Charities have a unique SEO problem: there’s not a lot of people searching to give to them, which makes keyword discovery difficult. I saw that with Mada Center, a soup kitchen in Montreal that I tried to do PPC for but we failed for lack of keywords, and recently have come across a similar challenge for Achiya, an Israeli charity for learning disabled kids whom I work with via illuminea, a web agency in Jerusalem.

Without giving away the farm, what we’ve decided to do is produce content to brand them as the experts about their issue, and target terms related to learning disabilities.
For instance, we want to give parents tips about coping with ADHD kids, giving techniques on doing homework with the kids and so forth.

Some that sell products as a means of fund-raising have it easier, or participate in well known stuff like ‘adopt-a-child programs’ but it’s generally uncommon for people to be searching for charities to give to.

I’d be curious to hear if you guys ever did SEO for a charity?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

2011 was a beautiful year for guest posts on SEO ROI as more and more of the web’s top SEOs shared advanced ideas and original material, right here on this blog. I don’t publish rehash, and it shows in the unique tactics, case studies and tools reviewed.

If you want to guest post, read the guest posting guidelines then contact me. Benefits include links, the attention of 2600+ RSS subs, 1600+ emails subs and social love…

Guest Article Case Studies & Research

What Do CTRs Look Like By Position In 2011? – This excellent research piece by Phil Golobish (T: @saintphilip) of Slingshot SEO was a preview of their massive research piece featuring data from 170,000 visitors to their client websites.

Not to be outdone, a glorious case study on mobile web analytics and conversion optimization came to us from the skillful Stephan Croome, who sells ipads, talks about hair styles and dreams up marketing ideas like www.startupbeanbags.com.

Longtime contributor Everett Sizemore taught us about affiliate marketing, and specifically how an affiliate got merchants to promote him! Everett blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.

Ben Jackson wrote me a clever link request email that turned into a case study on his approach. As a result, Ben published his experience with broken-link link building (broken link building for short), where you look for dead pages or sites and go after the people who linked to them… Ben writes at SEO Discovery, an SEO blog with link building strategies, amonst other goodies.

We got another two case studies in a single article by Liz Krause, on how to reverse negative reviews. Liz writes for EtherSpeak, a company specializing in Unified Communications for internet phone service. They are a Microsoft SIP provider and also offer internet encryption for business class VOIP.

Guest Posts on Tactics:

Post-Panda, Here’s How To Beat Scrapers Outranking You With Stolen Content was a guest post from Everett Sizemore, who is an eCommerce SEO consultant operating off his 38 acre farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. He enjoys gardening, collecting eggs and tackling tough SEO problems.

How To Recover From A Wild Panda Attack: 3 Cheap Tools
This post was written by guest Brian Patterson, a partner at SEO consulting firm MangoCo.

4 Advanced Ecommerce Tactics

This guest article was by James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

Can you rank on page 1 for one-word keywords? Find out the inside details how in another great guest post by Brian S Patterson, partner at a Virginia SEO firm known as MangoCo. You can also follow Brian on Twitter!

How do you produce professional video for your blog? We learned all about angles, lighting, editing and more in a guest article by Andy Havard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company that also does corporate vids.

Guest Posts About Tools:
… Or Tools for Guest Posts: How to Use Scrapebox to Find Guest Blogging Opportunities/

This guest post came from Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services.

6 WordPress Plugins That Automate Your SEO was an experienced based guide by Pedro Cardoso who runs a site teaching folks to fix their slow @#!*% computers, as well as his blog, slices of life.

Found the content here interesting? You can be featured here in 2012! Read the guest post guidelines then contact me with your idea. Preference is obviously given to case studies, tactics and anything original you can share!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Need A Free Ebook Directory? Here’s the Ebook Directory list….

Hat tip to Eric Ward for telling me about ebook publishing as a link building technique. It obviously helps more if those ebooks are free. Check out Eric’s link opportunity alert newsletter for more…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

There’s an eternal debate amongst copywriters whether long copy or short copy is better, and the truth is that there’s no absolutely correct answer – the length of your copy depends on how much persuading your prospects need. Here’s the simple guide as to what factors influence how much copy you need.


If you like this post, get my latest posts by email or RSS.

