Due to the fun of time zones mostly when its the 24th April in the US its the 25th April in New Zealand. In New Zealand and Australia the 25th April is ANZAC day. ANZAC Day is the day Australasians respect our war dead – so I personally think its pretty fucking ironic that’s also the day that Google decided to DISrespect the right of small business to exist on the Internet. By the 26th there were an awful lot casualties including askthebuilder.com – apparently being the poster child for the Adsense team and providing huge amounts of unique and original content is no guarantee that Google might rank you in the search engines. So much for the content is King argument. The winners, fairly universally, appear to be large corporations as domain authority and, quite possibly, large Adwords budgets, trump everything else.
Full disclosure: my niche sites got slaughtered. As in every ranking gone from the top 100. My larger sites are generally OK with some oddities like losing the ranking for “passive income” for this one. However I do not think this is a result of the deindexing of Build My Rank, I saw the drop of a few pages that was the result of that. This was the wholesale disappearance of every ranking for each site.
Most of those affected where niche sites, which, frankly repeat the same keyword variations a little too much both on-page and in the backlinks – I’ll ignore them for a while before I decide what to do with them.
But there is one I’m, frankly, annoyed about, the book site I set up last August. I set this site up to promote my Vacation Packing List book. Before 24 April it was bouncing around page 2 for some related long-tails – but now its gone, entirely, it doesn’t even rank for the site’s domain. Instead we have:
I mean that terms is hardly a very competitive one – in fact, as witnessed by the SERPS – Google has hardly anything that matches! It has good links and about 20 links from Build My Rank – if that’s what sunk it – then the very scary world of negative SEO is alive and well.
My gut feel is that this one is a huge win for Google – but not for its stated reason of “removing spam for the search results” – it clearly hasn’t – just Google some of your favourite queries using a proxy such as pagewash.com – to see the rubbish that is ranking.
No this is a winner for Google – because of the number of small time SEOs I see claiming that they be quitting the game. In fact if I was looking for an investment then I’d be buying shares in any company which provides email services such as mailchimp or AWeber.
Because although I’m not quitting the game – I am focussing more on social traffic and building email lists. And those are easier to do with larger sites. Are niche sites dead? I don’t think so – unless every specialist site – like my one above, and every small business’s website, are doomed to rank nowhere. Which may be what Google wants – but how long before the general public start switching to a better search engine? Because at the moment if you search Google isn’t providing the answers – they are giving you a list of big brands, and sites which are way out of date.
Google is Part of the Competitive Environment - Not a Moral Authority - or Your Friend
For fucks sake – I am over this whole -“Google hates me”, “I must please Google”, “is this OK with Google” shite going down in certain circles.
Google is a company.
Google is a search engine that using a superbly complex algorithm.
Google doesn’t give a shite about you – because you are not Google’s customer.
I think a lot of people need to get over this unhealthy relationship with Google. Because as it is now Google appears to be winning the war – which war? The propaganda war.
You know spreading mis-information and fear – the oldest propaganda trick in the book. And its working. Take for example the bullshite about buying and selling links. Google hates it. Of course Google hates it – links are what their search engine algorithms are still (mainly) based on. The reality is though, its pretty darn difficult for Google to know when a link is – well just a link – and when a link is a paid endorsement.
So often times you can get away with lots of paid links. But even more importantly:
If you are not ranking in the search rankings anyway why the hell wouldn’t you sell links – it could be a nice little earner!
Selling links is gaming the system, well that’s true. Selling links will get you thrown out of Google’s index, it will get you sent to the pergatory of the 999th page, your site will be deindexed and your sins will never leave you! Selling links is immoral!
Google doesn’t want you to sell links, or buy links. However that’s just a preference they have, because it helps their business model if you don’t. Selling links is bad for Google’s business model: selling your kid sister is immoral – see the difference?
I call bullshit on the rest of it. Lets start with the immoral bit first. This would frankly perplexes me. Google’s algorithm depends in part of counting the links to the page the more likely Google is to rank that page near page 1 (gross simplification there). So people who want their site on page 1, will acquire links to get them to page 1.
None of those links are paid for though – so they are OK. But if I take money for a link on my site – then its immoral and wicked and polluting the electrons of the Internet ??? Pleeeese. It sounds like a business proposition to me.
Google is Part of the Competitive Environment - Not a Moral Authority - or Your Friend
Selling Links in 2011
The link selling industry is alive and well. Most of us who have active blogs, particularly a site which is anywhere on the first couple of the pages of the search engine results will be familar with the email:
“Dear webmaster I love your site – I would love to provide some free content to it – the content is very well written and highly relevant to your readers. In return we will want just one tiny, little link.”
That’s the first offer – they want their link for free. You could try saying yes – and then no-following the link 🙂 Always amusing that one! Better yet – negotiate a decent rate – and then make sure the post doesn’t annoy your readers.
Decide on a Business Model
You either want to sell links or you want to rank in the search engines – I suggest you don’t want to do both on the same blog. You also want to pick your niche. For example, there is no point selling links in the Internet Marketing niche. Anyway there are plenty of affiliate programs which readers are interested in, and which pay me commission.
Other niches are different. Take, for example travel. The affiliate programs in travel don’t seem to convert well – who goes to a blog to book a flight or a hotel – most travellers know how to spell expedia or hotelclub – and they go there direct. Travel on the other hand is an enormous global industry. An industry which is going more and more on-line. Having your travel site on page 1 of a search listing is very, very worthwhile.
Paid Links and Sponsorship and Advertising – Same, Same – Not Different
Apparently advertising is OK but paid links aren’t – well that’s what some in the travel community seem to think. I call bullshite on this one -plus a pile of mis-information in the post and the comments which caused me to write this.
Not one of the sites I reviewed for this post no-followed any of their paid links: sidebar, footer, links under “Advertising” headers, widgets, or in-content links – either declared or not. As far as Google is concerned – if they want to come the heavy – they are all paid links unless you no-follow them.
In practice – if they are actually links to affiliate programs – then Google will probably not care. If they are links to landing or home pages of the advertiser – for which you are not getting a commission for – Google’s reviewers are going to assume you are being paid.
After all why the heck would anyone want to go to any of these advertisers – when they are on a travel blog? Yeah I outed the guys buying the links – not the bloggers being paid – rather see the pimps in jail not the pros if you see what I mean?
So if you are going to do paid links –
Do Paid Links Smart
Here’s how. You need to put all the paid links posts in new category – I suggest that you don’t call it “Paid Links” – maybe “Guest Posts” or “Miscellaneous” might be less obvious.
Make sure that category doesn’t appear on your front page, and remove it from your RSS feed. So now you have money in the bank and you haven’t annoyed your readers – that’s a start.
I would seriously consider re-writing any “Advertising/Press” page you might have to include that you always “no follow” paid links, whether you do or not. Yeah take the moral high-ground if you want – but really Google is in the habit of shooting first and asking questions later. You can always negotiate the deal with the advertiser in private.
If you are caught up in a manual review – then you need to appear to be doing the right thing.
Also putting links in older posts – is far less likely to be annoying to readers, particularly if they aren’t posts which show up in your “greatest hits” list.
Don’t even think about doing paid links on a blog which also uses Adsense – “Don’t make Google Look Stupid” is the appropriate mantra here.
Google Hates Paid Links But Seems To Be Ignoring All But the Most Blatent Sellers Currently
I’ve been watching the most blatant sellers of links in the travel niche for a few months, including a page rank update last month. The worst I’ve seen is a drop from 4 to 2 for someone who has a paid link at the bottom of almost every post. I’ve seen no reports of deindexing.
