EzSEO Newsletter # 194
This week:
1. Get a link - Part IV
2. www. or not?
3. Does LSI mean you should follow your passion?
4. KRA Pro Update
Hi again
I hope you have had a good week. I am in a bit of a hurry today, so let’s get straight on with the newsletter.
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1. Get a link - Part IV
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In the last few issues of this newsletter, I have included a method of getting links to your site.
This mini-series will build up into a “plan” of action you can apply to any and all of your sites.
Incidentally, I strongly suggest you get links to all of the pages on your site, and not just the homepage that so many people seem intent on linking to. Deep-linking to your site is the key to a successful, and “natural” linking strategy.
OK, so far we have had:
1. Digg.com
2. Getting links from other people’s blogs with the help of Neil Shearing’s excellent fr.ee tool.
3. Becoming an authority on topic related forums, and using a resource box at the bottom of your posts to include links back to your site.
Today, I want to cover a method we are all familiar with, but even if you think you know it all, do read on, as done incorrectly, this method wont work.
The method isarticle submissions.
The idea here is to write articles and submit them to article directories. I currently only submit to 2 directories, which are:
ezinearticles.com
goarticles.com
When you submit your content, you include a resource box at the end of your article that points back to a page on your site.
Now, article directories are beginning to use the nofollow tag in these links, meaning you wont get much benefit from the article directory itself in terms of link popularity.
However, high traffic article directories that use nofollow are still worth submitting to because they will give you:
1. Traffic to your site via the resource box.
2. Exposure of your article to webmasters who may pick up the content and republish it on their own sites.
Let’s consider the first point first.
People who read your article can click through the link in your resource box and end up on your site. That’s fr.ee traffic.
However, why would somebody want to do that?
Put yourself in the readers shoes.
If the article is spammy rubbish, would you click through to the authors site? Nope.
If the article answers all of the readers questions, would they click through? Unlikely.
If your resource box said:
“Joe Blogs is the author of my-diet-review-site.com. Read about more diets there.”
Would the reader click through? Nope.
Your article needs to be of the highest quality, and it needs to include some way of persuading the reader to click to your site.
Give them a list of 5 fat burning foods, and tell them that they can get 5 more on your site.
Tell them the secret to reducing wrinkles, but finish your article with a teaser that tells them there are 3 foods you absolutely must eat if you want fewer wrinkles in the future, and guide them to you site.
You need to have a cliffhanger.
There has to be an incentive for the reader to click through, so use your imagination.
Oh, and don’t submit an article to a directory that is already on your site, and just link to the same article on your site.
A reader will read your content on the directory site, click through to your site (you have done all the hard work to get them there), and they are shown the exact same article again. That’s an immediate click away from your site!
OK, what about the second point? Exposure to other webmasters.
Well, if your content is good, and answers questions that people have on a topic, it is highly likely that webmasters in your niche will pick up the article and republish it on their site. For everyone that does, you gain a valuable one-way link from a highly related site.
Again, there is a catch here. If your article is poor, or spammy, why would any quality site reprint it? You might end up on scraped sites that don’t care about quality, but they will rarely include your resource box anyway, and even if they did, the link wouldn’t count for anything since the site it appears on would be marked by Google as spam.
For both of the benefits mentioned above, your article needs to be a very high quality. If its not, you are wasting your time.
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2. www. or not?
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I was asked this week about whether or not to use the www. bit of your web domain when linking pages of your site together, and when getting links in from other sites.
Rather than explain all of this myself, I found this excellent article on the subject:
http://www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/internal-duplicate-content-fix.html
The article explains some of the problems, and also a way to fix your domain so that only one form is indexed, no matter what other people use in their linking.
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3. Does LSI mean you should follow your passion?
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In the old days of search engine optimization, you could do your keyword research, find lots of high demand, low competition phrases, and create a page around each one.
Each page would target one main phrase, with that phrase appearing in the filename, the title tag, an H1 header, maybe an H2, the first paragraph, the ALT tags, in a hyperlink, and all the time ensuring that the density of this phrase was somewhere around 5%.
Do you remember those days?
What? You are still doing that? No wonder its not working.
You see, in the last couple of years, things have changed.
Readers of this newsletter heard a long time ago that LSI needed to be taken into account, and over the weeks and months, I have shown you how to do that so your content will no only do well in the search engines, but also bring you lots of targeted traffic. Just go back over my newsletters from the last year or two and look at every section where I mention themeing.
Back in January of 2006 when I began testing some theories I had about LSI (I didn’t know that was what it was called back then, I just knew from looking at my test sites that something was changing), my results were so good that I spent months writing a course detailing my methods, and showing how anyone could do the same.
I wanted the course to be the most complete it could be, and future-proofed. To that end, I created an article editor that would guide you through your content creation and included that in the course. I also included a specialist research tool, and the 230+ page Manual taught you how to put the pieces of the jigsaw together.
Its seems like a long time ago now that the first edition of my Fat Content Course was first released. That was back at the beginning of October 2006, nearly 17 months ago. I suppose in Internet marketing terms that is a lifetime ago.
One thing is for sure. The principles that I wrote about in that course are as true today as they were when I wrote the course. It seems that LSI is here to stay.