Factors influencing choice of long copy vs short copy:

• Price: The more expensive a product, the more persuasion is necessary, and thus the longer the copy. Enterprise software needs longer copy than my free email or RSS subscriptions.
• Safety: What are the risks (other than financial) posed by the product? The fewer worries people have about safety, the less copy you need. For instance, you typically need long copy to sell travel to a dangerous or remote area requires copy assuaging fears of all the potential dangers, be it from the environment (dirty water), animals (think anacondas on Amazon treks) or people (war, crime).
• Familiarity / Complexity: The better known you are or the product is, the shorter your copy can be. Notice how there’s no copy explaining the benefits of bubble gum at the checkout counter, and there’s just a price sticker?
• Privacy: Short copy is just fine for those times where you’re requesting very little information. For instance, dating sites typically have a free signup form with under 5 fields on a page with a title and a few bullet points.
• Non-textual means of persuasion: Does your product have some kind of sample or demo available? Ice cream and cars sell at very different price points and have drastically different levels of complexity… but you can sample both, with a taster spoon or test drive. Steve Jobs did a great job demonstrating Apple products and tantalizing crowds. Video demonstrations and pictures portraying benefits are also often helpful. Letting someone’s senses persuade them is often more effective than talking yourself.
• Immediacy: If you have to get someone to take action now, you’ll need more copy. This typically applies with limited quantity availabilities.

Note: High price is a trump card that almost always requires long copy. The exception is for existing customers and especially reorders.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This guest post is by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services. We met at SMX West a few years ago and he recently got back in touch to see about guest posting… I suspect this technique is how he found out about me taking guest posts !

ScrapeBox kicks butt for link building. It has dramatically sped up my link building process more than any other tool I’ve used. This post will show you exactly how I use ScrapeBox to find dozens of high quality guest blogging opportunities – in minutes instead of hours.

What the heck is ScrapeBox?

ScrapeBox is a powerful tool that’s popular with affiliate marketers and those who like to push the boundaries of automated blog commenting and trackback posting.

But don’t let that scare you away.

ScrapeBox can be used to speed up regular link building tasks too. I’ve found it particularly handy for uncovering good guest blogging opportunities.

How? ScrapeBox lets you harvest a list of blogs that accept guest posts, then gives you the ability to sort that list by PageRank to identify your strongest targets.

Let’s go through the step-by-step the process I use. This is a real example of how I used ScrapeBox to find guest blogging opportunities for Adwords articles I plan to write.

Find Guest Post Opportunities with ScrapeBox

1. From the main ScrapeBox screen, enter your keyword (adwords in this example) in the first box and “guest post” in the second box. Use quotation marks around guest post to make it an exact match search.

2. Select the search engines you want to scrape. In this example, I’ve used Google.com, but you also scrape Yahoo, Bing and AOL. You can also manually add the Google CCTLD of your choice, to help you focus on your target countries.

3. Click the “Start Harvesting” button and ScrapeBox starts to do its magic. Depending on the speed of your proxies (and you’ll want to use proxies to avoid getting blocked), the scrape can take a few seconds or a few minutes.

4. Now you have a big ole list of URL’s, 991 in this example, but you need to clean it up a bit. So using the Remove/Filter drop down in the Manage Lists options, we’ll remove Duplicate URLs.

5. Get the PageRank of the Domain using the Get Domain PageRank option in the Manage Lists section. I’m interested in the Domain PageRank, as opposed to the URL PageRank, as it’s a better gauge of the link value your site will receive from your guest post.

6. Click the Import/Export URL’s & PR Export drop-down and select CSV. This will export the URL list with PR values into Excel.

7. Open the Excel document. Filter out the N/A PageRank values, and then sort from largest to smallest PageRank. Now you have a list of blogs that accept guest posts (or have run guest posts in the past) that you can target, ranked by their PageRank.

Granted, not every URL will be a good guest posting opportunity. But with a few minutes of refining, you can identify dozens of high quality opportunities. Here’s a sample of the Adwords guest post sources I found:

This is just one example of how you can use ScrapeBox for link building. If you’re not using ScrapeBox now, I’d highly encourage you to try it out. Its $97, but you can easily find coupons for a $40 discount.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This guest post is by Andy Havard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company that also does corporate vids.

You’ve no doubt seen the slick, professional video blogs Google and its representatives have churned out lately. Videos shot with pristine white backgrounds, inviting speakers and a whole lot of views. They’re impressive video blogs right? Well the following article explores how you can make the same professional looking corporate video blogs from the comfort of your own home.

Why Create A Video Blog

A video blog is a great way to showcase your brand or business as an approachable and engaging organisation. Corporate video productions allow organisations to connect with potential clients and show a human side to their brand or business. A prospective client will always feel more comfortable using an organisation if they feel they know the people behind it.

Sales pitches, adverts and marketing strategies can’t connect with an audience like a personal one-on-one video can. This is why so many organisations of all niches and sizes are starting to create video content to engage with their future customers.