Google really doesn’t seem to care about the travel blogger’s selling links – at the moment. Whether the little furore I linked to above, will make a difference, its hard to know, but bets would be on not, but this is game not without risks, make your judgement.
The reality is – why you can get away with selling links, you are getting cash in hand, real cash, real return. If it all goes to custard and you get penalised – the worst thing that will probably happen is that you will lose your Page Rank. Page rank and search engine rankings are not related. PR is certainly not related to social media – your community won’t notice. Yes it may affect your future earnings – but at least you still have the cash.
My cynical take is that the people buying the links are also big Adwords advertisers – they are Google’s customers and Google doesn’t want to piss them off.
If you do get done for selling links – here’s what to do:
delete the offending posts or add the “no follow” attribute to the links; and
Had to engage in the conversation here – Leo – says there is no such thing as passive income he argues that we all should be developing businesses not just relying on SEO to climb to the top of the rankings.
Funny how my name has got associated with passive income – as friendspointed out to Leo (and not saying Leo isn’t a friend – merely wrong 🙂 ) I would be in for the argument.
Not Passive Income
OK so lets step back. In the dark times pre-passive income – I used to be a highly overpaid IT consultant – I was paid a nice hourly rate by companies who wanted to upgrade or replace software. I used to work on a salary – a “safe” job right. Yup, it was – I never got fired from a permanent job – but it was huge, huge millstone around my neck. You see turning up 40 hours a week – even if the hours were somewhat flexible – meant that I could only travel in the holidays- I only got 4 weeks annual leave so even with creative use of leave without pay, public holidays and anticipated leave – I could only get away for 6 weeks ever couple of years.
I could afford the travel – but I didn’t have the time – the rules around my presence at work were my definition of hell.
Business or Passive Income ?
I looked at options – buying a franchise is a popular one around here – but it sounded like buying a job to me (told what to do – lots of bosses (clients) and high overheads (franchise fees)) – no thanks. Plus, again – you have to be in the country to run the business.
Starting my own business – I never considered it to be frank – I not only couldn’t sell, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to risk my capital and the failure rate for small business in New Zealand is pretty high (and usually that takes your house too).
I started to look at other options. When I started researching my options I came across the concept that you could invest now and get paid later. I could buy property and get paid rents, I could buy shares and get paid dividends (rarely in my country but the principal is still there).
Passive Income Take 1
This was promising – I did quite a bit of research. In the end we invested in property (my partner was already in shares) – and its worked for us and continue to do so.
Now some will argue property investment, particularly residential, free-standing, older wooden houses, in earthquake prone countries, is not passive. They will say houses need to be maintained, tenants need to be found, managed and got rid of.
Yup – and you can outsource the lot! Case in point – house we own in small town New Zealand.
Passive Income - New Zealand Style
Here’s the rough figures (all NZ$ – NZ$1 = US$0.75 at the moment – but relatively it doesn’t matter).
Purchase price 2003 – $77,000
Currrent estimated value 2011 $150,000
Unrealised capital gain 6.4% a year
Original tenant left a few weeks ago – yup same tenants for 8+ years – never missed a payment – $140 to $160/week for 8 years.
Gross rental income: $8320 or 10% cash yield
Gross yield 16.4%/year (yup that’s why we don’t focus on shares very much).
Now the property does have expenses, we use a property manager, pay Council rates and insurance, and of course we borrowed the purchase price so there is mortgage interest as well – but time wise its cost us about 2 days when bought the place (one day deciding to buy the place, one day due diligence, signing papers) and now – eight years later we spent 1/2 day, inspecting the property and arranging for someone to give it a good tidy up.
Is that totally passive income? No
Is it bloody close, the way we do it – yes. And even we maintained and managed the properties ourselves (and plenty of larger landlords do) – we would have a business giving a us a ful-time income for a very part-time amount of effort. But we don’t that because between the two of us we are crap at DIY and are too soft to deal with ratbag tenants!
Will this property be passive income for us for the next 10, 20, 30 years? Should be, likely to be, unless there is a major earthquake in the region – when it won’t be a total loss – but we will probably get paid out and have to walk away at that point. Is passive income guaranteed – nope.
So if property investment is so great – why didn’t I stick with it? Well we did – but we stopped buying – why? Risk, to make good money on property you need to gear up (borrow) – to do that you are layering risk on risk – we got to the level of borrowing against asssets that we were comfortable with – and stopped.
Property is an as passive or active income as you design it to be.
Passive Income #2
My second attempt at passive income you are familiar with, as documented right here. I rank websites at the top of the SERPS and make passive income from the advertising on them. Frankly I never started off to build a business online – a wanted a passive, long term income – and I have that now. Some of my income is from fairly new sites, some of my income are from sites and pages that I haven’t touched for three years. Last year I inadvertantly demonstrated that I could do little work for several months have not affect my income.
What’s long-term income though – will my websites still rank in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years? Maybe, maybe not – but every indication to date is that older sites rank and hold their rankings better than new sites. But one of the reason I have many websites is the same I reason I own 5 rental properties in smaller, cheaper places, rather than just 1 or 2 in the fairly expensive city I live in – diversification. If one of my houses is destroyed or untenanted – it hurts but its only part of my portfolio. If one of websites gets out of favour with Google or that particularly niche falls out of fashion – the others are still producing.
Now from what I am seeing – nothing much has changed on the last Google update – my sites are still ranking in the same place more or less, my Hubpages may be a little down – but that could be coincidence/seasonal too. February didn’t match my record January month – but I know my pattern is that once I hit a new income record it takes 3 to 4 months to match it again – in short I am seeing nothing out of the ordinary in my business.
Leo argues that I really should build a business online – a real business with real clients – but nothing has much changed for me – my freedom is still the most important thing for me – and having to be available to clients cuts into that freedom. Having a few clients is fine (and I do) – but ramping it up seems to be just trading freedom for income – a trade I’m not really prepared to make.
Leo argues that SEO will get more and more competitive over the coming years – it could well do – though I wouldn’t overestimate the ability of corporates to adapt – pretty bloody slow in my experience. He argues that I should establish a “real” business which has real followers and therefore not be dependent on search traffic. I know a little about this – because this blog gets “real” visitors not just search traffic. As far as I can tell though -the people who convert are the search traffic.
What I know is that with my silly little sites – I can make a little money – not a huge amount – sometimes $1/day – sometimes more. But even at $1/day lets look at the rate of return:
Initial purchase of site: (all prices US$)
$8 for the domain
$10-$15 for content on the site Ti
Total: $23
Backlink articles at say $1/each – maybe 30 -90 articles – say $90
Annual profit $243 … annual costs say maybe $20…
No mortgages, no property managers, no rates, no insurance, no risk of earthquakes…
Passive Income – Is It For You? Maybe Not If …
If You Want to Make a Difference
If you want to make a difference in the world – then blogging ain’t where its at – go become a health worker, or a volunteer in a country that needs the help. An engineer bringing clean drinking water to kids in Africa, a researcher finding a cure for cancer is making a difference, me – not so much.
If You Need Money Now
As I have advised many people – if you need money this month, or next month – or even in the next 6 to 12 months – this won’t work for you – it may, but for most beginners it won’t work. It didn’t work for me – I got a job – it paid, it was a crappy job but it delivered what I needed at the time – cash.
