Pay $10 - $25 per blog post?! Wow! Put me down for 200 of those. I imagine they’ll be top shelf link bait! Just what I need for my SEO…

C’mon! I know blogging is hard work and takes a lot of time, but do you really think the answer is outsourcing to someone cheap? How good do you think the result will be?

Let’s think about the logic for a second: it takes YOU about half a day to write a quality post, right? And you’re the subject matter expert. How long’s it going to take a copywriter? They have to get their head around your offering, your customer, your target reader, the purpose of your blog, the purpose of the post and the fundamental message of the post. Then they have to research and understand the details, plan the post, write numerous headlines and choose the one that’s most engaging, then write the post and optimize it for search. All the while, ensuring their terminology is credible!

At least, that’s what they’ll have to do to write a quality post!

Now I can’t speak for everyone, but it takes me a good day or two to get through all of that. And I’m no slouch. I’ve been writing professionally for 15 years. I’ve run a business for six years. I have a Bachelor of Arts in English Lit and Linguistics. And I have a Master of Arts in International Communication. So I research effectively, I learn fast, I understand business and I write fast. This isn’t a sales pitch, it’s all fundamental to my argument.

So if it takes me a good day or two, let’s be generous and assume it’s going to take most SEO copywriters about the same. Let’s say 1.5 days per post. Now if you’re paying $10 - $25 per post, that equates to around $7 - $16 per day for the writer. That’s only $2,555 - $5,840 per year, assuming they work every day! There’s no way in the world that any decent SEO copywriter will work for that! (Well, there’s a miniscule chance you’ll find a great junior SEO copywriter who’s just starting out and desperately needs the money. But finding an SEO copywriter like that is like finding a needle in a haystack. And they won’t stick around for long. Trust me, I’ve been down that path.)

I know it’s tempting to say, “Send it to India,” but that’s not going to solve the problem, either. A cursory scan of Indian job search site Nakuri reveals that a half-way decent copywriter can earn around 4,00,000 to 8,00,000 Rupees per year. That’s around USD $9,390 to $18,780 per year + benefits. So why would they work for $5,840 (much less $2,555) per year?

No. What you’ll get is a blog post that was written in an hour (two, if you’re lucky). Poorly written, rehashed rubbish with no subject matter expertise, and certainly no relevant opinion or thought leadership.

Be honest. Would you subscribe to, return to, talk about or link to a blog like that? Of course not!

And after all, if you’re blogging for SEO, it’s all about subscriptions, return visitors, buzz and voluntary backlinks. Which means you have to repeatedly offer original, helpful thought provoking blog posts. Blog posts that people consider worth bookmarking and worth sharing with their own visitors and networks. What’s more, if you’re touting that sort of rubbish in places like Twitter and Plurk, you’ll quickly lose all credibility, and stand no chance of developing a following.

That’s why it amazes me when I hear so-called ‘social media experts’ suggesting this tactic. They should know better!

My contention is that if you’re serious about your blog (and not just blog-spamming – which is no better than article spamming), you have only four options:

1. Write your own blog posts;
2. Write your own blog posts and have a good SEO copywriter with social media knowledge edit & optimize them;
3. Have a good SEO copywriter with social media knowledge ghost-write your blog posts (which will cost a lot more than $10 - $25 per post); or
4. Try to attract some good guest-bloggers who’ll do it for free (and who aren’t competitors).

If you’re not up for any of those options, then you can forget about blogging. It’s not for you.

In blogging, there’s no quick and easy option. Just as there’s no quick, easy way to write your corporate web copy (Home, About Us, Products, Services, etc.). Would you settle for $10 Home page copy? If you’re serious about your blog, then you have to treat it with respect. You have to value it as highly as you value your other promotional material. It may not be selling your product or service, but it’s selling something, nonetheless. Something much more important, in the long run: your brand and your reputation. And if your purpose is SEO, it’s selling to a very jaded audience: social marketers.

Social media is the key to SEO these days. And it will remain the key for a few years to come. Certainly blogging is going to be massively important for years. WHAT we blog about may change, but the ACT of blogging will be critical for a long time. The key is expertise, usefulness, credibility, frequency and accessibility. And you’ll never get that paying $10 - $25 per post.