Where Should I Film My Video Blog?

You don’t actually need to step foot outside your house or flat to find a great filming location. A garage, spare room or simply just a room that has a bit of free space to set up your equipment could work perfectly as a makeshift studio.

What Equipment Do I Need?

What Background Should I Use?

The infamous Google white background can make any video look powerful and professional. It’s a background technique used by many corporates in their video blogs and it works like a charm. Surprisingly it doesn’t actually cost an awful lot to create this effect. If you’ve got a bit of a budget then perhaps you can afford a film standard white screen, but you can create the same effect with some white sheets or even just by painting a wall in a glossy white shade.

What Camera Should I Film With?

Depending on the style of your video, whether you want to appear sat down for a desk-side chat or standing up for a more animated performance you may need some different equipment. If you’re sat down you could use anything from a standard Webcam to a high end film camera depending on your budget. If you’re presenting a standing presentation you’ll need either a Flip cam or a standard camcorder and you’ll definitely require a tripod to position it. If you’re shooting at desk height you may find you can rest your camera on an object nearby to save you purchasing a tripod. The quality of your images will depend on the quality of your camera, but even the most poor quality visuals can be boosted in post production.

What Lighting Should I Buy?

Your lighting is what makes both you and your background look slick. You can use anything from household standing lamps (around £40) to industry standard florescent lighting (around £100+ per light). The brightness of your image can also be boosted in post-production so don’t fret if the lighting isn’t as bright as you’d hoped.

You’ll need to position your lighting as follows; one light to the right of your background, one light to the left and one left next to your camera positioned at a 30 degree angle to the subject you’re filming (perhaps yourself). This three-point lighting will help to give you the best quality lighting for your video production.

Here’s a quick sketch of what I mean:

What Microphone Should I Use?

If you’re using a Webcam or any type of video camera you may find you have a built in microphone that works rather well. Whether you opt to buy an external microphone will depend on your cameras positioning and whether it can efficiently pick up your voice from your presenting position. If you have to get an external microphone choose a lapel/lav mic. These mics capture great quality audio and are very easy to hide during filming.

What Do I Do When I’ve Finished Recording?

When you’ve wrapped finishing your video blog it’s time to get editing and work on the post production side of your corporate video. You can get a variety of free editing software if you’re a Mac or Windows user (iMovie/Windows Movie Maker), but it might be worth paying for a more extensive piece of software (Adobe Premier), which will offer some extra tools in post production.

When you edit your video try and keep it as short as possible; short and snappy is always a winner.

The post production stage will allow you to:

• Increase the brightness on your video if your lighting wasn’t bright enough during filming,
• Alter any colour aspect of your image you wish to enhance whether you want to give your video a warm orange hue, a black and white finish or a neutral white hue to make the image seem more crisp
• Get rid of any shadows that are being cast during filming or reduce any light glares or reflections spoiling your shot.

Using such tools will help make your videos look as professional and polished as possible.

In Sum…

Follow these tips to create effective corporate video blogs that present your brand or business as a powerful and approachable organisation.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

1) I got engaged.
2) Preparing the book ordering site. I’ve done two rounds of usability tests and set up a split test on the book chapter download to see if I can increase performance there.
2.1 ) Shipping pre-orders.
3) Creating a new free WP plugin based on one of the book’s tactics. It’ll help with content marketing. You can comment if you want to beta test, but I expect feedback. Expect this to seriously rock. If you’re not already subscribing by RSS, add my RSS feed to your reader now to get your free copy first once released! You can also get my latest posts by email.
4) Planning lots of guest posts and promotional content.
5) Planning a big piece of content: a remote usability testing guide based on my experience improving the book’s site.
6) Enjoying the beautiful city and life that is Jerusalem, where I live.
7) Applying to speak at WordCamp Jerusalem.

Like I said, get my latest posts by email or rss! Or get a free chapter from my advanced SEO book and see what all the fuss is about…

Jon Villiard, one of the pre-order customers, with his copy:

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Try the Internet Archive’s 2M+ ebooks and texts.

Of course, there’s also the Gutenberg project which everyone knows, but it’s only got 36K docs, and anyways I don’t think the IA’s database is as well known.

Liked this tip? Add my rss feed to your reader to get all my latest posts!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post from Everett Sizemore, who is an eCommerce SEO consultant operating off his 38 acre farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. He enjoys gardening, collecting eggs and tackling tough SEO problems.

Want to fight the scrapers outranking you with your own content post-Panda?

Google is losing the war against content scrapers and we’re the ones paying the price. It has gotten even worse since Panda, despite efforts to fix the problem. I know of several dozen websites that are being outranked by scrapers.

