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Archive for the ‘SEO - Search Engine Optimisation’ Category

New podcast uploaded where I have reviewed 2 websites that I was asked to review on the A4U Forum.

If you have a website that you would like reviewed then send me a message on Twitter – @ChrisYoungUK or post a reply to this post on the A4UForum: SEO – Ask a Super Affiliate.

You can get this from iTunes or listen to any of our podcasts from here:

• On Page SEO Site Reviews (June 2009)
• Affiliate Marketing Questions and Answers (June 2009)
• The Basics of SEO (June 2009)
• Long Tail Keywords (May 2009)

Nearly all websites need regular, fresh content – either from a trusted sources or from users – or ideally both.

But what is good UGC? so often today you see badly typed, badly worded, sms txt style rubbish – here is an example I found of a UGC question

Q: how to work calculator design texet albert?
A: dnt no even im strugglin n ive gt my maths GCSEs nxt week

As you can see, this is pretty much useless. The bottom line is this: Users need guidance. It is no good just letting them post whatever, however… they don’t know or care why we want their content and they certainly won’t give a hoot about keyword relevance.

Good UGC should have a sprinkling of relevant keywords, ideally have few or no typos, be unique and be of suffiicient length to actually be of benefit. Sufficient length (for SEO) is subjective, if the page the UGC is on is the only “real” content appearing on the page then the page weight to code ratio will mean you need much more from one user than you would if you had lots of posts on the same page. Whatever way – aim for a tleast 25 words absolute minimum and it will be better than nothing.

So with these rules in mind, there are a few things which will help get the right UGC – we will be applying these in various ways on AnswerHero.co.uk and we will tell you all about it when we do – and if it has been a success or not:

1. Create an incentive for rewarding people – cash is not an option as it has too many tax implications but vouchers are fine. We suggest giving vouchers for “x” number of posts – we do this on CompareStorePrices and we will be running an “Answer Super Hero” sign up where users can become our paid answer experts
2. Always tell people the rules – we will be publishing simple posting rules. Some users will read them – many don’t but they do help to some extent.
3. Once a post has been made – have a word count box and when they click “Post” show an alert asking them to amend or adjust (tell them it will benefit them to make it better) but always allow a “post anyway” button unless you want to be very controlling. I think posts will drop off a cliff if you do not allow a “post anyway”
4. Have a spell checker than automatically makes changes or higlights bad words
5. Have a Tag section – again telling users why it helps for them to complete the tags fields, if you want to be really clever – have it auto-populate from a keyword suggestion tool based on what the user has typed and get the user to edit or amend. If Chris can create this function it will be neat
6. Encourage users to register – that way you can make a regular email send out requesting registered members contribute to users questions (based on topics they are interested in stated at time of registration)
7. Find a way of hitting the users hot button. Twitter is so successful because users get a feeling that people are reading and give a damn about their daily rambles.. certain show biz types are totally hooked on it as it is a new way to massage their egos (which most of us have in some form) So we need to try to find a way of pressing the ego button. That may be to enable UGC to communicate back to a network of users so that it is open and shared so when users “help” each other by answering questions, they get a warm sense of self gratification from knowing that other users have seen their handy work. Yes I am been cynical but it is basic human nature. With Answerhero we will have the perfect opportunity to create a “sharing, helping, caring, rewarding” style ego massager that, if done right, will get UGC happening. I will say this though – we have not worked out the best method for this yet but I suspect that rather than re-invent the wheel, we will look at what other big UGC sites like Twitter/Facebook et al have done and see if there is a way of taking the best parts and applying them.

There is more that can be done – its always a balance between putting the user off and boxing them in to do it “your way”. When it comes to paid experts (like AnswerSuperHeros) then the rules are cast iron and they have to conform to earn voucher points.

We will tell you how we get on and what we find to be the best way to get decent UGC as we go along – ultimately, unless we are sucessful in finding a way to hit the users hot button, it will probably come down to rewards of some type. Watch this space.

One thing I forgot to mention when talking about our rationale for choosing a Q&A site is “The Long Tail“.