Pay peanuts, get monkeys! And that’s all I have to say on the matter

Happy blogging!

In today’s blog post at Search Engine Journal, Ann Smarty reveals results indicating that Google penalizes sites with over-optimized internal links.

Specifically, she examined the effect of linking to the Home page using keyword rich anchor text. These results are very instructive (thanks Ann!), and they make a lot of sense. Google is right to penalize sites with over-optimized internal links. Here’s why…

When a visitor first arrives at your site, one of the first things they’re gonna try and do is find the Home page. (Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability) And when they do, they’ll look for a link, menu or button that says “Home” (or they look for a logo at the top left of the page). They won’t look for a link that says, “Computer Spare Parts Home” or “SEO Copywriter Home” or “Red Tennis Shoes Home.”

So by optimizing links to your Home page, you’re certainly not improving usability. Your optimization is purely an SEO tactic with no visitor benefit. (Indeed, if you replace all straight “Home” links with optimized links, you’d be actively undermining usability.)

Why should this affect your ranking? Simple. Google wants quality, helpful sites in its SERPs. If you make your site less usable, that’s not gonna reflect well on Google, so it makes perfect sense that your ranking will drop as a result.

I hate to say it (well… err… no, actually, I don’t ;-)), but Ann’s results reinforce what good SEO copywriters have been saying for years: “never sacrifice readability for searchability.” It’s also what Google’s been saying all along.

And, although Ann’s results relate to Home page links only, the usability message (and maybe even the penalty) applies to all links. Don’t over-optimize them. Here’s just a few reasons why:

1. 79% of users scan; only 16% read word-by-word. (Nielsen: How Users Read on the Web)
2. People look for links when scanning a page. (Nielsen: How Users Read on the Web)
3. Concise copy is 58% more usable, and scannable copy is 47% more usable. (Nielsen: Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web). Over-optimizing links makes them both less concise and less scannable.
4. Low-literacy visitors don’t scan effectively. They tend to read word-for-word. And if the text gets to dense, they look for the next link, often skipping important info in the process. If that link is also dense, they’re more likely to skip it too, resulting in more info skipped. (Nielsen: Lower-Literacy Users)
5. The first two words of scannable items, like links, are vital, because they’re often all the visitor sees. They should be words that carry the most information. (Nielson: Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings, Writing Style for Print vs. Web and Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005) And that generally won’t be your keywords. In most cases, the visitor is already on a page related to your keywords. Starting a link with those same keywords really only tells visitors that the destination page is related to the current page. It doesn’t tell them anything notable about the destination page, so they can decide whether they want to read it. Knowing that it’s related to the current page isn’t enough.
6. People love clicking on links; it’s the Internet’s most used feature. (Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use) So you want to make it easy for them to do what they like, and to find what they’re looking for when they do it.

Maybe Google is already taking all of these usability issues into account, maybe it’s not. One thing’s certain though: your visitors sure are!

“Out him! Out him! Out him! People have a right to know!” Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? But if you think I’m talking about lifting the lid on the personal lives of the Neil Patrick Harrises and T. R. Knights of this world, think again.

I’m talking about exposing black-hat SEOs for the depraved, oiled-up, muscular, leather-clad, handle-bar-moustache-sporting, night-club-going evil-doers they truly are!

What’s that you say? I’m just jealous that they rank better than me, and I want them hung, drawn and quartered so I can have a bigger slice of the pie? Preposterous! People have a right to know, I tell you! (Did I already say that?)

OK, I know I’ve stretched the analogy a little too far, but you have to admit, black-hat ‘Outers’ do share a few things in common with your garden variety Outer of homosexuals. If you don’t believe me, show me one who didn’t Out a black-hat for his or her own benefit… (And yes, personal satisfaction counts as a benefit!)

But surprisingly enough, that’s not really what this post is about. (The headline got you reading, though, didn’t it?!) And it’s by no means a defense of black-hat SEOs. If they’re silly enough to back themselves against the world’s best math brains and algos, they deserve all they get. No, this post is really about what Aaron Wall neatly describes as “the arbitrary and uneven nature” of hand editing for black-hat tactics.