While Google might hope we’re going to do their job for them with tags like rel canonical, and rel author, this problem isn’g going away any time soon. You know things are bad when powerhouses like TIME.com are outranked by sites like this.

Fortunately, there are many ways to keep sites from scraping your content, including easy ones like simply asking them to remove it, or bureaucratic messes like filing a DMCA complaint and reporting it to Google. But neither of these options is practical when your’e dealing with more than a few sites or a few dozen pages of content.

In looking for an effective strategy to combat scraper bots you should consider a multi-faceted approach that is scaleable, and then pick up any that get through the cracks using cease and desist letters and reports to Google and/or their host.

The Multi-Faceted Approach To Fighting Scrapers:

#1 – Due Dilligence
First, make sure your message is heard loud and clear. Have your copyright visible in the footer of every page, and include something like the following on your Terms page, as well as in an area commented out within the body copy code:

<!– COPYRIGHT NOTICE: The content of this page is owned by MyWebsite.com and is protected under copyright law. All rights are reserved. Using this content in any way is forbidden, except when permission has been given explicitly in writing from MyWebsite.com. Any use outside the given permissions constitutes copyright violation and will be prosecuted within the full extent of the law. All access to this website is logged. –>

While that probably won’t stop a lot of scrapers, it provides you with the first line of defense and shows that you have done your due diligence from a legal perspective should you have to file a DMCA report.

#2 – Robots.txt
Disallow any bots that you don’t want accessing your site from your robots.txt file. While a lot of scrapers will ignore your robots.txt file (more on that later), many of the popular tools used to scrape websites do respect this file. As an example, you might consider these two lines:
User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 1.0 Disallow: /
User-agent: Yahoo Pipes 2.0 Disallow: /

Disallow a specific file and then record any traffic that accesses the file, which should also have a robots noindex, nofollow tag on it. For example…
Disallow: /do-not-open.html

#2.5 – Bait the Trap
Now link to the disallowed file from within the body area of every page on your site. It can just be an href tag, or you can put the link around a 1 pixel image if you like. All of the “real” search engines will respect your robots.txt file and not visit that URL. If they don’t respect that file then you can bet it’s a rogue bot, even if they are “spoofing” Googlebot’s user-agent.

#3 – Htaccess (Or your Windows server equivalent.)
You should be recording which IP addresses, referrers and user agents access that do-not-open.html page, whether with a script or just by viewing the log files. The next step is to block all of those from accessing your site. You have some options here. For instance, you could deny them access, send them to a custom page (like ScrewYou.html), or get a little tricky and redirect them to their own IP address, which has the benefit of crashing some bots by sending them through an infinite loop. Eventually they’ll get the point and just stop coming to your site.

You can try and get a head-start on the process by blocking the scrapers that are already on blacklists like…
Referrer blacklist by Perishable Press
User Agent blacklist by Perishable Press

For more technical instructions, including the code to use in your htaccess file, see this great post on PerishablePress.com: Eight Ways to Blacklist with Apache’s mod_rewrite

There are probably as many ways to deal with content scrapers as there are ways to scrape content, including several WordPress plugins that mostly just ensure the scrapers give you a link by embedding them into your RSS feeds. What are your favorite methods and why?

[Editor's footnote: Conversely, if you have legitimate uses for scrapers, here's an article on three web screen scrapers for SEO. And if you liked this post, add my rss feed to your reader! ]

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

If you’ve read about Panda, you’ll know that the quality of your writing and editing is a key notion targeted by Google’s update.

So why not try a tool that will evaluate your readability?

This is in a similar vein to Brian Patterson’s recent post suggesting a grammar checker, but the tool I just linked to evaluates what level your writing style is at. Are you writing for the plebeian masses or for the elite?

On a related note, I saw a sweet, original tip by my friend Ann Smarty on querying Google by author. Helpful for hiring writers, for example…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

While reading this recent commentary on Google’s progressive rollouts of algorithms worldwide, I picked up on Aaron’s mention that some sites competing in languages with less content are less likely to get whacked.

“In most foreign markets Google is not likely to be as aggressive with this type of algorithm as they are in the United States (because foreign ad markets are less liquid and there is less of a critical mass of content in some foreign markets), but I would be willing to bet that Google will be pretty aggressive with it in the UK when it rolls out.” [Emphasis mine.]

How do you figure out what those languages are?

Wikipedia.

