie in your Google Analytics account for easy viewing and slick reporting. Social Media - in addition to Facebook and Twitter Raven also offers brand/keyword monitoring services, integration with KnowEm and Omgili. Website Directory - records of all the websites used in your campaign with filtering options to sort out different site and link types. iPhone and iPad apps Give Raven a Try Raven’s integration is slick and powerful: Google, SEM Rush, and Wordtracker for keyword research Majestic SEO & SeoMoz for link building and research Google Analytics integration Twitter & Facebook integration with lots of engagement goodies Raven currently offers a free 30 trial, no credit card required, on all their plans. The combination of SEO tools, link building tools, social media integration, and custom reporting options were strong selling points for me especially at the price points Raven offers. I think you can also see the significant time saving benefits Raven provides, especially in the reporting module. There isn’t much to lose, a free 30 day trial that doesn’t require you to enter any payment information. So give Raven’s SEO Tools a try. Pricing and Free Trial Info

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Raven SEO Tools Review

Today, Eric Schmidt and Ivan Seidenberg, Chairman and CEO of Verizon, will announce a joint proposal for an open Internet. We’ve been working with Verizon to find common ground on the issue of net neutrality for nearly a year—last October we released a shared statement of principles , and in January, we made a joint filing to the FCC . We hope today’s proposal, a suggested legislative framework for consideration by lawmakers, helps to advance the debate over open Internet rules in Washington. We also believe that it is best for users and for the web. For more information, read the full post on our Public Policy blog . Posted by Karen Wickre, Editor, Google Blog team

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A joint policy proposal for an open Internet

Marketing generally has 2 core strategies in terms of customers: finding new customers & keeping your current/old customers happy. The best businesses tend to keep the interest of their customers for months and years through consistently improving their products and services to deliver more value. Whereas the other sorts of businesses tend to be hard-close / hype driven & always promoting a new product / software / scheme. It is never a complete system being sold, but some “insider secret” shortcut that unearths millions automatically while you sleep - perpetually. One of the problems with false scarcity hype launches is that it attracts the type of customers who can’t succeed . The people who are receptive to that sort of marketing want to be sold a dream, they are not the type of people who want to put the time and effort in to become successful. They are at stage 2 in this video : “my life sucks” … so sell me a story that will instantly make everything better without requiring any change from me at all. Another one of the problems with the hype launch business model is that it requires you to keep repeating the sales process like a traveling salesman . Each day you need to think up a new scheme or angle to sell a new set of crap from, and you have to hope that the web has a short enough memory that the scammy angles used to pitch past hyped up product launches don’t come to bite you in the ass. I don’t mind when the get rich quick market work their core market, as there is a group of weak minded individuals who are addicted to buying that stuff . But I always get pissed off when someone claims that your field is trash or a scam (as an angle to sell something else), and then they later start trying to paint themselves as an expert in your field. Here is a video snippet of Ryan Deiss exclaiming his ignorance of the SEO field & how he got ripped off thrice because he knew so little he couldn’t tell a bad service provider from a good one. “If you want to get free traffic you have to get good at the cut-throat game of SEO (which I for one am not). … SEO for most of us isn’t the right answer.” - Ryan Deiss And his latest info-product (in perhaps a series of dozens of them?) is called Perpetual Traffic Formula. In the squeeze page he highlights that it offers you the opportunity to… “Discovering a crack in Google algorithm so big it simply can’t be patched. Being able repeat the process for similar results in UNLIMITED niches.” You don’t have to be an expert to create an info-product ! The Droid has a pretty good review of how awful his sites are doing in terms of ” perpetual traffic .” If you want to buy from a person who *always* has another new product with a secret short cut to sell, Ryan is THE guy. If you want to learn how to evaluate the quality of products being sold, here are some good tips on that front . And if you want to get a good overview of the internet marketing world for free you will love this .