Put simply, when a site is Outed, it’s far more likely to be unjustly penalized. Search engine algorithms aren’t sensitive to public opinion – not directly, anyway. Google’s PR and legal teams, on the other hand, are. As soon as a site is Outed, you can be guaranteed there’ll be a lot of negative publicity surrounding it. I agree with Aaron that this publicity makes Google far more likely to err on the side of caution and penalize a site that might otherwise have been considered fine, rather than risk being publicly branded soft.

Imagine if it happened to you. Can you say with 100% certainty that you have never employed tactics that could possibly be construed (in a public de-construction) as black-hat? How would you prepare a defense when the public wants a scalp taken? Especially given the inherent muddiness of Google’s ‘rules’:

1. The rules are ambiguous – Google says, “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings” and “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank”, which includes “Links intended to manipulate PageRank.” C’mon! Can they be any more ambiguous? Every SEO is into link building, and we’re all trying to increase rankings and manipulate PageRank. Does that mean we’re all black-hat? Google also advises us to avoid “Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging,” but it doesn’t say what constitutes ‘Excessive’.
2. The penalties for breaking the rules are unclear – I just did a quick search of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and couldn’t find any mention of specific penalties, much less an indication of what offence will result in which penalties. And I’ve been reading the Guidelines quite a bit recently. (I’ll qualify this by adding that it’s waaaaaaaayyyyyyy past my bed time!)
3. The penalties don’t distinguish between intentional and unintentional black-hat.
4. The penalties often impact people who were not responsible for the black-hat – Like the client of a black-hat SEO.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not condoning black-hat. I’m just saying that they’ll eventually get what’s coming to them. They can’t stay a step ahead of the mathematicians forever. The system will get them in the end. More importantly, ‘offenders’ will treated a little more impartially by the system than they will be by the PR machine.

Now I’m going to bed!

EDIT: Check out Patricia Skinner’s Outing blog post for a slightly different perspective (still anti-Outing).

I read an interesting blog post today: Low value content is destroying your website.

The guts of the post: most pages of most websites are low value. People hardly ever visit them, and if they do stumble upon them, they tend not to return. Only a handful of pages are visited often. Furthermore, “… what I find… is that the search results are full of links to the press archive and other old, out-of date content. Some of the content is misleading and wrong, talking about, for example, a feature for a product that has long since been replaced.”

This post got me thinking (again!) about the implications of ‘low value content’ for search engine optimization (SEO). (No particularly new thoughts; perhaps I just needed to vent!)

As an SEO copywriter, I’m regularly asked to quote on high-volume SEO copy and SEO articles (for article PR / article marketing). By definition, there’s nothing wrong with these requests. High volume SEO copy and SEO articles can be of a very high quality. And they can be very helpful for SEO.

Unfortunately, however, the prospect’s budget usually indicates that the important part of their request is the ‘high-volume’ bit. They don’t really care how good the copy is, so long as it’s keyword rich, and there’s lots of it. They want it purely to boost their rankings.

I know this is slightly different from the low value content discussed in original post, but the end result is the same: it appears in the search results, and it’s read by prospective customers who immediately identify it as crap and infer a great deal about the company that published it.

This is particularly true of long-tail searches, because high volume, low level content tends to be optimized for quite specific keyword phrases. So when someone searches for something really specific, they’re likely to end up at a low level page. And what sort of customers Google very specific keyword phrases? Those who are ready to buy! Now, although there’s never a good time for a reader to think you’re a crap company, I couldn’t think of a worse time than when they’re ready to buy.

The moral to the story: don’t write crap! SEO copy isn’t some invisible force. It’s content that’s frequently read by prospective customers, often when they’re ready to buy. So crap content may – MAY – help your search ranking, but it’s only ever going to harm your conversion rate.

And the sub-moral (here comes the vent…): If you’re intent on having crap written, don’t ask me to quote on it. I never write this sort of stuff. When I write SEO copy and SEO articles – even high volume – I simply can’t write crap. It goes against the grain. I have to write meaningful, helpful copy, and this takes time. (Which means my prices are usually too high for clients who want volume only, anyway.)

End vent.

Happy writing!

I’m ashamed to say it, but many SEOs are just plain dishonest. They know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an utter mystery to most of their customers, and that nobody outside of Google really, truly knows Google’s ranking rules. So they lie. And they get away with it.