If You Have Huge Income Requirements
I remember when I wrote about making $1000/month with Adsense – that it seemed like a lot of money (I hit that milestone almost exactly 2 years later) – $1000/month is a lot of money to me – its not enough to live on – but I could live on it if I had to – its pretty much what the NZ government pays as a pension for the over-65’s and most of them seem to do just fine.
About US$5k /month would work just fine for me – but I see people making $10k plus in the TKA forums – frankly that’s nice – but its unlikely to ever be me – because I don’t really need the money I will probably never persue it! If you really need to make a 6-figure salary – again I’d say get a job – just make sure you have the right skills.
Tourist Hoards waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
Looking for headless chook image – could only find hoards of tourists (close enough I think)! Thought I would do a follow up on my what is a content farm post – as the fall out continues on Google’s recent update – and just point out that human psychology is quite intereting and I am thinking that maybe Google has a number of psyc PhD’s amongst their software geeks.
Tourist Hoards waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
Google Farmer Update – What Was It?
On or about 1 March in the US results (but will be rolled out worldwide) Google changed their algorithm – they made the unusual step of annoucing what they had done and Matt Cutt’s is quoted as saying:
This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
Google claimed to affected nearly 12% of the search results – but a number of us found either nothing had changed, or nothing bad had happened to our sites. As I said in my last post – I wasn’t see much evidence that they had succeeded.
The problem is of course the age old question:
What the Fuck is Quality?
Some people think this site is quality – some don’t – but I have no qualifications in making passive income online. In fact I didn’t even make much income when I started this site – but people thought this site was quality – because I was writing about my own experience.
Here’s another site which is really useful: http://www.cure-back-pain.org/ – the site introduces itself with:
I suffered with crippling lower back pain for 18 years of my life. I know what you must endure everyday while living with back problems. I have empathy for you. I understand because I was there myself. I have found my own cure. I now know how wonderful life can be without the huge burden of chronic pain. It is my most sincere wish that you might find lasting relief, as well.
I found the site because Google has started a thread asking people to report if their site has been adversely affected and think this is unfair – the owner of the site above wrote this:
I am so devastated. My main site and my life’s work, cure-back-pain.org was drastically affected. I am not a learned webmaster, I am a back pain patient and someone who writes to help others recover. My site is 5 years old and has often led in the rankings for my topic, back pain and back pain treatment. I was let go from my “dayjob” in the economic decline of 2008 and found a savior in the fact that I could make a living helping those who needed it most, so I turned to my site full time and found it very rewarding. I write all my own content and work my site 80 hours a week+. I do everything myself. I do not syndicate or outsource anything. All one has to do is read the letters in the Q&A section to see how much I am dedicated to my cause… I could not figure out what I did wrong to suffer such a decline in ranking and then started to research what may have happened and found that many excellent sites (and many not so excellent content farms) were affected. Eventually, I found some advice from my webhost and checked my site for stolen content. Guess what? I found TONS of sites stealing my 100% original and self written content! I am shocked and appalled. This probably has something to do with my dismissal as an authority in the topic I know so well…
I double checked the US SERPs for back pain treatment. At position #4 I found a news result – like who gives a shite if you are looking for treatment why would I care if Barcelona’s soccer coach has back pain??? I found results from webmd and emedicinehealth (also webmd I think), I found an about.com page which quoted scientific results. And I found this little gem on a classic Made For Adsense site:
The quest for effective back pain relief has thrown up some challenges in the modern world. As we move through the early years of the new century, the pace of life is becoming ever more frantic. With every passing day, there seems to be more to do than there ever was before. At the same time, there is little doubt that the pressure …
If I was the owner of back pain treatment I wouldn’t just be “devastated” I would be utterly and totally pissed off and disillusioned. Now we could have a debate about the sites not that pretty – its a standard Site Build It! template, but its the guy’s only income – and he has actually been giving Google exactly what they want – and the kick him in the nuts. But all is good – in this self-satisfied interview with Matt Cutts and another Google Engineer apparently:
However, our classifier that we built this time does a very good job of finding low-quality sites. Wired.com
In the words of the Speights Ad – Yeah Right. But of course I wouldn’t want to running off and saying that Google had stuffed up – that wouldn’t be scientific or anything -right? So I went to the home of all in-depth research in things of a darker nature in Internet Marketing – and found that the owner’s of splogs and autoblogs were very, very happy about the latest update.
I could spend hours going through that Google support thread and finding examples – you may have seen that even sites which are quoted as exemplars of Adsense publishers got slammed included Ask The Builder – page 2 of the thread.
On a skim – the sites I saw that were penalised were:
large and generally old (5 + years)
had had consistent rankings for quite a while i.e. their owners were comfortably making an income from them which they were pretty dependent on
some were general sites but most were specialist
most had good original content written by either experts or by someone with a passion for the topic
high PR (5 and above) sites were affected
Now I hope, and this is sincere, that in many cases the sites in this thread will get reinstated – but the state of chaos currently gives us one clear point:
Google still can’t distinguish original content from scrapped content. If you are are an old, well-ranking site with content your content will get scrapped, copied and re-written – as of today – this may well result in your rankings dropping.
If those sites do get reinstated it will be manually – not algorithmically.
Some are already asking whether this Google update mis-fired and Leo points out the winners from the Farmer update are in fact the scrappers (at least short term). I agree with his recommendation though to build niche sites to fill the gaps. But as Griz points out – fly beneath the radar
So can you still make passive income online? I think so – from where I am sitting – actually looking at the facts, rather than the hype, Google is no closer to cleaning up its search results than it ever was. If I was starting today what would I do? Avoid the niches Griz mentions in his post, avoid having one huge site on lots of different topics, I’d build a bunch of niche sites across a range of topics, build back links to them – and see what worked. If I site started producing I would seriously look at taking Adsense off it and finding an alternative monetization strategy.
On the other hand you might just be so scared off by the latest furore in our little corner of the Interwebs – that you decide that you really should go out and get a real job and contribute to society of something – go ahead – but consider this – that’s probably exactly what Google wants you to do …
Matt Cutts has the best job in the world. He writes one little blog post and puts the whole of the Internet Marketing community into a tail spin – and his latest is a good one – in fact when googling “what is a content farm” the first result was a news result – indicating that the term is hot, hot, hot at the moment.
But WTF is Google doing? Are they trying to destroy all of us who want to make a few dollars of passive income a month? Is the era of making a living online gone forever? Google search is failing – and what Google is doing is a public relations exercise in order to recover some credibility – and the evidence is in the results of the above search.
So what is a content farm I thought? I asked Mr Google (using US results via the nifty Chrome Google Extension tool) – and Google told me –
News results: according to joisic.com:
The term “content farm” is commonly used to describe these sites that add pages and pages of unoriginal, useless information to the search engines database.
and gigaom.com thinks that:
Companies that do this have come to be known — somewhat disparagingly — as “content farms” because of the low rates they pay the people producing their content and because of the factory-style atmosphere of some ventures.
They then go on to quote examples of such companies as including:
Demand Media, Associated Content, AOL (with Patch and Seed), About.com, HubPages, Examiner.com and Suite 101.
Odd list – hubpages.com doesn’t pay me a cent – I get paid from a share of revenue from articles on their site- my biggest payout comes from Google’s Adsense… BTW I never heard of either of these sites I was thinking maybe LATimes or TechCrunch – its not like the discussion is not being had…
But getting on to the very, very best results for my query:
wikipedia: the entry is somewhat shorter than the list of references and says precisely – nothing …
seotheory.com asks What is a content farm and offers an opinion based on personal experience – rather than rehashed content – odd how its coming in at #4 behind the nonsense in front of it.