Relative sizes of article collections in Wikipedia when comparing between languages

Of course, you need to take that information with a grain of salt. Obviously Wikipedia’s data is not necessarily representative of the web as a whole. Cultural differences, for example, may make speakers of one language disproportionately more likely to contribute to Wikipedia than others. But it’s a data point worth considering, if of course you have the capacity to compete in more than one language. This is the sort of critical thinking encouraged and taught in my book, of course.

“Whooooosh!” – That was the sound of dozens of content farms going multilingual .

If you liked this post, add my RSS feed to your reader!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Google’s promoting scrapers over Time magazine. Seems Google’s exception list isn’t as robust as one might have thought, or perhaps it’s that the news business just ain’t what it was…

Ideas why this is happening?

Update: 1 idea is that it’s tied to the latest algo change. See also Mashable’s status.

One guess I’d have is a high ratio of surrounding junk to the main body of content. That would fit under the layout/design/user experience angle targeted by the latest algo update.

If you have a legitimate need, read this review of three web screen scrapers?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Don’t limit yourself to bidding on competitors‘ brand / trademark keywords – rank your website for them organically, too!

This is counter-intuitive to SEO consultants – what content will you write and how will you get anchor-text rich links? That’s not a rhetorical question any more – there are a few types of content you can write to rank for competitors’ trademarks and convert the traffic!

The way this question came to my attention was that a lead (referred by the awesome Gabriel Malca) asked me how to rank his Mercedes dealership for BMW keywords. The logic was that both brands feature similarly priced luxury vehicles.

At the time I recommended against it, because it’s well-known that brand-keywords are searched for by people with a specific intent – the audience is composed of brand loyalists. Can you tell someone who swears by Coke that Pepsi is equally good?

1) What about if you offered an objective comparison, though?

That may not apply specifically to a substance like Coke that is addictive, but it’s plausible that a percentage of people interested in BMWs – but who are earlier in the conversion funnel – can be swayed to buy a Mercedes based on the relative merits of each brand.

Have you ever seen product comparison tables? They list features and products, and the company whose site hosts the content has all the checkboxes marked off for its own product.

Clearly, there’s some selective attention as to what features matter. But that’s not the point. Often you are objectively better. This is the opportunity to explain why.

Note: Never trash-talk the competition. It’s uncouth. Instead, emphasize your unique added value. “That hotel may be cheaper, but we’re downtown. And we have meeting facilities, so you can host your lead for discussions and a presentation right here. That makes us better than the smaller hotel a block away [i.e. which is also downtown] that lacks meeting spaces.”

In pitches to leads, I’ve often said that the competition would also do a good job if they were hired (in cases where I knew and trusted them), but I’d provide a better service because X,Y,Z.

2) Integrate reviews of competitors – or perhaps a ratings board.

This isn’t talking badly about competitors – this is objective, third party data.

Obviously, it’s tempting to emphasize complaints, but so long as you allow positive reviews to appear as well, then the information will be trustworthy for consumers.

The simple point is that once you have people on your site reading reviews, you can upsell them on your own product.

And that’s how you write content to rank for competitors branded keywords and rank! (The unique content aspect means you’re linkworthy.)

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy this item on discovering what keywords your competitors use. You should also check out my advanced SEO book for more on the topic of competitive intelligence and advanced SEO tactics and ideas.

p.p.s. John McElborough wrote something similar: http://www.johnmcelborough.com/ranking-for-competitor-brand-terms

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I have a problem with the ‘AIDA’ formula we as marketers use.

AIDA stands for ‘Attention, Interest, Desire, Action’ and is a rough summary of the buying process/marketing process. Unfortunately, it’s too vague of an instruction set for marketers, and vague instructions lead to screw-ups in carrying them out.

So I’m changing AIDA to QPBC. It’s less catchy, but a hell of a lot more practical as far as instructions go. It’s clearer.

QPBC stands for Question, Problem, Benefit, Call.

Question – Are you {part of target audience}? Ex.: ‘Online marketer?’ That gets their attention.

“Are you John?”
-”Why yes, I am. What’s up?”

Problem – Are you struggling with {problem X}? Ex.: “Struggling with low conversion?’

“I heard you keep getting carded by bouncers.”
-[John thought bubble: Yeah, it's annoying. I want to go clubbing with my friends and actually get in!]

Benefit – Enjoy {benefit A}! Ex.: “Convert higher today!”

“I can get you in to any club on the guest list. Want my help?”
- “Sure, that’d be great.”

Call [to Action] – Use our {product Y} to solve {problem X} and get {benefit A}. “Get our free whitepaper, ‘The 10 Worst Checkout Conversion Killers’ and increase your sales!”

“Sign up to my guest list email newsletter. It’s free and gets you in regardless of age.”
- “Woohoo!”