This article lifts the lid on a few of those lies. Hopefully it’ll help you avoid those unscrupulous SEOs and find an SEO company that can really help you. (Rest assured, there are plenty of those about, too.)

Lie 1 – “We have a deal with Google”. Untrue. No SEO provider is in bed with Google. That would totally undermine the relevance of Google’s results. The truth is, we’re all on the outside, looking in. Doing our best to unravel the complex mathematical mystery that is Google’s ranking algorithm. Every SEO provider claims to have an excellent understanding of the algo. But you should always just let their results do the talking.

Lie 2 – Timeframe guarantees. Google’s rankings are automatically determined using incredibly complex mathematical algorithms. They’re Google’s single most valuable asset, and they’re devised by the world’s biggest math brains, who are paid squillions by Google. SEO providers that offer timeframe guarantees are suggesting that they’re: a) privy to Google’s most valuable business secret; and/or b) smarter than all of the world’s biggest math brains combined. The truth is that although good SEO providers have a very good understanding of what tactics result in a high ranking, they derive this understanding through trial-and-error only, and they don’t know 100% how long things will take.

Lie 3 – Unlimited keywords. This one defies logic. To optimize your site for a keyword or keyword phrase, you just use it more often than any other word or phrase. But because your site has only a finite number of words, there’s a limit to the number of keywords you can target. For simplicity’s sake, let’s consider a single page of 100 words. If I optimize that page for “SEO copywriter Australia”, that means I have to include the phrase “SEO copywriter Australia” around three times in the copy (for a ‘keyword density’ of 3% - which is a reasonable target). That’s a total of nine words out of my 100. Not too hard to do. In fact, I could also optimize for “case studies” and “sales letters”, without too much trouble. (I’d then be using 21 out of my 100 words – not easy, but do-able.) If I try really, really hard, I might be able to optimize for “annual reports” and “speeches and scripts”, as well, but that’s about the upper limit, because then I’d be using a total of 33 words out of my 100, just for keywords. Doesn’t leave much for meaningful content. Realistically, the upper limit for optimization is about four to five unique keyword phrases per page. (If you don’t believe me, give it a go. See how meaningful your content ends up if you try to optimize for more than four or five keyword phrases.) Now your SEO provider might argue that they’re going to target a different five keyword phrases on each page, but that’s not such a good idea, either. Then you’d only have one page on each ‘subject’ – not really enough to prove to Google that you’re an authority on any of ‘em!

Lie 4 – Package deals, like ‘Economy’ or ‘Professional’. Huh?! You either rank well or you don’t! Does an ‘Economy’ package get you to page 5, whereas a ‘Professional’ package gets you to page 1? What’s the difference? Or do they mean they’ll only target one keyword phrase for ‘Economy’ customers? That’s not much use to anyone! Or, in fact, do they mean they’ll target an unlimited number of keywords for ‘Professional’ customers? If so, I’d refer you to Lie 3 above…

Lie 5 – Displaying logos for big-name clients. Some SEO companies falsely claim – or imply – they’ve done SEO work for big-name clients. Sometimes they’ve done some other sort of work for that client (who knows… maybe data entry, maybe gardening!), and sometimes they’ve never done any work for that client, at all. For example, I heard of an SEO company that claimed a MAJOR bank as a client, when all they had ever done for that bank was SEM – not SEO – for a single keyword, once, long ago. So always be sure to ask exactly what your SEO provider has done for each client it claims. And if you’re still in doubt, ask for references.

Lie 6 – Submitting your site to thousands of search engines, over and over, will get you a high ranking. It doesn’t. In fact, I’m amazed this one’s still going around. The truth is, you usually don’t have to submit your site at all. Search engines are, after all, created to FIND and INDEX websites. So theoretically, they should be able to find and index yours without any help from you! Of course, it never hurts to be on the safe side. So if you want some peace of mind, you can certainly submit your site to Google. But you can forget the others. And you should never pay someone else to submit your site to Google. It’s easy and free. Just go to http://www.google.com.au/addurl and type in your URL. That’s all there is to it. (Note that if take up one of those offers to submit your site to thousands of search engines, all you’ll do is increase the amount of email spam you get!)