Next we have the site called – yup – “The Content Farm” – and yes you can find really useful stuff like how to talk to a child (hint first check if he is wearing priest’s clothing …) or how to determine the weight of an Oscar (TM) Statuette – hint – first win one … In fact its a lot more amusing than the usual stuff on ehow and good luck to them I say – and it just goes to show the Exact Match Domain (EMD) bonus still works ..
At position #5 we have a 2009 post from readwriteweb.com age and authority will allow you to rank with little effort at all…
Many people know how to rank in Google’s search results – and Google doesn’t like it. If you missed the broadcast mesage – to rank content in the search results it is easiest if:
your domain name matches the search term;
failing that the term you want to be found for is in your url and within your article using the basics of on-page SEO
build links to your site – some of those links should be anchored using your search term or near relatives to it.
Google is trying to rank quality – but frankly – it can’t.
Lets take a topical example. Christchurch New Zealand has suffered 2 damaging earthquakes in the last 6 months. In September 2010 there was a damaging earthquake which didn’t kill anyone, on the 22 February and aftershock of that quake may have killed as many as 240 people (figures still unconfirmed at the time of writing). So I am in NZ and I know that this story is so big that it has played in primetime on CNN, BBC and elsewhere around the world. There was non-stop media coverage (without ads) for the first 48 hours in New Zealand in TV1, TV3 and Radio NZ – my point is that there is an awful lot of information on the topic – a lot of new information – which can’t have been gamed by the clever SEO’s. So what does Google.co.nz come up with when I ask it the question many have asked me (an ex-Geologist) in the last week:
So in order we have:
a bunch of very useful official sites – any query about christchurch and/or earthquake is displaying this in New Zealand at the moment – fair enough but not contextural search.
news results from legit daily newspapers – though it seems a little bit unfair that the UK telegraph showed up an the NZ Herald didn’t – NONE of these results relate to my actual query – the cause of the quake.
now the first actual search results is from – Yahoo Answers – yeah font of all legit qualified opinion that is – at least the answers on this particular listing are not too outrageous – but its hardly at a technical level – or even a good English level.
next we have a pretty awesome photoblog from MSNBC – nice article – nothing to do with the question.
the next two – yup – two results are from suite101 – one of the supposed farms – the first article has a sub heading which matches my query – but it doesn’t relate to the most recent event – thought Google was better than that – the second article – does relate to February’s quake – was written several days ago (I can tell from the estimated death toll) and there is nothing really about the question I asked in my query. These articles are reasonably well-written but obviously not by anyone who is either anywhere near Christchurch or knows much about Earth Science.
Wikipedia is up next – but the link is to the 2010 quake not the 2011
Wikianswers makes it into the top 5 with a little gem – we don’t know in about 300 words.
But maybe that’s the best there is – so I dug a little deeper – here’s a good explanation and another one here and here – of course I only found those because I know that earthquakes are explained by the science of plate tectonics: obviously no one told Google.
Summary for those who skipped the preceding 993 words:
Google can’t make a judgement call about “quality” – all it can try and match search terms with content on a site and the authority of that site. It doesn’t understand even the most basic LSI – plate tectonics goes with earthquakes like cheese goes with wine – go figure.
Google is doing a bit of smoke screen exercise designed to scare the f*k out of some SEOs.
Google can’t even really distinguish between original and copied content – I wish they would because I am bored with the scrapers stealing my content – but I certainly haven’t seen it improve in the last few days.
Google can’t even pick up grammar – not should it – Christchurch’s mayor has been widely quoted as “However it is bad news for one of the city’s key sewage facilities. “Our main sewer truck is seriously munted,” Mayor Bob Parker told TVNZ.” – in my mind the quote of the event and exactly right if you are of a certain age and grew up in New Zealand. So don’t bury it in the results because its not grammatically correct!
Google trusts older sites more than newer sites – and PR has almost nothing to do with it.
They have (almost certainly) temporarily – reduced rankings for some large content sites. Apparently including hubpages – I say apparently because my long-standing well-ranking hubs are still exactly where they were in rankings.
From forum comments it appears those with affiliate sites promoting Amazon/eBay type products have been slapped down and the affiliate site promoted above them. I remember now why I gave up on promoting eBay and Amazon.
From my own figures – niche sites with unique but hardly stellar content are still going strong.
Go read Allyn for his take on Content Farms for Google to Zap
Build My Rank really has been a business changer for me. Well not by itself obviously – in fact if you don’t have a plan to start of with then – you don’t need this post you need the Keyword Academy instead!
Back about a month ago I signed up to BuildMyRank: review and rankings were on my mind, then I was pretty excited about it. Well now I am ecstatic about it! Why? I’m seeing rankings jump and jump significantly and with them income. Will the rankings hold? Who knows – but meanwhile I’ll take the money thanks.
Have I a got detailed results to prove this? Nope – these were sites that I was previously supporting using Postrunner – so maybe I could have waited a month and seen the results jumping on the Postrunner submissions- I don’t know – frankly it takes a lot of time to document that type of detail and I don’t have duplicate sites: same niche, same age similar content etc to do proper split testing. Instead I swapped my writer over from writing for Postrunner to BMR and sat back to see what happened.
What I do know is that BMR plus my writer is hands-off outsourcing for me – and Postunner plus writer wasn’t. That’s worth not just about an hour a day of my time, its more than that because it means that suddenly there are about 17 sites I don’t have to think about more than once a month – I can focus on other stuff. Important stuff like this:
Rottnest Island, Western Australia
Oh OK and growing my business as well …
A few days ago several people posted about a minor PR update and a Google dance in their rankings. I knew that nothing dramatic had happened to mine as my Adsense was tracking nicely to an all time record – but on the 1st I ran all my sites for rankings again in Market Samurai – I was up, almost across the board, sometimes dramatically so, sometimes just a little. Now these are all sites which have fairly similar characteristics:
they are mainly niche sites – less than 30 pages indexed generally;
the youngest are 7 months old, most are over a year;
most are WordPress, some aren’t (I see no difference between html sites and blogs in the rankings);
But I also took an old site – hadn’t been updated for nearly 2 years. I wrote a new page focused on a new keyword – used Impact Page Builder to optimize the on-page SEO – posted 10 back links to the new page from BMR over a week – its now ranking in the 20s for a moderately competitive term.Pretty darn impressed with that.
Do I Need Backlinks At All?
Some will say not – some successful webmasters say they never build backlinks. They argue that you might as well spend your time building your own site rather than adding it to other people’s site. Most of those webmasters don’t make any money – so I tend to discount them – after all this ain’t a hobby! Some of them do a lot of real-world promotion – or have even got at book to their name. I discount them – that is not a business model for me.
But some of them make money , good money, better than I do. What do they have that I don’t? Without exception they have websites which are 10 or more years old – that age thing you can’t fake! And the site has been up that whole time, even if it started off long before WordPress and is now a blog – it doesn’t matter – Google doesn’t care about your technology – but it REALLY cares that the site has been about the same general topic for 10 years.
Which tends to mean that the sites involved – are passion sites – the person started them in 1999 because they LOVED the topic – not because they could make money from it. The clever ones make money now. And they have backlinks, lots of backlinks, natural, organic backlinks because they are market leaders in their niche and other people link to them – and yes every one of the sites I know about in this category are SOCIAL sites too.
