Category Archives: seo

search engine marketing

Curationsoft review

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For Christmas I bought my daughter Kate a great piece of low-cost software called CurationSoft, to help her fill her niche sites with fresh  content, and to get more traffic to them so that she makes more money.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(In case you think that software is a terribly mean present to give to a girl for Christmas I also bought her a nice white iPad to play with :) )

She loves both presents, though the email telling her about Curation Soft didn’t excite her anywhere near as much as opening the iPad box. And so far she’s spent about 3 hours using CurationSoft and she’s used the iPad until she’s boggle eyed and the tips of her fingers are sore from tapping and swiping the screen.

But it’s CurationSoft that’s making her money. Now that she’s seen how using it has almost immediately increased visitors to the site she’s using it on, she’s totally won over and singing its praises.

BTW, before you ask, there’s no way I’m giving you the name of her site, or even the niche. So please don’t email me about it. She wants me to keep quiet about it because she knows that a mention here will have dozens of you niche marketers rapidly jumping in to compete with her. And you would, don’t deny it :)

Having said that, Kate is a director of a new US based charity set up to help children born with metabolic disorders. Here’s a link to it The Metabolic Disease Foundation if you feel like being generous by making a donation they desperately need your help. Even just linking to the site, or giving their Metabolic Disease Facebook page a like will help in a small way.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you Kate’s traffic success is because I’m personally amazed at the huge traffic increase it’s given her. I thought it might help a bit, but in a month her visitors have more than quadrupled. And get this – she hasn’t added any new articles, and she’s not done any backlinking.

All she’s done is just semi-automatically (drag and drop) added fresh content to 15 of her existing articles. (BTW, the software works on both Macs and Windows)

And it took her less than 10 minutes an article to curate the content she wanted to use on her pages and add it to the existing mix of articles and reviews.

So she’s spent just two and a half hours quadrupling her visitor numbers (real people, not bots)

To me this is amazing. Especially as Google like’s what she’s doing, and so do the individuals whose content she has used a line or two from and linked to. They like it because a) they’re getting a link to their content, and b) quite a few of them are chuffed because she’s ‘quoted’ them. She knows this because they’ve tweeted about it, or commented on her site.

And she’s not gone out and added any new links, though some people whose tweets and other content snippets she’s used have linked to her.

We all know that part of Google’s new ranking algorithm is favoring fresh content. It seems that adding to, or reworking existing content works just as well.

The full version of the software is just $59 (a year) but there’s a fully working free trial you can test. The only difference is that you’re limited to just one content source (Google Blogs) rather than the 8 in the paid version.

Seeing all you do is enter a keyword or short phrase, select the content source you want to use, and press go, it’s very simple to use.

It’s been out for six months, or maybe longer now, and the people behind it are all well respected online: Jack Humphrey and Peter Lenkefi to name but two.

Highly Recommended

 

At first I had my doubts about the whole curation craze. My thinking went along the lines of “It’s theft. Sites are stealing using other people’s content to profit from”  But I’ve changed my mind. Sites use just a short snippet of your work. Maybe 2 or 3 lines, and in return you get a link back to your site. You get traffic from it, from both searchbots, and real people who are interested in your content and want to see more. It’s been written in more than one place that ‘curation’ is what the web of 2012 will be all about. And on the evidence of Kate using this blog curation software for just a few weeks, I can see why some people are saying that.

There’s quite a lot of content – examples and stuff like reviews and news items about the world of curating – on the curation software site on the sites blog. The site is not a sales pitch one. So if you want to know more about curation blogging you can read a lot more before even testing the free trial offer.

phil

Headline and Title writing tips

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Why your headline is really really important … and ideas for creating a good one

 

Whether you rewrite a private label article or go the slow way and write your own from scratch, you should always come up with a snappy, interesting title.

It’s the first thing that people see, and it either grabs their attention or it doesn’t which means they might move on without even taking a look at the content.

Think about it. Everyone scans headlines, on or off the web looking for something that interests them. If something doesn’t instantly catch your eye you move on to something else. It’s the way of the world.