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by John McElborough, a [ed: awesome!] freelance SEO from Brighton, England who blogs at johnmcelborough.com

There’s been a lot of talk in the SEO world of late about the idea of ‘content farms’-  sites which exist principally to attract mid to long tail search traffic through large scale content generation.

Several high profile SEO’s have been pretty critical of sites like ehow, mahalo and livestong who use these tactics. Personally if a sites earning that much cash through SEO I’d rather learn from it than criticise so for my first guest post here on Gab’s blog I want to take a closer look at long tail tactics and share some practical tips for how pretty much any site can cash in on their markets long tail potential.

Step 1: Long tail keyword research

Although essentially the concept of long tail keywords implies that research isn’t necessary I would still recommend starting any long tail campaign by researching keywords. This research will help to inform your decisions about what new content you can create and how you can best optimize existing pages for new keywords. It will also give you a better feel for how people search so if you’re producing content you’ll instinctively use the language of the searcher and drop in long tail combinations without even thinking about it.

Personally I use Wordtracker here because, despite the anomalies it throws up it makes it easy to identify low competition long tail keywords using its KEI3 scoring system. Start with a few seed keywords on a topic of your choice then sort the results by the KEI3 score and pick off all the keywords which you think you can use in your campaign.

If you’re already getting a fair bit of long tail traffic you might want to try out Hittail- its come along quite a bit from when it was first released a few years back.

Step 2: Add content to existing pages

One of the best ways to start your long tail campaign is to identify pages on your site which already rank and expand on their content to introduce more long tail keyword combinations. Although to really max out on your long tail potential you’re gonna need to be developing new content pages eventually at first what I like to do is to identify thin content pages on my site where I can add extra words and introduce more long tail combinations. The good thing about this tactic is that if your sites newish and lacking trust you’re not diluting your pagerank by creating lots of new pages to soon.

To do this I start by getting into analytics and looking for a few pages to work on. Here I want to find pages with the most search traffic but fewest keywords- the logic being these pages are likely to be performing for short tail keywords but not driving much via the long tail. I you’re using GA you can do something like this…

You can also use the top pages on domain tool (or just webmaster tools) to identify your most linked to pages and then running a word count check on these pages to pinpoint where you’ve got strong pages with low content. The fact these pages are well linked to means you should be able to bulk out the content and they should start immediately ranking for a bunch of new keywords and driving more traffic.

It should probably go without saying that you need to apply some common sense when doing this. Fill a landing page with a load of copy and you run the risk of damaging conversion rates so tread carefully if you’re doing this with key sales pages and make sure you’re measuring your conversion rates so you can measure the profitability of this tactic.

Once you have these pages identified look at the keywords which are already sending them traffic and search for related terms.

Here’s a quick example…

Webmaster tools tells me these pages have a few links pointing to them:

But right now those pages are pretty thin, lets take the Playa Den Bossa page as an example….

Check out the entrance keywords for that page – only 51- that’s not many. If we double the content of this page it could easily double the number of referring keywords and the traffic it receives. Not to mention there’s an opportunity to turn that page into a better resource. On a crude level a page with 600 words is probably more likely to attract links than a page with 300.

So with that page identified all I need to do is to reshape the content of that page to include these extra combinations. This sort of work should be real bread and butter stuff for a decent copywriter. I’ll talk a bit more about some content strategies later.

Step 3: Optimise under performing pages

Basically this is about flipping the process above and looking for pages on your site which should be driving long tail traffic but aren’t. Usually this will either be a case of tweaking the keyword strategy or boosting the page up with a few links.

To find these pages again go to Analytics and export a list of pages which get low traffic from natural search (use your own judgement what ‘low’ is for your site).

Remove pages like your privacy policy or contact page which are likely to be in there then go through and select the thick content pages which you think should be doing better. As a guide if a page has got 300 words or more on it I’d expect it to get at least a trickle of long tail traffic in most cases. Here’s a beauty…

There’s 3 things you can do with these pages, ideally do all 3.

1. Tweak the copy to include new long tail keywords from your keyword research.
2. Increase internal links to the page – ideally link to it from a page with some decent PageRank like your homepage or a top level category.
3. Build external links – if it’s a case this page is in the supplemental index it should only take one decent link (or a handful of crap links!) to lift it out. I still fall back on article marketing in many cases to link to pages like this.

Step 4: Create new pages

Like I said before to really reach your sites full long tail potential you’re gonna need to be injecting new content rich pages into it. It’s best to approach this in a complimentary manner to your other search activity so don’t just look at keywords but try and structure these new pages in a way that they have a decent chance if attracting organic links as well (link bait) and offer good value for returning visitors.