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Ryan Deiss Perpetual Traffic Formula Review

Marketing generally has 2 core strategies in terms of customers: finding new customers & keeping your current/old customers happy. The best businesses tend to keep the interest of their customers for months and years through consistently improving their products and services to deliver more value. Whereas the other sorts of businesses tend to be hard-close / hype driven & always promoting a new product / software / scheme. It is never a complete system being sold, but some “insider secret” shortcut that unearths millions automatically while you sleep - perpetually. One of the problems with false scarcity hype launches is that it attracts the type of customers who can’t succeed . The people who are receptive to that sort of marketing want to be sold a dream, they are not the type of people who want to put the time and effort in to become successful. They are at stage 2 in this video : “my life sucks” … so sell me a story that will instantly make everything better without requiring any change from me at all. Another one of the problems with the hype launch business model is that it requires you to keep repeating the sales process like a traveling salesman . Each day you need to think up a new scheme or angle to sell a new set of crap from, and you have to hope that the web has a short enough memory that the scammy angles used to pitch past hyped up product launches don’t come to bite you in the ass. I don’t mind when the get rich quick market work their core market, as there is a group of weak minded individuals who are addicted to buying that stuff . But I always get pissed off when someone claims that your field is trash or a scam (as an angle to sell something else), and then they later start trying to paint themselves as an expert in your field. Here is a video snippet of Ryan Deiss exclaiming his ignorance of the SEO field & how he got ripped off thrice because he knew so little he couldn’t tell a bad service provider from a good one. “If you want to get free traffic you have to get good at the cut-throat game of SEO (which I for one am not). … SEO for most of us isn’t the right answer.” - Ryan Deiss And his latest info-product (in perhaps a series of dozens of them?) is called Perpetual Traffic Formula. In the squeeze page he highlights that it offers you the opportunity to… “Discovering a crack in Google algorithm so big it simply can’t be patched. Being able repeat the process for similar results in UNLIMITED niches.” You don’t have to be an expert to create an info-product ! The Droid has a pretty good review of how awful his sites are doing in terms of ” perpetual traffic .” If you want to buy from a person who *always* has another new product with a secret short cut to sell, Ryan is THE guy. If you want to learn how to evaluate the quality of products being sold, here are some good tips on that front . And if you want to get a good overview of the internet marketing world for free you will love this .

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Ryan Deiss Perpetual Traffic Formula Review