So here’s a big tip. What you should do is try and write article or blog post titles like the stuff on the covers of Cosmopolitan and Reader’s Digest and other magazines with huge sales.

Reader’s Digest covers

Cosmopolitan covers

Notice how both these magazines, Cosmo and Readers Digest, use a lot of numbers in their teasers. (teasers is the word that journalists use)

“41 Things doctors Never Tell You.”

“25 Great Places to Visit for Free”

“No Hassle Flying: 18 Insider Tips”

“7 New Ways To Be Happy”

“50 Things That’ll Make Him Worship You”

They use them because they work, and a LOT of work goes into creating them. They’re tested and tweaked to get them perfect to attract people to buy/to read the magazine. So if they work on mags they’ll work online too.

So stand in a magazine store and make a note of some of them, or you can see them online at places at the above links.

You can find tons of magazine covers in your niche (assuming it’s a popular enough niche to have lots of magazines) at places like

Magazine http://magazine.com/

and Magazine City http://www.ccgdata.com/index.html

Learn from them…grab ideas, study the writing technique, and also just adapt one of the headlines to suit your article or blog post. They’re headlines that work. Written by pro’s at the top of their game. Make use of their skills :)

 

Avoiding the duplicate content penalty

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If you’re one of the masses of people who build sites using content from the free articles directories, you should start getting worried about the duplicate content issue.

Personally I think that Google (and the other major search engines) are going to start banning – or more likely just not ranking – pages and sites filled with these articles.

You see, lots of people use automated tools to pull in dozens, or hundreds, of articles from one, or more, of these free sources. And they use the same types of sitebuilding software to build sites around the articles they’ve grabbed. This means that with popular niches you’re going to get the same bunch of articles on dozens of auto built sites or blogs.

Do you think the search engines like that? Of course not. Why would they (or a searcher) want to see the top few search engine results pages filled with almost identical sites?

Think about it. If you do a search, on say, fishing you wouldn’t want  to find near identical sites clogging up the results.

I’ve read somewhere (and I don’t know if it’s true) that Google now have the ability to break pages down into 15 word blocks. The more of these 15 word blocks on your page match 15 word blocks on another page the higher the duplicate content filter. And the page indexed first is considered the original and ranked higher. I can’t remember where I read this, but the piece went on to say that the only reason this is not fully implemented yet is because of the massive processing power involved. You can place bets that this, or something like it, will happen one day soon though. Google’s not exactly short of processing power.

Actually, I’ve just done a search – and this piece, written about the 2006 Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, says pretty much the same thing:

"When indexing, web pages are broken into word sets (shingles). Rearranging those shingles into a different order doesn’t add any benefit. Search engine still considers that all the shingle is there."

As you probably know, duplicate content is a contentious issue. I’ve talked with quite a few people about this  some people agree with me, others think there’s nothing to be concerned about and are happily filling their sites with articles from the big  article directories.

Personally I’ve already stopped using this kind of article. It just makes sense.

To me, this all points to sites filled with the same articles eventually, or already, getting ranked much lower. So I’ve already stopped using them. It just makes sense.

One other thing to think about is that the major search engines are also refining their grammar filters in an attempt to stem the flood of content produced with automatic, or semi automatic, article rewriting software.

Again, it all comes down to them (and us as users) wanting good quality, helpful content when we do a search.

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Because of the duplicate content issue, you’re MUCH better off using PLR content than articles from one of the free article directories.

But when you buy articles from a PLR membership site don’t you run exactly the same duplicate content risk?

Well in theory, yes.

Say a PLR site sells 200 memberships, and give their members 50 articles on golf, you’d think that a few months later there would be 200 sites using that content.

But in practice it doesn’t work that way. People (even people who pay for content) are lazy. They might intend using the articles but only a few of them ever get around to doing it.

Here’s proof:

Cats.