Lie 7 – Spend a lot on Google AdWords, and you’ll automatically get a high ranking. Absolute rubbish! Although Google (and most of the other search engines) offer PPC ads, those ads are absolutely independent of your site’s natural ranking. Google’s success relies on its ability to deliver relevant results. The moment it took money in return for natural search ranking, its reputation for relevance would be justifiably ruined. It’ll never happen.

So there you have it. All things considered, it’s hardly surprising that many business owners and marketing managers are a little daunted by the prospect of SEO. But it’s not all doom and gloom. The trick is to know a little about SEO BEFORE you engage an SEO provider. That way, you won’t just have to take their word for everything!

I’ll be releasing V2.0 of my SEO ebook soon. SUBSTANTIALLY updated. If you want to be notified when it’s released, please email me at glenn@divinewrite.com or bookmark the ebook sales page.

Happy SEO-ing!

When I first checked Twitter out, I didn’t get it. Like you, I’m always too busy. So I had one quick look, couldn’t see the immediate benefit, and (much to my own misfortune) I didn’t come back for months.

It wasn’t until I had the privilege of seeing Darren Rowse present at a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) conference, that the penny finally dropped. (Darren’s one of Australia’s leading bloggers, a title you don’t get without being very switched on, committed and genuine.)

The day after the conference, the moment I got into the office, I signed up to FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter (I was already a member of LinkedIn, FriendsReunited and LivingMemory). I didn’t think much of FaceBook and MySpace – and still don’t – but Twitter has been a revelation.

If you want your site to rank better in the search engines, you want more direct traffic, or you just want to engage better with customers and influencers, Twitter is a must. (In fact, 60% of Americans use Social Media, and 93% of them believe every company should have a Social Media presence. Cone)

But just in case you take one look at Twitter and say, “I don’t get it”, here’s a quick list of 10 tips for understanding it and making the most of it.

1. Twitter is like Instant Messaging Broadcasting – If you’re familiar with Instant Messaging through Windows Messenger, Skype or the dozens of other tools out there, you’ll be right at home with Twitter. It works in much the same way, except that your message (or ‘Tweet’) doesn’t go to just one person, it goes to everyone who has chosen to follow you. Oh, and you only have 140 characters per Tweet.
2. People Follow you if you talk about stuff that interests them – Although Twitter’s tagline and call to action is “What are you doing?”, it’s no longer really a forum for announcing what you had for lunch. The idea is to Tweet about the things that interest your Followers and, importantly, the people who you WANT to Follow you. If you’re a business marketer, your target Followers will be customers and influencers (people who influence your customers). So think about the things that they’ll find interesting.
3. The idea is to build up a community of Followers – Whatever your goal (search engine ranking, traffic or engagement), the means to that end is to become part of a relevant community. In the beginning, it’s mostly about you Following other people. But over time, as you Tweet more often and add more value, people will begin to Follow you. That’s when you start to develop a community all of your own – when you start to become a thought leader or influencer, yourself.
4. Find and Follow the right people – Search for relevant people. Pick a word that’s relevant to your industry, and search for it. The results will show you a list of recent Tweets related to that word, with the ‘Avatar’ (picture) of the Twitterer responsible for each, on the left. Click this pic to see the person’s bio and a list of all their Tweets. If they look relevant to you, Follow them. If not, come back to the search results, and check out the next result. Start out by Following as many thought leaders and influencers as you can – you’ll recognize them because they’ll have many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Followers. This is an incredibly effective way to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry. There’s a very good reason they have such a huge Following.
5. Tweet to add value to your Followers – Although you have a commercial agenda, everything you do on Twitter needs to serve your Followers. Discuss only what they’re interested in hearing, and only as often as they want to hear it. Some people Tweet dozens of times every day, others tweet only once or twice a week. Both are OK, so long as your Followers are OK with it. And if you find yourself scratching for something to say, ask yourself if there’s some relevant way you could help your Followers. Have you just read a really helpful article, or visited a really interesting website or blog? If so, Tweet it, and include a link. (There are tools for shortening links so they don’t consume too many of your 140 characters – if you use Twhirl (discussed below), there’s one in-built.) So long as it’s relevant, these sorts of Tweets will be well received. Eventually you’ll become a trusted member of the community; people will recognize you, and will look forward to your Tweets. You may even use Twitter (as many do) to announce your physical location, e.g. “I’m at such-and-such a bar, if anyone wants to catch up!”
6. Understand and observe local etiquette – Darren Rowse advises people to treat every Social Media tool like a foreign country. Learn the language, the customs, the etiquette. Perhaps even find a local guide. By doing this, you won’t unknowingly offend anyone or make a fool of yourself!
7. Know how to Tweet – To Tweet publicly (to all your Followers), just type your message and press Enter. To address a public Tweet to someone in particular, prefix your message with “@username”. (OBVIOUSLY, you have to replace “username” with their actual username!) If you want to send a private/direct message to someone, prefix your message with “d @username” (again substituting their actual username). If you receive a Direct Message, it’ll be flagged as such, so make sure you reply in the same way. You can even forward someone else’s message on to all of your own Followers. This is called a Re-tweet. The Twitter interface (and Twhirl, discussed below) has all of this functionality inbuilt.
8. Don’t expect too much – You won’t always get an answer to your Tweets. Some people Follow thousands of people, so your Tweets may not always catch their attention. And they may not always want to answer. Everyone uses Twitter differently.
9. Use Twhirl, not your Web browser – Using Twitter in a web browser becomes very difficult, distracting and inefficient. You’ll find yourself continually opening and closing your browser and visiting and revisiting Twitter.com. It’s much more efficient to use a desktop application like Twhirl. It works much like Messenger or Skype; it beeps when a new Tweet arrives and beeps differently when you get a Direct Message. It offers pretty much the same functionality as you’d get in your browser (e.g. you can Tweet, Direct Message and Re-tweet, as well as to mark certain Tweets as Favorites, and Follow and Unfollow people).
10. Follow Darren Rowse. You’ll find that much more helpful than anything I’ve said in this post! And if you think my Tweets might be useful to you, you can follow me to!