If you have one of those sites – you don’t need me and congratulations. Do I really, really, really wish I’d started my passion site about independent travel in 1999 – oh yes I do! But I didn’t and you – gentle reader – probably didn’t either. So for the rest of us – well we need to game the system basically … you need to manipulate your backlinks. You need to build them, you need to pay someone else to do it for you.
Lis’s Views on Backlink Profiles
If the site is new – its more important to get authority links than it is to get bulk links. You need to get some “real” links from sites which are recognized as authority in the niche (not just PR). Some Postrunner sites will work for this – as will blogs which accept guest posts in your niche – if its a social niche that is.
Different niches work differently for backlinks – travel bloggers, and frugal living bloggers comment on each other’s sites ALL the time. Niches about embarrassing personal problems and serious debt – not so much. I suspect that Google has a “normal backlink profile” for some niches – deviate too far from it – and you will be sand boxed for a while. You will come back after a while (or any competitor could take out any site at anytime).
I have ranked and kept a site in position #1 with only crappy backlinks and no new content – for 2 years – its hard to stuff this up but some approaches will see results faster than others. I’ve NEVER seen a site deindexed because of bad backlinks – certainly have seen sites sent to position 500 purgatory though!
If your sites are in a niche which is “social” then its probably worth having some twitter and Facebook love going on around it – after all it looks normal …
Getting the SEO right and siloing your site so that it doesn’t have unrelated links on the page – really does seem to be significant
Lis’s Views on Backlink Services
All backlinking services are gaming the system: Postrunner and EzineArticles included.
Gaming the system works – to a greater or lesser extent.
Backlink services work better with a more established site – that old thing of site age is still something you can’t fake – if you want a genuine short-cut in this game – buy an aged site in the niche you want.
Backlinks to backlinks also works – I think this is the major weakness of Postrunner – but you can help yourself with this with things like backlinking services to keep your links indexed.
Until you are making about $500/month from your sites I don’t really think you can justify paying for additional backlink services – and if your sites are less than one year old you are also probably risking your money as well.
There is a risk involved with using any service – sometimes they do die a slow death – which may be terminal if the owners don’t do something about it (basically Google discounts the sites being used over time) – don’t ever signup for a service for longer than a month. On the flip side you really need to commit to 2 or 3 months to really evaluate a service so that is the amount of money you are risking.
Doing ANY backlinking is never a waste – at the moment BuildMyRank seems to work exceptionally well – that may drop back to just averagely well – the point is if I am using it to build at least 10 links a day to my sites I will outrank you if you are still worrying about whether you should backlink at all.
Sorry I went on a bit – the bottom line is – this game isn’t that hard -and it doesn’t change that much over the years – and the best info you will ever get is building your own sites and EXPERIMENTING – then you will really find out what does and does not work.
I’ve just enrolled in a new backlink scheme too – but I probably won’t have any results before the end of the year on this one – so I’m not prepared to name it here – but it does have absolutely EVIL affiliate program so contact me if you want the link LOL – we can do a deal!
So are you building baclinks? Using what if any services? Using your own backlink sites only? Or do you only publish on your own site?
Google can be more than annoying sometime – I mean, as Leo asks, what would you do if you woke up one day and all your rankings had disappeared?
But that’s not what happened to me today. Instead I was talking to Dave – who runs the awesome travel blog GoBackpacking which allows old backpackers to guest post about Google Alerts – and I noticed something had changed…
Waterfront, Wellington, New Zealand
But first rewind: you do use Google alerts don’t you? Its the fastest way to keep an eye on what the great web is saying about you. I have alerts on my name e.g. “lis sowerbutts” my blog’s names e.g. lissowerbutts.com. But I also have some more subtle alerts:
site:mydomain.com – tells me every time Google indexes a url on my site;
link:mydomain.com – tells me every time Google counts a link to my site. NOT Yahoo – Google
Now most of you know probably all know that and have had the alerts for years. But today I noticed there is a new column in the Manage my Alerts screen. As well as “type” and “how often” there is a new column “Volume” – the default of which is “only the best results” – I turned it back to “all results” .
I thought about it and realised I hadn’t been seeing many alerts for the last few weeks – suddenly they are all back. So what does this new feature tell me about Google:
there are sites and there are sites – Google trusts some more than others – and PR has very little to do with that.
Drizzle with a chance of earthquakes in the afternoon…
On Saturday morning I was asleep – I usually am, but I was late getting up and getting online. I noticed that Skype was flashing a message – it was SY from Hospitalera Blogs asking if I was OK. Hmm I thought yes – why? I turned the radio on – it was talking about the big quake – obviously not the long awaited Wellington earthquake, and was in fact a huge quake of 7.1 in Christchurch.
Its been an interesting few days – and I don’t just mean the minor earthquakes that we have had in Wellington (and yes quakes do come in swarms, and no I didn’t even notice them). Two things came out of this: trends blogging and business continuity and communications in the Twitter world.
OK in my defence I knew no one was dead – but my second thought was – hmmm wonder what happens if I Google “earthquake insurance New Zealand” -ah I find my own Earthquake Insurance hubpage (which was written almost a year ago after Hubpages did a disaster hubmob) ranking just below the government site. Interesting because the hub was about earthquake insurance in the US – but not specifically about earthquake insurance in NZ. So that wasn’t a difficult topic to choose.
When something like a earthquake in Christchurch happens – people want information – and they want it fast. Turning on the radio was a good start – they apparently started broadcasting about 7am – 2.5 hours after the initial shock. But finding virtually no information in Google on Christchurch related seismic terms and seeming my semi-related hubs ranking well told me what to write about. Why did I put the articles on hubpages – not here? Authority – I knew I’d get fast indexing and fast promotion – and I have every new earthquake related hub I’ve put up is ranking for at least long tails within 4-5 hours (as fast as the hubpages analytics could tell me). Now if there were just some relevant ads…
My office before the Earthquake – honest!
Frankly for the traffic stats it would have been better if I live in California – but in real terms I am more than happy to live in New Zealand. For those of you who consider earthquakes as terrifying acts of God – you are right – unless you happen to live in a country with good building standards. Both the dismal Haiti quake and Christchurch’s quake where about the same magnitude and depth and proximity to a city. No one died in Christchurch, maybe 230,000 died with a further 300,000 were injured in Haiti. Three were seriously injured in Christchurch. Now OK the population of Christchurch is 400,000, Haiti had a lot more – but this is all about building standards. And anymore who thinks New Zealand building standards are over the top have probably been silenced for at least a generation.
Oh and there some disasters which are just too easy to predict … Meanwhile – if I’m not online and there has been a quake in Wellington, I live and work in modern wooden house which is on bedrock and at the top of the hill – I will be fine 🙂
Online Business Continuity
One of the shocking stats coming out of Christchurch is that some small retailers will be bankrupt if their business is out of action for a week. Frankly I’m shocked I had no idea they lived so close to the line. I’ve already proved that I can ignore my business for months. But what I will lose in an instant in a quake is power – which will stop my modem working instantly – even though the laptop would last for several hours (if it survived being thrown on the floor hmm).
In Christchurch the cell phones stayed up for several hours until the batteries operating the towers died. The traditional phone system lasted through out (though I suspect younger people discovered that there are phones that don’t need power). Maybe I need to remember how to connect via dial up (and a cable..) and/or a cell phone which knows about the Internet. Maybe I need a decent phone which could at least allow me to update Facebook and my blog.