Recently, there have been a series of negative articles about content farms. Content farms, such as Demand Media’s eHow and similar low-cost content publication sites, are now deemed an industry “concern”. “Industry” being the traditional publishing idustry, and concern presumably being “competitive threat”. A trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document entitled ” Council To Counter Web Content Generators Growing Clout “. They talk about “job threatened journalists” and “diminishing content standards”. Look, see what happens when the proletariat gets their hands on the printing press! The pundits have also weighed in. So many journalists, eh. Looks like an over-supply if you ask me Some of them could learn a thing or two from SEOs. For starters, many seem to be working on the false premise that Google returns “quality” results. Since when has Google ever been about “quality” results? Google’s aim is to return links the searcher finds relevant . “Quality” and relevance may not be the same thing, and thinking in terms of an arbitrary notion such as quality is to misunderstand what Google does. For example, if a searcher, with a below-average level of reading in English wants a quick answer to a question about the common cold, then who’s to say a simple, peer-produced bullet-point explanation is less relevant than a doctoral thesis on the same topic? Everyone benefits when the answer is factually correct, of course, but there’s nothing to say the content mill won’t offer factually accurate content just because the production process is low cost. If geared towards rankings, the content may also offer the facts in a format the user finds more useful. Google is mostly about utility. It’s about providing value to the end user. “Quality” is very much in the eye of the beholder. Let’s also not forget Google argue that Adwords - advertisements - are content, which are also rewarded by a relevance algorithm. I’m guessing the council won’t be arguing that advertisements can be a form of quality content any time soon. And what does quality mean anyway? And who defines it? I think I can guess what the elitists at the ICSC may argue - they know what it is, and they will define it! Nice work if you can get it, I guess. Solutions To The Content Crisis One solution they offer to this perceived “content crisis” is to create a set of public guidelines for internet content, or an accreditation process for syndicated content. Heh. Reminds me of the SEO “best practices” debates of years past. The result will be the same, of course - they’ll end up talking to an audience that consists entirely of themselves. Everyone else will be getting on with the job of producing content. What concerns us is that most of these new content syndicators are producing low-quality articles that are link based,” said Tim Duncan, the ICSC’s recently installed executive director. “They are designed to score high on search. That drives down high quality content. Wikipedia, and white hat SEOs, might not agree, of course. Content can both be ranked well and be highly relevant. This is, after all, Google’s aim. Some ICSC members have even advocated reaching out to Google to urge the search giant to tweak its algorithm to give more weight to content quality in its search results Hilarious. I think they mean “any content they think is quality” Perhaps Google can send them a regular cheque each week, too! I suspect money is the true driving force, as opposed to any real concern for editorial standards. Have you seen some of the trash the MSM serves up ? Quality stuff, certainly. At the end of the day, quality standards arguments are pointless. Besides the confused frame of journalistic news vs Q&A-style content, the end user decides the level of quality they will accept and pay for on the internet. The real problem traditional publishing and the mainstream media is facing is that their business model is screwed. Their content production costs are simply too high, and they are being undercut. If they think that people want higher quality, then the answer is simple - produce it and let the visitor decide. And get some good SEO advice, so they don’t inadvertently bury it. Google Joining In? In a further twist, Google might be looking to join the content mills at their own game. An interesting patent, ” Identifying Inadequate Search Content ” identifies keyword areas where there is search demand, but low levels of relevant content. That’s essentially what Demand Media does. Assuming Google don’t/can’t get into publishing for every vertical in existence , Google would do well to make this information publicly available. Especially to their hordes of Adsensers How You Can Create A Successful Content Mill Ignore mainstream media journalists and whiners who like to form councils. Understand that Google is looking for relevant content. “Relevance” is, in the end, deemed by the searcher. If there are a lot of searches for “pay levels for doctors” and you publish a page that shows “pay levels for doctors”, then you are producing relevant content and Google will reward you. Google are, no doubt, measuring how relevant visitors think the information is, and there are various signals that could be used to determine this. These signals will not come from a council of elitist, self-interested old media. The signals will be based on user activity and user voting patterns. These signals must be scalable i.e. links, visits, timeliness, recommendations, frequency of appearance, re-quoting, etc. Increases in “quality” i.e. content depth and accuracy - will come from end-user voting. If users want deeper answers to search questions, either Google will deliver it, or users will abandon Google and go somewhere that provides it. Perhaps that’s what ICSC should do - start their own search engine Having said all that, a lot of samey, lightweight content won’t survive in the long run, because Google likes to provide variety in their result sets. Look for ways to differentiate your content. Quality is only one - arbitrary - point of differentiation. You’d be better concentrating on aspects such as ease of access, readability, findability, relevance and freshness. Keep the end user firmly in mind.

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Content Farming - SEOs Get It, Journalists Don’t

Last week, we shared a video on how to get the most out of your automatic alerts . Now that you’re familiar with automatic alerts, you know that Google Analytics has an intelligence engine that monitors your traffic and posts alerts when it sees something unusual. Now we want to tell you about “custom alerts.” With custom alerts, you can add on to this capability and tell Google Analytics to also watch out for specific things that you know you’re interested in. Custom alerts can be used in so many ways that it’s sometimes hard to know where and when to incorporate them into your workflow. This week’s video, also below, shows how to use custom alerts as a campaign management tool . The idea is that, when you set up a new campaign, you set up alerts that help you manage the campaign — for example, alerts that trigger when revenue from the campaign increases or decreases. Campaign management is just one of the ways you can use custom alerts. We’d love to hear how you’re using them. Feel free to share your own tips in the comments. Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Analytics Intelligence Tips: Custom Alerts

