Hey Everyone,
Welcome to this week’s SEO roundup! This week we have an interesting post from SEOBook about larger websites borrowing smaller websites content, advice on judging and perfecting landing page relevancy (from an SEO perspective), a little update on Knol from Matt Cutts, a bit of a new perspective on personalised search from Michael Gray and a video from SEOMoz on how you should really be tracking your SEO success.
It’s a bit of a long one this week so get ready!
How is everyone this week? It has been an interesting one if you live in the East of England (as I do) since we had a bunch fo snow which, this being England pretty much killed all the roads. Here is a little photo of what it looks like on my back garden today, not too deep but everywhere is like an ice rink because it froze last night!
Anyway on with our posts.
The first one is from Peter (of SEOBook) and talks about a problem we have all seen if not felt a victim of one time or another. It’s the idea that larger, more popular websites in a niche “borrow” content from small webmasters to steal ranking or at the least search traffic potential.
Now I have to agree with Peter’s post that sometimes it’s just coincidence, especially in small niches there is only so much to write about, and in all fairness it almost certainly happens the other way round too, the effects are just not as drastic. The worst thing about the situation is that it so easy just to credit an author and give them the link they deserve but so many bloggers out there don’t do it.
Content duplication always has been and always will be a problem on the web but Peter’s article gives you a few ideas of how to put some time into protecting the content you feel really matters and a lot of the work you do counts towards the SEO side of branding which going forward is going to be an important part of your SEO strategy.
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Our second post today is from Search Engine World. It examines landing pages and what you need to do to make them more relevant and ultimately more successful.
Many of the tips some of you may already know from paid search campaigns but the article is none the less very informative and is a must read, especially for you guys as affiliates because you need to keep traffic on your pages to convert.
More importantly you need to think about the wider impact of bounce rate and landing page relevancy, I have no doubt in my mind these will become, if they’re not already, major factors in today’s SEO.
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The third post I want to draw your attention to is about Google Knol and if from Matt Cutts’ official blog. When Knol first launch there was a bit of an SEM storm surrounding it, Google’s Answer to Wikipedia was feared, slated, praised, ignored and finally just left in peace to grow.
I have a few articles on there myself but I don’t actively use Knol as I do Wikipedia, partly because its not as big and partly because I keep forgetting about it.
It is a better platform than Wiki though and used correctly it’s very important, I recommend you read Matts post not because it gives any strong SEO tips out but it gives you an update at where Knol is at for Google which in turn shows that it’s still valuable to them.
With regards to SEO for Knol I would recommend you keep it to a minimum, use it to build your brand and if you really have an expert opinion, place an article but don’t spam it with second rate work, it is Google after all and those guys love collecting data about you.
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The forth post today is from Michael Gray and I have included mainly because it’s a full on common sense SEM post as well as being very complex and informative. Read his post first before watching the included video and once you have had a moment to think about it watch the video too.
You should come away from both with maybe a new take on what people want to see from your website as a service as well as how you should deliver it to them.
What Michael is trying to say with his post on the subject is that it’s easy to be short sighted and attack Google for every little change they make against SEO but if you step back and look at what they are trying to achieve you see that it’s more of a secondary benefit than their target.
This post and video is not so easy to summarise all the way for you so any questions you have about it let me know and i’ll try and clarify it as best I can.
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Finally we have a video from SEOMoz, it’s only a short one but definitely informative. The video looks at the best way to monitor SEO success and how that rankings are becoming less important as a metric for SEO.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – When to Track Rankings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
I am mainly in agreement with Rand on his analysis, one thing I will add though is how much search volume is in flux right now (thanks to the global recession) and this can have an effect on your results no matter how you measure them.
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Hope you enjoyed this weeks SEO roundup, sorry it was a long one!
Good luck with SEO and let me know if you have any questions.