I probably need some more cash too – I rarely have more than $50 in my wallet – and of course EFTPOS and ATMs need power and phone lines! I do actually have a cheque book – it would be interesting trying to persuade a retailer to take one though.
You see frankly if the big one does hit Wellington I’m not hanging around for the aftershocks and waiting for the essential services to be connected. If it hit during the day my partner will probably have to walk home from the CBD – it may take him 3 or 4 hours. Assuming that neither of us are injured – we will be walking (the roads are a disaster waiting to happen and will be impassible to a cute little urban car) north until we can hitch and find civilization (aka Gin, broadband and power) – probably Levin or Palmerston North. Our house is fully insured – I feel no need to hang around and protect if from – well exactly what?
Do me a favour – if in future you do hear about a big eathquake in Wellington (100% chance in the new 1000 years by the way) – and you haven’t heard from me online for 24 hours – please link to this post in the forums that are asking where is Lis, and put it on my facebook wall again.
Meanwhile what are your business continuity plans in the case of a natural disaster? Must admit its the first time I’ve really thought about it…
Ideally – if I wanted a site completely focussed on websites for small business I would do the following:
I would try to get the exact domain name match e.g. websitesforsmallbusiness.com (or net or org) – there is definitely a bias from Google in favour of exact match domains (this does not extend to .info, .ws. .biz .co or any other extension). In this case those domains are unavailable and I wanted to focus the site on a particular country, so I went with the .co.nz extension.
I would include the keywords I was targetting in the blog’s title – sometimes you can’t get, didn’t get, didn’t think before you established a website – so end up with a stupid domain name e.g. lissowerbutts.com – but you can still target a totally different keyword by using the title tag. Ideally though I’d have had an exact match domain name.
Then I’d add the keyword again into my tagline.
I’d head over to the permalink settings and change them from the default for WordPress – which is the ugly ?p21 format and make them %postname% so that now I would have “pretty” urls like http://websitesforsmallbusiness.co.nz/website-package which include the page’s and post’s titles.
If I wasn’t using a theme such as Catalyst which includes SEO options I would install a FREE plugin such as all-in-one-SEO or Platinum SEO. I would tell the SEO options it to NOT noindex categories and tags and other pages.
Using those SEO options I’d add the main keyword into the title and meta-description of my homepage, and it and related keywords in the overall meta tags of the blog. This counts for very little – Yahoo may still use meta tags, Google probably doesn’t. Google may or may not use your meta description in your site’s search engine’s listing.
Now having done all that – I would add some posts and pages – which – obviously – would talk sometimes about websites for business in NZ or websites for small business or even cheap websites for NZ business– all obviously closely related.
If I was feeling really ethusisastic I would add some optimized images. Now Google is pretty stupid – its only a computer and tell that the bunch of pixels at the top of the post are about the consequences of earning a passive income online. So I told it! (Yeah I know its a stretch but I don’t have an image of banknotes lying on the beach!). BTW traffic you get from Google’s image search are notorious for only staying long enough to steal your images, they are useless as readers or revenue sources! To optimize an image do the following:
change the name of the image – before you upload it – include your keyword in the new image’s title – mine is now called https://lissowerbutts.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Perth-From-Rottnest-passive-income-reward1.jpg
then when you import the image – make sure the title, the alt-title, the description and the caption all to include the keyword of interest.
Perth from Rottnest - Passive Income Rewards!
Targeting More Than One Keyword on a Website
All of the above was an example of a small and focussed website. Not all websites are like that – this one sure isn’t it – it ranks quite well for its main keywords passive income online and related terms. But I also rank for terms utterly unrelated to those. How does this happen – well I do two things – I add relevant content. For example I rank quite well for the term postrunner and postrunner review – that’s entirely deliberate. This is what I did – I wrote a post: Postrunner Tutorial – used the keywords and related terms in the title, at the start of the post and at the end. I didn’t try for any particular number of times – I didn’t unecessarily captialise, bold or italicize the term – though it was natural to use it in sub-headings that happen to be bolded…
Then I wrote another post – also about Postrunner – I linked the two together – simply to tell my readers that there was a previous post that they should maybe read first – and to tell the search engines the same thing. I used the same category and similar tags for the two posts. Google now knows that I have quite a lot of i.e. more than one page, about this particular topic – that gives my pages a boost up the rankings,and hopefully a double listing (if I use exactly the same anchor text linking from each post to the other).
Ultimately you can get one website ranking for a bunch of unrelated keywords – and even it you started totally wrong – you can change everything up but adding titles and revising posts and get the same effect in the end. The key though is to get the site ranking for one keyword first – once you have the first ranking it will be quicker and easier to get subsequent rankings.
So over a couple of thousand words that’s pretty much a free on-page SEO guide. Its really not that hard – and almost all of your effort should actually be directed at getting backlinks for your site !
A few months ago I wrote a Scribe SEO review which created a lesson in online reputation management in the comments – which was interesting – but hardly the point. My point was that there is nothing difficult or technical about “optimizing your blog for SEO” – and I promised that I would write more about on page SEO. A promised and then I promptly forgot about. But I have had more than one person contact me about a free alternative to a tool like Scribe SEO – so here is my version of it. Its free – its here, you don’t even need to subscribe for the e-book – frankly there is not enough to write to fill an e-book – well not the important stuff anyway.
Baobab Tree - Native to the Kimberley's this example relocated to King's Park, Perth, WA
I am NOT an SEO Expert
I can do SEO, I know what I need to know to rank sites in Google. I am not an innovator, and I don’t do a lot of testing. This seems to appeal to the inner Geek – I am a part-Geek but not with SEO. I do practical SEO which works for my sites.
SEO Changes
SEO=search engine optimization – but what we all really mean is Google optimization – Google is the only game in town because it has so much of the search traffic. Ranking top in Yahoo or Bing is nice but pretty worthless as far as search traffic is concerned.
BUT Google changes all the time – most recently was the so-called MayDay Update – which caused angst and concern throughout the online Internet Marketing world – if you haven’t heard about it – don’t worry – and save yourself several hours of reading – don’t Google “Mayday update”
On Page SEO – A Practioner’s View Point
Not every post I write here is focussed on getting search engine traffic – in part this is just a social blog which allows me to connect to readers – and mix it up a fair bit. That’s OK and it doesn’t affect the site’s rankings for the keywords I DO target. Because Google ranks pages not sites in general. But before we even get to where you should be using your keyword on-page lets step back to ask the most basic question? If you have a popular site you can get traffic to any post – just my publishing it! But if you want to draw in new readers the easiest way is to have at least some posts which are keyword focussed.
What Are My Keywords?
You can’t rely on any tool to tell you what you keywords are! To do so is like sitting down and writing a novel and then working out what the plot is! You must have at least some idea before you start! Which is not to say that you should completely ignore market demand. If you want to write about garden design – it doesn’t require a genius to know that anything with the words “eco” or “green” in the title may sell better than others.
But even if you are short of ideas – Google will help you for free! In particular Google will tell you what terms they think your search is related to.