When I released the second edition of my Fat Content Course (late 2007), I created some fr.ee reports that I gave away to those who visited the Course website. Those reports showed detailed comparisons between webpages that did well in Google, and those that didn’t. If you haven’t read them, you really should. You can sign up for them here (look in the top right hand corner):
So why an I telling you all of this?
Well, in the past there has been a lot of debate amongst the “teachers” online. Some have said that when you create a new site, follow your passion. Create content about a topic you know well.
Others have said not to worry about the topic. If it is profitable, build it, even if you have no interest in the topic.
I have been in the second camp for quite some time, and advised people to build on ANY profitable topic and not just consider those that you are passionate about.
However, let’s look at the problem here.
Let’s suppose that you wanted to build a site on “inflatable boats”. You would do your keyword research, and find that there was a popular make of boat called a “Sea Eagle”.
Your next step is to create a page on Sea Eagle boats so that you can add affiliate links or adsense to the page.
Where do you start?
In the old days, it was easy. You could write a generic article on inflatable boats and just use the word Sea Eagle in the filename, title, h1 header (sound familiar?), and you’d be OK.
The problem is that this wont work anymore. You see, Google now uses LSI to help rank pages, and when someone searches for Sea Eagle, Google knows that any quality page written about sea eagle boats is likely to have a few of the following words on the page as well:
inflatable, sea, eagle, boat, boats, fishing, kayak, water, accessories, motormount, package, motor, lbs, hull, adults, repair, price, seat, pump, bag, design, seaeagle, material,
kit, deluxe, seats, features, four, carry, air, storage, explorer, product, canoe, chambers, support, paddles, sport, products, bow, floorboards, hp, oars, capacity, models, catamaran, paddling, durable, quality, stability, stable, yacht, weight, instructions, tender, dream, fish, warranty, comfortable, customer, floor, anglers, people, whitewater, fit, foot, information, makes, rugged, pressure, safety, handles, plastic, gear, designed, engine
Phew… That’s quite a list, and I am not suggesting a quality article on Sea Eagle boats would contain all of these (but a minisite on this topic would most certainly contain most).
A well written page would contain a lot of those words simply because they are NEEDED when you write a quality page about a Sea Eagle Inflatable boat. They are the words that describe what a Sea Eagle boat is all about. They are the THEME words related to the Sea Eagle Boat!
The good thing from Google’s point of view is that if someone who was passionate about Sea Eagle boats wrote a page on the topic, these are exactly the types of words they would include NATURALLY, since the are NEEDED if you are going to write a good article. Therefore by looking for these words in a web page, Google can rank pages according to how well they match the “Sea Eagle Profile”.
How does Google know which words to look for when someone types in a query at Google.com?
Answer: LSI.
Google might also be looking for the following phrases:
sea eagle, inflatable boat, inflatable boats, repair kit, fishing boat, inflatable kayak, storage bag, fishing boats, inflatable kayaks, man inflatable, fisherman’s dream, motormount boats, dream package, inflatable canoe, boats inflatable, deluxe kayak, foot pump, eagle boat, boat adults, fisherman’s dream package, man inflatable boat, sea eagle boat, sea eagle ps, sea eagle motormount, sea eagle fishing, eagle fishing boat, inflatable boat adults, sea eagle explorer
So how on earth can someone who knows nothing about Sea Eagel Inflatable boats possibly know the words they need to include?
Does this indeed mean that you should only create sites that you are passionate about?
That choice is ultimately yours, but I personally find it easier to create my own content on topics I know and love.
However, I do create sites on other topics as well, and that was the purpose of my Fat Content Course - to teach methods, and give you the tools you need to be able to create sites on any topic.
Last week I mentioned Martin Avis’s LSI tool. It is that tool I used to collect the theme words above for Sea Eagle Inflatable boats, and in fact it was the same tool that alerted me to the importance of Sea Eagle boats in the “inflatables” market. I didn’t have a clue myself.
Tools like this equip webmasters with the “knowledge” they need to be able to write content on ANY topic.
I actually use this tool for a wide range of tasks, and think that it is in a class of its own for spying on competitor pages, and cracking LSI on any topic.
I wrote a short report showing 10 ways I use this tool. If you are interested in getting Martin’s LSI Keyword Spy tool, get it through the link below, and I’ll send you a copy of the report.
You can try out the tool yourself 3 times by scrolling to the bottom of this page:
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4. KRA Pro Update
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Last week I told you that I intended to release KRA Pro on Monday 25th February to existing KRA owners (a full release will be a week or two later). During the week I had so much to do that I thought I would need to postpone the release by a few days, but everything seemed to fall into place as the week went on.
The final beta version is currently with my beta testers, and so far there have been no major issues. Because of this, I am confident that KRA Pro will still be released on the 25th (tomorrow). I set up a notification list especially for KRA owners who wanted to be notified of the release, since it is only going to be initially available for 48 hours. If there are any changes to the release schedule, I’ll let that list know.
For those who are curious to know what KRA Pro is all about, I have uploaded a couple of videos to youtube, so you can get an idea of what this tool is all about.
A full release of KRA Pro will be early in March.
Well, that’s it for this issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ezseonews.com/archives
Have a great week!
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