In ye good ole days you could create pages for fairly competitive keywords and you would have a reasonable chance at getting some fair rankings for them if you got all the elements in place to please the search engines. Unfortunately, with so much competition on the web, those days are gone.

One of the biggest mistakes new affiliates make is trying to create a site that targets highly competitive terms such as: “digital cameras” or “credit card comparison“. I see this time and time again and the end result is always the same – a demoralised affiliate who can’t understand why he/she can’t get any traffic to their website.

So What is This Long Tail?

Think about all the types of searches you have done when using a search engine. If you are looking for a leather case for an Iphone you don’t just type in “iPhone“, you type in “leather case iphone” or even “where can i get a cheap leather case for an iphone“.

Take a look at this graph:

The left side of the graph is where you will find keywords like “iphone” and “digital camera“. You can see the the number of searches for the competitive keywords is extremely high but then so are the number of sites that are trying to reach the top of the organic rankings for these keywords.
As you move to the right of the graph the keywords start to contain more words and therefore a lower number of searches are carried out each month however the more words they contain the easier it is to get them ranked on the first page of the search engines results.

Greed can often overtake at this point and many affiliates might think “what’s the point in getting a number one ranking for “blue rabbits in silk pyjamas” (I have no idea where that came from but it is a Sunday and I’m blogging on the patio, in the sun, so please forgive me!) when I will only get a handful of visitors and make diddly squat from them?“.

There is ONE VERY GOOD REASON – MOTIVATION!.
– If you can see a page on your own site rank on the first page of Google for ANYTHING then you will feel motivated to continue.
– If you spend a year fighting an uphill battle trying to rank for a competitive keyword and get nowhere you will just feel frustrated.

Now the key with the Long Tail is volume – to get decent levels of traffic and make a reasonable income you will need thousands of pages. At this point you have three choices – pay someone else to write the content, get it from somewhere else (but run the risk of a duplicate content penalty) or write the content yourself and be mindful of the fact that you will only get a small amount of traffic in the early days.

Once your site is established then you can start to work your way to the left of the graph and target more competitive keywords as you will have hopefully gained a lot of links to your long tail pages.

Luckily for us the questions that are flowing into CompareStorePrices.co.uk provide us with a constant stream of long tail keywords and all we need is additional content in the form of answers to those questions. More on that last bit as we move forward.

You’ll hear people banging on about keeping up to date with the latest SEO techiniques and continually optimising your pages, etc. which is a load of old poppy cock!

Once you get the basic on page SEO requirements set up there are far more important things to do that waste any more time on it.

I haven’t changed the on page SEO on CompareStorePrices.co.uk for over 4 years and the rankings have hardly changed. The only changes I have seen are that Google makes small tweeks to it’s algorithm which causes fluctuations in the positions of many of the pages but overall the traffic has been consistent.

So make sure all of the following are in place on your pages (I still have to do some of these on the AnswerHero pages but as I said earlier I believe you should just get the site out there first):

1. Make sure EVERY page targets a DIFFERENT phrase
2. Include that phrase at least 3 times throughout the page and the more text you have on the page the more you should repeast the phrase (this is called keyword density)
3. There should be at least 300 words of text on every page
4. The first occurrence of the phrase should be as near to the top of the page as possible and be within an <h1> tag
5. Use as much unique text on the page as you can and DO NOT PUT ANY TEXT IN AN IMAGE – instead use CSS to create the effect you want
6. Make sure you have the phrase included in the TITLE
7. Add the phrase to the following tags:
   • Description (include additional words here after the main phrase)
   • Keywords
8. All internal links should contain the phrase as the link text
9. Try to make all pages accessible within 2 clicks of the home page so the search engine bots don’t have to dig too deep
10. If possible include an image that matches the phrase and put the phrase as the ALT text on that image
11. Include a sitemap which is available directly from the home page. The site map should be Google Sitemap format and submitted to Google using their webmaster tools

That’s the on page SEO done and you can forget about it! Your main tasks to INCREASE YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS should be creating more, unique content and getting MORE GOOD QUALITY LINKS.