The biggest challenge here is pumping this new content into your site without damaging conversion rates or diluting the PageRank distribution of your existing pages to a point where it disrupts your rankings. Where those big ‘how to’ sites do well is by using a really efficient publishing structure so they can add hundreds or thousands of new articles a day and they all get indexed quickly and get enough exposure on the site and internal link juice for them to rank very quickly. If you look at most traditional publishers like newspapers and magazines, many of whom churn content at a similar pace, where they let themselves down in many cases is by having a poorly optimized structure so old content gets pushed down the archives and eventually drops out of the rankings.

When you’re planning your content campaign think about how new content can be integrated into your website structure. A blog is probably the simplest option although you should think about the type of content you’re going to be adding and whether it lends itself to the blog format. Q & A’s, FAQ’s, tutorials and glossaries all work really well too.

Once you have the ability to publish on your site in a scalable way you can pull together your content plan. Turn your keyword list into a list of article titles, then write a brief synopsis of what each article will contain. If you know the subject turning keywords into titles should be pretty easy, failing that ezine article has a pretty cool little title suggestion tool which I use a lot. Some of the suggestions it gives you are pretty mental but you usually get a few good ones as well…

At this stage you can either get busy creating this new content or you can just outsource it. I’ve used services like textbroker, content customs, content now and a few others in the past. The results are mixed but what I can say for certain is having very tightly focused titles and detailed article synopsis’ greatly improves the quality of work you’ll receive from this type of service.

Nowadays I prefer to hire a writer directly who actually knows the subject and can work off their own initiative. If you’re an affiliate or a business with a lack of internal resources for this type of thing I reckon this will probably be your most cost effective option.

Step 5: Dynamic content creation

This is where we get a bit more clever and take the campaign into overdrive. You’ve probably heard stories about adsense millionaires who’ve made their money with auto-generated sites? You’ve got to be pretty hardcore to make a go of this sort of thing and it doesn’t work as well as it used to, but there’s a lot you can learn from it. Here’s a few techniques which might work for your site…

Tagging & dynamic page generation

By converting your long tail keyword research into tags and gathering all the information you’ve got on your site for a that keyword you can quickly create lots and lots of new pages.

Boilerplate or macro content

I’ve talked about this before in my post on ecommerce product page optimization. Basically you take a paragraph of text and a database, like a product database and use database values to fill in blanks in the paragraph, this lets you create lots of semi unique pages.

Spinning & rewriting

Gab’s talked about this one before. It’s a bit dodgy but if you think about most of the articles demand media churn out they’re basically just rewritten from other places (actually most of the information in the world is if you think about it!). Spinning multiple versions of the same article onto your own site might not be great for user experience but it will help you target more long tail keyword variations. Why else do you think ehow would have 6 articles on cooking a damn turkey!

Content feeds

These days if you try to fill a new website with duplicate content off a feed you probably won’t get very far but established sites with strong domains still make a killing off copying other peoples content and pulling together feeds from different sources.

This page on mahalo – http://www.mahalo.com/stub/rye-bread is a nice example, a hundred words of copy rewritten from wikipedia then Google images, Youtube videos, Amazon products feeds, Twitter search results and a whole lot of ads. If you can’t beat em, join em!

Transcription

Transcription of video and audio content can be a really cost effective way to boost your long tail. Just look how much content SEOmoz get out of one of their whiteboard Friday videos. Although you need a real person to do proper transcription you can also do it with software.

UGC

Plenty of people have talked about UGC before. Reviews, comments, forum threads, answers, anything where you get other people to write stuff for you is going to boost your long tail massively.

Dynamic keyword insertion

Nothing too sophisticated about this one. Basically you take all the keyword variations you want a page to rank for and spit them out on the page under the guise of something like ‘Searches used to find this page’ like this one:

I hope this post has given you something to think about and take away. In my opinion exploiting the long tail is the biggest opportunity in natural search at the moment (and has been for a while actually) so if you can get your head around streamlining the process of long tail optimization you’re onto a winner. Please leave me a comment to let me know if this was useful, or to share your own tips.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

If so, I’d love to get a testimonial to that effect that I can use for my advanced SEO book.

Anything you can share about the following points in particular might be helpful:

• Case study
• Challenges finding time such as working 2 jobs etc
• Having a negligible budget to start with
• Before / after you started reading my blog

I’ll be happy to share the testimonial here on the blog and give you a dofollow link (with your chosen anchor text) for the time, so long as you’re being honest. Just type it into the comment box below along with your name, email and desired link/anchor text!