Example 1a – phrase taken from an Espired PLR article on cats from early March:

"These worms can and usually are transmitted through the mother’s milk or while the kittens are still inside the mother’s womb"

Results in Google: Zero.

Example 1b – phrase taken from a free article offered on goArticles since early March.

"You would not suspect this is a sign of cat disease. Unfortunately, this may the symptom of a variety of sicknesses : diabetes, liver problem, or uterus infection."

Results in Google: 15

That’s not too bad actually. If I was trying to hype this up I’d have to wipe that example out and find one where the free article had been used a lot more :)

Anyhow, let’s look at some older articles.

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Dogs.

Example 2a – phrase taken from an Espired PLR article on dog training, available since Nov 2005:

"A quality dog trainer can help instruct the dog while also providing the owner with invaluable guidance and assistance"

Results in Google: 8

Example 2b – phrase taken from a free article offered on ArticleCity since Nov 2005.

"For one thing, obedient and trained dogs are happier dogs, less likely to get into tussles with people or with other dogs"

Results in Google: 213

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Honeymoons.

Example 3a – phrase taken from an Espired PLR article on honeymoons from Sept 2005:

"What better way to begin the rest of your life than with a memorable honeymoon vacation"

Results in Google: 16

Example 3b – phrase taken from a free article offered on ArticleCity since early Oct 2005.

"Taking a Mediterranean cruise is the dream of many people, especially for their honeymoon"

Results in Google: 77

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Aquariums

Example 4a – phrase taken from a Content Attack PLR article on aquarium plants from Oct 2005:

"When decorating an aquarium that is going to have smaller fish in it such as tetras and guppy’s plants are essential"

Results in Google: 25

Example 4b – phrase taken from a free article offered on EzineArticles since Oct 2005.

"Aquarium plants add more life to aquarium and make it to look beautiful while completing the aquarium community structure"

Results in Google: 111

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Ok, that’ll do. I’m sure you get the point that you’re much better off using PLR material than stuff made freely available.If you’re one of the masses of people who build sites using content from the free articles directories, you should start getting worried about the duplicate content issue.

There is, of course, something better than using PLR articles. I think you can guess what that might be.

My favorite/recommended PLR sites:

Articles:  the new  and high quality PLR Pro    -   Espired

Ebooks (complete packages) :  Ebook Niches   -  Content Goldmine  – Niche Content Packages  –   Niche Health Products

Note: if you want to know more about ways to use PLR content then I highly recommend you read  "Unlock the Secrets of Private Label Ebooks" by Martin Avis. It’s very good.

phil

Is there a shortcut to a high search engine ranking?

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"There MUST be a fast, smart, easy way to get a high ranking (eg in Google) for a range of selected keywords?" a reader of my Letter from Phil newsletter asked me today.

The bad news is there’s no short cut to getting ranked high except from getting a lot of backlinks to your site or web page.

You can get ranked high slowly by writing a keyword rich, on topic rich, page. But it’s not going to immediately propel you to the top of the search engine rankings.

Just writing a keyword rich page no longer works properly. You also need to "theme" the page. Example: if your web page is about ranking high in the search engines and your main keyword phrase is "get to the top of google" you also need to use secondary keyword phrases like seo, ranking, search engine ranking. Perhaps a better example would be that if you’re writing a page or article on walking boots you would rank higher if you also mention hiking, trails, waterproof, laces, mountains, backpacks, carrying water, etc, etc.

Search engines, or rather the people working for them, are not fools and they know that most, if not all, automatic site builders build pages have a keyword phrase repeated many times throughout the page – but nothing much at all related to the topic. So they now penalize against this kind of page.

A good free tool to use to help you find secondary keywords is the free Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool which displays a list of secondary or related keywords down the right side of the page.

So back to what I was saying – the fastest way to get to the top of Google, or the other major search engines, is to get hundreds of people linking to your site. The only way this is going to happen fast is if your site/page is something out of the ordinary/entertaining/viral, that people want to link to. Or your write a really good article that gets published in a lot of online ezines and web sites and has a link in it back to your site.

phil