Sturt's Desert Pea, Kings Park, Perth WA
For example – go to google in and type indigenous landscape design. Google will tell you what it thinks you mean in two ways: as you type in the drop down it will offer alternatives, and at the very bottom of the page – you will see “searches related to indigenous landscape design ”
Now this particular keyword is an excellent example of having to know something about your niche and the way that niche uses language. Indigenous means “the original people (or other things: plants etc) of an area” – any biologist, anthropologist, zoologist would know that. But in Australia it is also the term very specifically used quite often in the media – where an American might talk about Native affairs or Native title and a New Zealander would talk about Tangata Whenua or Maori title – politically correct Australians would use the term Indigenous to reflect the people who were living in Australia when the Europeans happened upon the so-called Terra nullius. Aborigine is incorrect (it excludes Torres Strait Islanders and implies that almost all of the original Australians are the same race (they are not)), and native is associated with previous racist policies of white Australia.
Now having lived in Australia I know that Australia has huge issues with using the land inappropriately – e.g. commercially growing rice (which needs huge amounts of water) in the semi-arid Murray-Darling basin. Even home gardeners seem to grow far more more roses and lawns than the local flora (which is quite beautiful – I am using this post just to show off some of my better shots of it LOL)
So with that background when Gordon from Indigenous Landscape Design Australia asked me about a free alternative to Scribe SEO a thought his site was a really good example of a site which is doing most things right – but could be improved with a few additions. First a note about
Country Specific Keywords
Almost nothing is more country (if not region) specific than anything related to gardens and gardening. The information is specific, the plant varieties are specific and the stuff that grows in Cairns certainly won’t grow in Tasmania or Alberta. If you are targeting a specific country – get the specific countries TLD in this case .com.au – but also co.uk, .ca. .co.nz etc. This is the biggest hint to Google that your site is relevant to a single country – in fact the default now is for Google to show “sites from NZ” if I search from Google.co.nz – which is the default browsers for users in NZ. It doesn’t really matter where you sie is hosted (US is generally cheapest) – but you do need that TLD as a big hint in the domain name. As we are talking about an Australian site with an Australian audience I am using the Australian Google from here on:
So from google.com.au
as I typed in indigenous landsc… I got suggested:
indigenous landscapes – too broad
indigenous landscape design Australia – nice lots of searchers will add their country
indigenous landscaping – possible – might be too broad
indigenous landscaping ideas – excellent seracher wants info
indigenous landscaping omaha – huh – don’t think so
indigenous landscaping systems – hmm maybe – I don’t know enough about the topic to comment
once I insisted on searching for my original term – at the bottom of the page I got the related terms of:
Even More Related Keywords
So armed with this knowledge – and what very little I know about the topic – I head off to Google’s free keyword tool . Set the results to the relevant country (in this case) – toss in all the terms I think might be relevant from the above search and voila:
A note about search volumns and cost per click. This tool is designed for the USERs of Adwords ie the advertisers who pay for those Adsense ads that some of us make money from. This doesn’t mean its not useful even if you are not an adwords advertiser or publisher. If someone is paying to advertise for a term such “landscaping design” there is probably some chance of making money from it. Though if you change the search volumne over to “exact match” you will see that its not a huge volume. Even if you get the “not enough data” against a term – this doesn’t mean there are NO searches – again you need to know your market. Almost all New Zealand specific terms come up with that statement (there are only 4 million of us living here) – but that’s not to say that people don’t search for “small garden design” in NZ! It just means compared to the global demand for a term like “erection problems” its not very high!
Wildflower display, spring, Kings Park, Perth, WA
You don’t necessarily need high search volume to make money if you are offering expensive products and services e.g. a garden design service. But you do need to be using your customers language – and Google is offering you these suggestions because this is what your customers are using to search in Google for. Yes “outdoor landscaping” is a tautology – but 58 people a month in Australia search for it!
Now this site may be too specific – Gordon is already #1 and #2 for “indigenous landscape design” out of over 3,000,000 results. This suggests that there is not much competition and probably not much demand. But he will know what the demand is by checking his Analytics or other stats package – once you get to the top of the rankings you will know exactly what your traffic is!
And while you are there – your statistics are another excellent source of keyword ideas – people will find your site by using the oddest searches – and your stats should show you these.
Maybe I was wrong, perhaps my free on page SEO guide should be a book! Anyway its going to be a multi-part post obviously! Click here for part 2: Using Keywords in Your Site
What is a keyword – or more specifically what is a long tail keyword phrase – caused me endless confusion when I first began. I totally didn’t get it – that’s why products like Scribe SEO exist – to prey on beginner’s confusion. That’s unacceptable in my view – so here is the information that you need about keywords. Its here for free, you don’t have to sign up for any membership site or even a one off payment.
There are heaps of erudite SEO expert posts on keywords out there – this isn’t one of them. Instead this is an attempt to take it back down to basics – stick with me because I want to start to with a real world business example – and then we will move onto niche sites and blogs.
Keywords For a Service Business
I’m going to tell you how to do it for free. Lets assume you offer house washing services – purely because I am in the market for the same at the moment. Now I may search for “house washing” now this gives me a mixture of results including DIY articles on how to wash my house down and news results for house washing. But I am not interested in learning to wash my house down – I want someone to do it for me! The result is somewhere there in the 7 million pages returned by that first query – but its too hard to find. Instead I try again and type “house washing service” now I have the right sort of result – but they are in Michigan and Atlanta – its (now) obvious I want a local service – so I try “house washing service Wellington”.
So pretty much your keywords are all terms that should appear on your business card; what services you provide and the geographic locality that you service. Most businesses will have a number of keywords. House washing dude may end up with a list that looks like this:
house washing Wellington
house washing northern suburbs Wellington
water blasting Wellington
window washing Wellington
quick quote house washing Wellington
guaranteed house washing Wellington
So basically the keywords for a service business include each service you provide (house washing, water blasting), the location you services (Wellington, northern suburbs) and your unique selling points (guaranteed, quick quote). And all of these are in the language that your customers will use to find you – not the industry terms common among the experts!
Keywords for a Consultancy Business
One of the things I learned in my brief tenure over at Third Tribe Marketing was that an awful lot of people start with the thought that they are going to use the Internet as way to drum up services as a consultant. Common trades seem to include:
Social Media Consulting
WordPress Blogging Tips and Tricks
Marketing Strategies
freelance writing
This is a little trickier – basically because its harder to define a consultancy business – a plumber has regulations about not doing building or electrical work, possibly unfortunately, white collar consultants do not. From a business point of view you really, really should define your services very clearly. If you are planning on providing “web services” to the world and can’t define it any further – your problem is not keyword identification – its a business plan!
Next you should be aware that not all keywords are possible to rank for easily. Some have more competition than others. In broad terms the longer the phrase the more likely you will get to rank for it fairly easily and the more likely you will get a paying customer. For example which of the following phrases typed into a search engine by a potential customer do you think may convert to an actual customer? Lets assume you are selling writing services
freelance writing
web freelance writer
freelance writer for hire
freelance writer for hire cost less than $500
freelance writer to write about home improvements
Now before some freelance writers jump on me and say some of those terms are not grammatically 100% – I say that’s the point – people tend to type into Google as they think – they don’t edit for perfect grammatical structure. Useful keywords are ones that reflect how people search – not the text book!
Now those last couple of phrases will show in the Google Adwords tool as having no searchers – that’s an approximation. The same tool tells me there is no searches for people looking for family home for sale in Khandallah but there is at least one – I have shown her the house… At that’s the point I need exactly one person to buy the house, if you are freelance writer a client a week or even a month could be the start of a profitable career – you don’t need a thousand new clients a month to launch a freelance writing career – so find very long tail keywords that relate to the services you can offer and use them for post titles – it really is that simple.