Thanks a bunch!

Gab

Update: Dan Hinckley of Exhibit Edge trade show exhibits is first in the comments. Thanks Dan!

Brian Patterson of Mangoco.com, a Virginia SEO company, emailed me the following.

“As a partner at a web firm increasingly focused on SEO, The SEO ROI
blog continually helps me keep in perspective that SEO isn’t just about
links or traffic or other basic metrics, its all about delivering a
positive ROI for our clients. Gab’s creative ideas help me continually
increase ROI, and our clients are loving us for it.  Thanks!”

Christina’s added a comment below. She runs a sleep help site .

“Mac help” by Mike. (See comments.)

—

Guys, if you want a link – I’d really appreciate specifics – stuff you’ve done based on this site or other details.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Hey there boys and girls – want to get into multiple niches really fast? Are those niches just slightly different from one another, being a “base keyword” + modifier combination? Know that if you just duplicate the copy from one “base keyword” + modifier A page to a page targeting “base keyword” + modifer B, the newer page will probably get filtered as a duplicate or low value page?

This is true both in sales-driven businesses and in lead-driven businesses.

If you think laterally, there’s a simple workaround. Blackhat SEOs call it content spinning or article rewriting or madlibbing.

Content spinning or article rewriting works as follows. The spinning software takes your original article. You select words and phrases and type synonymous words and phrases. The article randomly selects amongst the synonyms to create a coherent – yet quite different – article.

You sell blue widgets and have 500 words of copy on blue widgets? Are they the same as your red widgets except for the paint job?

Take the blue widget copy, run it through an article rewriter program and voila – fresh new copy for the red widget page. Just do a find and replace afterwards to switch all instances of the word blue for red.

No need Less need to worry that the red widget copy will get the red widget page filtered by the engines.

I’m not sure if this qualifies as whitehat SEO or greyhat SEO. It’s different from what some blackhats use it for (at least, that I know), because:

1. Some blackhats aim to create massive amounts of rewritten articles for link building purposes. This is an onsite technique.
2. Blackhats who use this as an on-site technique just need it to bulk up crummy sites that will feed link juice upwards to moderately cleaner sites in a spam pyramid. Alternately, they’re used on made-for-adsense sites that only exist for search engines.

I doubt it’s entirely whitehat, however, because the main point of this is to avoid being filtered by search engine algorithms. But assuming you at least provide these various widgets, you’re at least saving visitors a click (e.g. the Adsense click).

If you liked this little bit on greyhat SEO, you should either add my RSS feed to your reader, or check out my SEO book for experienced search marketers.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Reading the curiosity-arousing article on SEL, “The Phone, Calling,” I noticed that the use and presence of call tracking numbers, toll-free numbers and other non-main-line phone numbers could cause trouble for search engines.

“First, these numbers throw a monkey wrench in business identification. Second, they could expire, inadvertently creating a dead-end for a consumer. Publishers today struggle with how to accurately identify an actual business when many phone numbers are involved.”

The easiest solution, imho, is to show humans one thing (the non-main-line phone number) and search engines another thing (porn, viagra, and all the good content [read: auto-generated] search engines love).

“But that’s evil blackhat, Gab!” Actually, all I mean is to recommend mediocre usability and coding in this exceptional case.

How?

In a image-editing/creation program, you type the phone number that you don’t want search engines and local listings publishers using. And then you post it – without alt text – on your site.

If you’re really paranoid about search engines using fancy optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract the phone number from the image, you can go further.

Step 1: Create an html frame.
Step 2: Block search engines from accessing it with Robots.txt and any fun cloak-and-redirect set up you want.
Step 3: Place the image of the phone number in the frame.
Step 4: Embed the frame wherever your phone number needs to appear.

If you liked this local SEO / greyhat seo tip, you’ll probably enjoy my upcoming advanced SEO book, which teaches the principles of such creative/critical thinking and offers 30 advanced tactics. Download a free chapter here. (There’s also a link to the download page in upper left, if you browse away from this page.)

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

There are a number of services of questionable ethics around, offering students to research and write full term papers for them. This is at the university level. For anyone familiar with the kind of work that goes into this, I would suggest that these sources can also be valuable sources for premium quality content. The type to linkbait professors, and other serious academics and quality sites with… Note that these things cost something like $20-$40 a page for a reason.

Speaking of content, I`ve been blogging little lately because I`m in exams and papers. That`s how I came to the above idea…

Separately, I`ve had some time to finally (I bought it over a year ago) read part of Partnering Profits by Brian Clark and someone else. I should have a review up next week.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.