Every day, 6.7 billion people view the world through their own unique lens. Imagine if there was a way to collect all of these perspectives, to aggregate and mold them into the cohesive story of a single day on earth. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of “Life in a Day,” a historic cinematic experiment that will attempt to do just that: document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world. On July 24, you have 24 hours to capture a snapshot of your life on camera. You can film the ordinary — a sunrise, the commute to work, a neighborhood soccer match, or the extraordinary — a baby’s first steps, your reaction to the passing of a loved one, or even a marriage. Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of films such as The Last King of Scotland , Touching the Void and One Day in September , will then edit the most compelling footage into a feature documentary film, to be executive-produced by Ridley Scott, the director behind films like Gladiator , Black Hawk Down , Thelma & Louise , Blade Runner and Robin Hood . LG Electronics is supporting “Life in a Day” as a key part of its long-standing “Life’s Good” campaign and to support the creation of quality online content that can be shared and enjoyed by all. The film will premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and if your footage makes it into the final cut, you’ll be credited as a co-director and may be one of 20 contributors selected to attend the premiere. Want to take part? Here’s what to do. 1. Visit the “Life in a Day” channel and learn more about the project. Be sure to read through the steps you need to take to participate and the guidelines for creating your video(s). Also check out some of the sample videos for inspirational ideas. 2. On July 24, capture your day on camera. 3. Upload your footage to the “Life in a Day” channel any time before July 31. Regardless of whether your footage makes it into the final film, your video(s) will live on on the “Life in a Day” channel as a time capsule that will tell future generations what it was like to be alive on July 24, 2010. Posted by Tim Partridge, Product Marketing Manager, watching “Life in a Day” trailer

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Life in a Day

It’s the 10th Anniversary of Web Analytics TV! Happy Birthday to us! In this exciting series, with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, you ask and vote on your favorite web analytics questions via our Google Moderator site for Web Analytics TV and we answer them. Here is the list of last week’s questions . In this action packed episode we discuss: Tracking un-subscriptions with negative values Best practices tracking social media Sources of keywords outside of Paid Search to help site optimization Custom reports sorted by date Tracking form validation with Google Analytics Why Exit Rate is 0% in the Google Analytics navigation summary report Tips to avoid sampling on landing pages Configuring Google Analytics to track test and production environments Comparing Google Analytics and Webmaster tools Best practices for tracking PDF downloads Getting the full referring URL in Google Analytics Sharing custom reports with advanced segments Best way to find keywords from mobile traffic Tracking dimensions over time in Google Analytics Tracking the impact of interactive TV Here are the links to the topics we discuss: Best practices for creating custom alerts 4Q/Google Analytics survey integration Google Webmaster Tools Google Analytics Event Tracking Overview Obtaining the full referral url in Google Analytics Taking screenshots in OS X and Windows Migrating to Async Tracking Tracking Online’s impact of Offline campaigns If you found this post helpful, we’d love to hear your comments, please share them via the comment form below. If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question and vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site . Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video. Thanks! Posted By Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

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Web Analytics TV #10 with Avinash and Nick

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links. If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools. A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility. This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and “spread the word.” Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site’s reputation in a positive way. Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site. With Google Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We’ve seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site’s source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site. However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn’t rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort. It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them. Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes. It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it’s important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors. Social bookmarks on YouTube enable users to share content easily Finally, consider making linking to your site easier for less tech savvy users. Similar to the way we do it on YouTube, offering bookmarking services for social sites like Twitter or Facebook can help spread the word about the great content on your site and draw users’ attention. As usual, we’d like to hear your opinion. You’re welcome to comment here in the blog, or join our Webmaster Help Forum community. Written by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin

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Quality links to your site