In this issue:
1. Finding Content Ideas FAST!
2. Fixing an old broken site
3. A Quick Guide to SEO – Part 3
Hi Again
I hope you have had a good week. Today I want to show you a great way to find content ideas for your site. I also hope you’ll think about keeping those old sites that stopped producing years ago, and do something productive with them. There is also the third instalment of my video SEO series, with this one looking at the meta keyword tag. Before you say that this tag is not important, watch the video…
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1. Finding Content Ideas FAST!
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Have you ever been stuck for ideas on what content to write for your site?
I have a foolproof method -though I am sure I’ll still get some questions on this ;o)
The technique I use is to look at the questions real people are asking in my niche. But how do you find out that information?
The way I have always done this involves carrying out comprehensive keyword research and then looking for those phrases that contain words like "how", "what", "when" etc. Given the right tools, this is very easy. However, there is a method I would like to tell you about that does not require any commercial software or services.
Here it is:
- Go to ask.com
- Type in a query related to your niche, e.g. contact lens
- When the search results page loads, click the link in the top navigation bar to "Q&A Beta"
That’s all there is to it. You now have a set of questions that you can use for ideas, plus some answers that you can use to base your own content on.
Do you like that? Well here are a few other places to find questions:
www.wiki.answers.com
www.answers.yahoo.com
www.ehow.com
www.wikihow.com
Are more time consuming way is to use Google’s intitle search modifier. Try these:
intitle:how contact lens
intitle:what contact lens
intitle:why contact lens
Get the idea?
Now you never have to be stuck for ideas again.
Now, before I leave it there, I know I’ll get asked a question at least a dozen times if I don’t answer it here.
Question: How do we know those "question" phrases get searched for? I could spend an hour or two creating a fantastic article on "how to care for contact lenses", but unless there are people searching for that phrase, I won’t get any traffic, right?
Answer: Wrong…. At least the way I write articles. Some of you who have been reading my newsletter for some time will know where I am heading here. Yup, themeing.
Now I know the reply I’ll get from some people when I mention themeing….
Question: Didn’t that Leslie Rohde guy from Stompernet prove that LSI wasn’t used by Google?
Answer: What Leslie was talking about has nothing to do with themeing (or most people’s definition of LSI for that matter).. Read the article called ?"Raging LSI Wars" issue of my newsletter:
http://ezseonews.com/internet-marketing-tips/ezseo-newsletter-235/
OK, let’s get back to the original question for a moment about traffic. I’ll use a real example from one of my own sites to illustrate. The phrase is:
"how the body regulates blood sugar".
Now my site is currently at #2 in Google for that phrase, but how many visitors does it get?
Well in the last 30 days, that page was found in Google for "how the body regulates blood sugar" TWICE. That’s right, just two times.
That kind of backs up the those people who think it’s not worth optimizing for a question phrase because it doesn’t get searched for, doesn’t it? Well actually no. Not if you take a look at the wider picture…
You see, in the last 30 days, that page has had 248 pageviews (206 unique pageviews) with visitors spending an average of 5 minutes 30 seconds on the page. The page was only found twice for the question I based the article on but it was also found for another 115 DIFFERENT phrases – and that is just in the last month.
If I go back 3 months, that page has been found for 314 different phrases.
How is this possible? It’s all in the themeing…
I have created a resource page on themeing here:
http://ezseonews.com/themereports
I recommend you at least read the gestational diabetes report on that page. Don’t worry, its not really about gestational diabetes – that’s just the keyword phrase I analyzed in the report.
The report looks at a cross section of pages in Google, from high flyers to bottom dwellers, and analyzes how well themed the pages are for the niche they are trying to fill. For those who don’t want to read the whole report, just look at the summary table at the top of page 8.
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2. Fixing an old broken site
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Do you have any old sites that use to make a bit of m0ney but now just sit there on your server taking up space?
Have you ever thought of just letting them expire?
There is one very good reason not to let these old sites expire – they have age.
An aged domain is a good thing when it comes to search engine optimization. A site that has been around for a few years is less likely to be a spam site, as most of these are put up, penalised and left to expire.
When I first started to build sites I created them like this:
1. Identify main phrases
2. Hire ghost writers to create content on the main phrases
3. Post the content on my site
The content was without doubt rubbish.
Reading it you would know immediately what the main phrase was because it would be repeated several times throughout the article. The article itself would be wishy washy with little or no real information. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I wouldn’t have dared hand such an article in as English homework at school – even as an 11 year old…
The funny thing is, back in those days, this method worked.
Today, Google just ignores those pages, so most of the original sites I created just crumbled and died as the search engines became more discerning.
In the past I have let a lot of domains go, but in the last year or so I felt that I should be trying to save these sites.
I came up with a plan – I wanted to bring the content on these sites up to date to see if I could revive them, all the time benefiting from their increased domain age.
Since I have a lot of sites, I also wanted to update the site from its old static HTML format to WordPress. That would mean easier updates to the site, and I could let WordPress take care of the on-site SEO for me, leaving me to concentrate on the content.
I have done a number of successful conversion in the last year and this gave me an idea. I wanted to record on video one of these conversions, so that I could show other people how to do it for themselves. There are 24 videos in all (about 3.5 hours in length), and they show every step in the conversion. Here is what one course member said:
"I see it as a great opportunity to upgrade an existing site to the best it can possibly be whilst fixing all the mistakes from when we were working on our learners permits" John Falkinder
There are more details of this course here:
You can also see a video on that page showing some of the rankings AFTER conversion.
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3. A Quick Guide to SEO – Part 3
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In this part of my video SEO course I want to have a look at the meta keyword tag. Yes, that’s the same meta keyword tag that a lot of SEOs say are not important. Let me tell you why they can be important.
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:
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
Have a great week!
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The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2009 Andrew Williams. If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.
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About Andy Williams
