SEO Rap: Just When You Think You've Seen It All

Once in a while, a real Original comes into the world. Welcome to The SEO Rap!

Article Syndication, Duplicate Content, and SEO

A few weeks ago, we were discussing whether submitting your articles to article banks is seen as duplicate content, and whether the search engines would penalize your site and/or specific website pages based on this information.

According to Google's webmaster site:

"Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt. "

So it seems that Google DOES see syndicated articles on article banks as duplicate content. While they may not penalize your own site for this, putting your article in the article banks probably won't increase your SEO rankings either. In addition, the search engine may show, in their search results, your article on the article bank's site instead of on your own site.

On the plus side, having your article show up in the search results often can lead prospective customers back to your site. I'm not abandoning my plans to syndicate my articles, but I will be creating two versions of the same article to avoid the duplicate content problem: a long one to put on my own site, and a short one to put on the article banks and on my blog. Taking the extra 15 minutes to shorten an article seems like a worthwile investment of my time.

SEO and Google: Going For The Big Win

Nielson NetRatings reports that in November 2007, searchers used Google 57.7% of the time.

Google has been steadily increasing it's marketshare, while Yahoo and MSN are declining. A look at this chart gives you some cold, hard facts:

	June	July	Aug	Sept	Oct	Nov
Google	52.7	53.3	53.6	54.0	55.5	57.7
Yahoo!	20.2	20.1	19.9	19.5	18.8	17.9
MSN/Windows Live	13.3	13.6	12.9	12.0	13.8	12.0

When I'm teaching my SEO For Everyone class, I focus strongly on getting good results in Google. Even if Microsoft buys Yahoo (as hinted about in this Motley Fool article), the combined result still won't equal Google's power and scope.

What does Google care about? Content. Pure and simple, Google loves a site with lots of content. And even better, Google loves a site where there's continually new content. This is a vote for adding new stuff to your site. If you write a newsletter, add your newsletter articles to your site after each publication of your newsletter. Put a blog on your site. Interview people in your industry and put those on your site. Always be thinking of ways to add content.

Of course, Google loves a site that other sites link to. You can create a sophisticated link strategy, but here's a hint: create content that others want to link to, and they will.

Should you ignore Yahoo! and MSN? No. But your first priority when optimizing a site is to figure out what Google wants and give it to them. You don't even have to search far: Google Webmaster Central will give you some tips.

Beware of Google Poisoning

Hackers, spammers and virus creators have come up with another way to infect your computer: Google Poisoning.

By using "black hat" SEO techniques, they are able to get high organic listings in the Google search engine for websites that are infected with a virus. When you click onto these sites, your computer becomes infected.

To learn how to avoid this, see this Red Tape Chronicles article.

Two NEW Classes for Winter 2008

I'm excited to announce two brand new classes for our Winter 2008 calendar:

1. SEO for Everyone - In order to achieve high rankings on search engines, you need to know and use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Join us for this teleclass where we cover some of the most important things you can do to improve your search rankings.

2. Marketing To Women - In order to grow your business, you must understand women's lifestyles and what are their specific wants, needs and desires. In this teleclass you will learn to re-define your marketing strategy and re-design your marketing copy to speak directly to women.

Check out our Calendar of Events for dates and times!

Over 50% of Searchers Use Google

According to a Comscore press release this week, 60% of all searches worldwide, both at home and at work, are done using Google and Google-owned YouTube. Yahoo sites came in at 14% and Microsoft site searches came in at about 4%. Note that these are worldwide numbers.

Nielson NetRatings released it's August "Search Share Rankings" report with the following statistics for United States users:

• 53.6% use Google


• 19.9% use Yahoo


• 12.9% use MSN

Comscore also reports that the average North American conducts 77.4 searches per month based on August numbers.

When planning your SEO and Search Engine Marketing strategy, it's important to pay close attention to Google. While no one knows for sure how Google exactly ranks sites, there are many SEO items that are surely in the mix: sites that have relevancy, content, and are updated frequently.

Which Internet Marketing Techniques Work?

Small business owners often ask me which internet marketing techniques work best. The answer is, "it depends on your audience." Knowing your target audience and testing to see which techniques they respond to should be your #1 priority in your internet marketing plan.

With that said, MarketingSherpa did a survey recently with these results:

BEST internet marketing results:

• 49% of survey respondents said "paid search ads"
• 47% said their own in-house mailing list
• 45% said search engine optimization (SEO)

WORST results:

• 56% said rented mailing lists gave them the WORST results
• 45% said pop-ups and pop-unders

MarketingSherpa.com is a wealth of information, especially surveys and studies. Here are some good reports. If you sign up for their mailing list, you get most of their reports and articles for free (if you access them within a week of the email broadcast; after that, there is a fee):

• MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Presentation: Top Email Marketing Opportunities for 2007
• MarketingSherpa Search Marketing Presentation 2006: PowerPoints, MP3 and Transcript

What's New in Internet Marketing 2007: SEO

This article begins a multi-part series of what's new in the world of internet marketing. My hope is that this information will help you with your marketing planning for the coming 12 months.

Notes and News about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

According to MarketingSherpa, people are still only spending 10 percent of their budget on SEO and 90 percent of their budget on paid search. In addition, over 70 percent of small business owners do their search engine optimization work in-house (they do it themselves versus hiring someone to do it for them); the same percentage conduct paid search (pay-per-click, etc.) in-house.

What does this mean? Small business owners need to learn what works and doesn't work when it comes to SEO and paid search techniques. The cost of paid search continues to rise, so SEO may be a better place to spend your time and money.

Most searchers don't scroll down beyond the first screen of search results they receive from Google, Yahoo or MSN Search. This means that if you are not in the top 10 search engine rankings (organic), you may need to do more SEO work to your website.

Here are some SEO tips:

• It takes good copywriting, with only a few search terms per page. Choose three or four search terms you want to target for the next six months, and build them into the text of your website and your articles.
• Well constructed sentences, with no spelling errors, wide use of bullet points, and short sentences seem to win the heart of search engines like Google.
• Another good way to get high rankings is by issuing online press releases. Press releases get you exposure to the search engines.
• Change the Title tag of your web pages; list benefits in the Title, not just the name of your company. The first 2 or 3 words pack the biggest punch.
• Search for your competition and see what they're doing regarding SEO in their website text; how do they rank in the organic search results?