So Which Longtail Keywords Should I Use on My Blog?
Many people start off in the general – this is my life or my work or my passion blog. These seem to particularly struggle with adding keywords to their posts – because its an after thought. Often they have bought into posting an excessive number of times a week – i.e. more than the once I manage around here. They’ve been told they have to post all the time – guys YOU DO NOT! Some of my favourite bloggers post once every few months – but when they do post its a useful, worthwhile and generally long post – it usually then has another few thousand words added in the comments – if you are good enough people won’t forget you! I’m not that good – but I can go weeks without posting anything here – and it rarely drops my subscriber count, doesn’t hugely effect my traffic, and makes little to no difference to the income I earn from this site.
Oh and you can ignore a site for months and suddenly start posting again to – I just did with a site of mine – posted for the first time in 4 months- indexed within 24 hours!
Why? Because most of the people who buy from me come from search traffic – often they will stick around, clearly dazzled by my deathless prose, but I measure success by income not subscribers (blame it on my bank – they are more interested in dollars in my account not my feedburner stats!).
If you are trying to kick start a new blog – or an old one which has the classic 10 readers, one of which is your mother – think about what you are offering your readers: if you aren’t offering them something then that could be part of the problem. This is why focusing on a niche for a blog is easier – if you start writing about the joys of being a first-time step dad and then continue onto to home renovation – your original audience may fall by the wayside. Which is not to say that you can’t have several topics going at the same time – but starting with one and expanding it will be easier – not just to bring your audience with you but also for the search engines to rank your posts because they have already ranked you for related terms.
Which is not to say you can’t change topics and introduce new things. For example when I started getting a significant number of readers here a lot of us knew each other from online forums – most of my readers knew more about keyword search than I did. But recently I seem to have acquired some new readers who may have missed some of these basics – so hence this post. Some of my regulars will have dropped off by now – but they should be off doing some work anyways- those that are still awake may have learned something.
So What’s a Buying Keyword?
Canon SX20 IS SuperZoom Camera
I thought this was magic for a while too. A buying keyword is also known as commercial intent. Sometimes we search to buy stuff – sometimes we don’t. Consider these search terms which I just made up:
When I typed in the query about fish recipes – I got the recipe for the kedgeree that I was looking for – there were ads on the page but Iwasn’t interested – recipes are great things to find online but don’t expect to start a recipe site and make money – you visitors want the recipe – you’ve answered the need – end of story. I site about cooking techniques would possibly do better
Passive income – its kinda in between – people are looking for information – they may want to do something with that information – they may become regular readers or subscribers (in the way the fish recipe person probably won’t) – but they don’t have a huge urge to act now.
The Canon SX20 IS is my latest oh so cool gadget – its a top-ranked megazoom camera with a 20X optical zoom and a 12MB maximum file size and does cool video too – I love it! Now I bought it recently and I was aware of how to search online but basically I started with a search along the lines of “wide angle, 20x zoom, AA batteries” and came down to narrowing it down to this one and another I searched on the very specific model number to understand the pluses and minuses of that particular model. Its an expensive camera I wanted to be sure. I spent 5 minutes going to a local shop and holding it in my hand – I spent hours finding all the reviews for it. It should have been a buying keyword for someone – unfortunately I don’t live in the US and the cheapest place I could buy it doesn’t have an affiliate program – and that’s one of the reason that usually US traffic will convert better (Amazon won’t ship the camera to New Zealand (or Australia) and that’s very common for electronics). Not all search traffic is equal – luckily you are unlikely to get serious numbers of visitors to your camera review site so don’t worry about it too much!
Generally as you get closer to spending money the longer the keyword you type in “Florida vacations” could be a school assignment on American domestic travel or a bored office worker dreaming at their desk, “family Florida vacations” – is someone getting a bit more serious about actually spending some money: “Florida Disney World Vacation hotels” – is getting better – but “Florida Disney World Vacation hotels coupons” could be a very good buying keyword indeed (it may or may not be – its not mine, its just my opinion, your mileage may vary etc etc).
Oh and engage brain about buying keywords before you use a tool – if someone is looking for a free WordPress theme – do you really want them on a blog you are trying to sell paid WordPress themes from?
So find specific keywords for your niche – sure start with the Adwords tool for brainstorming – but look at what is being pushed on TV and newspapers as well.
Optimizing Images
You’ll notice that cool camera pic is named for the name and model and has a similar caption and alt-text. Google can’t “read” images – it reads the name of the image, the alt tag and the caption …
Double Indexing in Google and Retrofitting Keywords
Now this is a bit of confession – not every post here is written with a keyword in mind – in fact in the early days – none of them were. Even these days I will sometimes just post cause I want to share with my readers and can’t be arsed with the search traffic.
But there is a secret to old posts – and I don’t do this often enough – the edit key. This is the trick to getting a double listing. Obviously ranking on the first page for a keyword is nice – but getting double listing is even better: one that looks like this:
The trick is this – each post has a link within the text of the post which links to the other one with the anchor text “third tribe review”. I usually work it something like . In the second post I will say that as a follow up to my recent post on (and I ad the link) <long tail keyword phrase here> blah blah. Then I edit the first post and often at the end of the post I will add a sentence or so that that says – read my follow up of <long tail keyword phrase> here.
FAQs About Keywords
Does capitalisation matter? It may to the grammar police – but not to the search engines – the key word lis sowerbutts is exactly the same as Lis Sowerbutts – how do I know – try the two searches and compare the results – you will find they are the same.
Is the plural version of a keyword the same as the singular? No its not – but they are very closely related. Rank yourself for “blue widget” then getting the ranking for “blue widgets” will be much easier.
Does punctuation matter? To EzineArticles definitely, Google – no. Whether you link to “blue widgets” or blue widget’s” or even “blue widgets’ ” its all the same to Google – they are all the same keyword phrase. Same goes for punctuation – whether you link to: ” Products are available in red or blue. Widget and doodas are available ..” Or “blue widget” the keyword is the same keyword.
On Page SEO
That is the book as far as I am concerned about on-page SEO. The short version of how to write for your readers is something like:
write descriptive titles (headlines);
I link to relevant posts on the same topic in the text of the post;
use subheadings if it fits in – use your keyword in them if reads naturally;
include useful information in the post about the topic – this means I will naturally use terms related to my my main keyword;
If I am writing for search engines I do:
all of the above
I try to include my keyword in the first 60 characters so its automatically in the post’s excerpt which is shown in the search engines;
more words is better than less – the reason that this post is so long is hat the main keyword is quite competitive – the more I write the more likely I am to hit some obscure phrase that someone may search on…
if I am using WordPress -add relevant tags to each post and make sure the blog is set up to index the tag pages
if the whole blog is about a specific keyword I include that in the title and sometimes the tagline
My point is that none of the stuff I do for the search engines to find my keywords – has any affect on my readers, if you are in a non-make money online, non-SEO niche they won’t even notice.
This really is all you need to know about what you should be writing on your site as far as long tail keyword research is concerned. If you want to seriously increase you traffic then spend a bit more time find long tail keywords you can easily rank for and less time pushing out more and more content which is unlikely to really engage your readers or show up in the search engine results.
Of course the on-page SEO stuff I have been talking about here is the 20% – the other 80% of your effort should all be about Back Links – but that’s another post and fortunately Allyn’s already written the definitive post about how to get backlinks check it out !