The above 10 tips are just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more helpful guides out there for using Twitter. Here’s a good one to start with.

In V2.0 of my SEO ebook (which is soon to be released), I discuss how you can use Twitter to improve your search engine ranking. If you want to be notified when V2.0 of my ebook is released, please email me at glenn at divinewrite.com or bookmark my ebook sales page.

Happy Tweeting!

Article marketing, article PR, article submission, article distribution… Whatever you want to call it, it’s a great way to generate backlinks. But are those backlinks really of any use? I decided to find out.

For quite a few years now, I’ve been using article PR as a link building method. For an SEO copywriter, it was an obvious choice. (Why didn’t I get more heavily into blogging? That’s a post for another day.) And for me, it really paid off. I wrote a host of good quality articles about SEO copywriting and general copywriting, and posted them to virtually every article directory I could find. It took ages, but I got a lot of links out of it and, subsequently, a very high ranking.

So backlinks in syndicated articles definitely USED to be counted. (Assuming you wrote really good quality articles, that is.)

Over the last year or two, though, a lot of people have been saying that Google now discounts backlinks in syndicated articles because of the duplicate content filter (e.g. see point 5 in this CopyBlogger post - 5 Link Building Strategies That Work). For the most part, I’ve discounted this criticism. Partly because articles have worked so well for me. And partly because much of the criticism targets those who engage in article spam. I’ve never done that, and I agree that article spam is a waste of everyone’s time.

However, I’m now doing a major overhaul of my seo ebook, and I’m up to the chapter on article marketing. So I decided to really look into the matter. I did a lot of research online and had some interesting discussions with two SEOs I really look up to, Rob Adelman from Top Rankings (Twitter @toprankings) and Mark Vozzo - ex-Fairfax search guru, now consulting to Microsoft (Twitter @markvozzo).

And the short answer is Yes! Backlinks in syndicated articles ARE still counted.

The long answer? The duplicate content filter affects merely what is shown in the SERPs. Say Google sees two versions of your article. It doesn’t want to list both in the SERPs, ‘cos it’s really after variety for searchers. So it decides which is the original, and lists that one in the SERPs. The other one misses out. But that doesn’t mean the other one is ignored. If it contains links to your site (i.e. in the byline), Google still follows those links and they still contribute to your ranking.

How do I know? Matt Cutts said so:

“if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank”

So, in fact, the duplicate content filter doesn’t have any impact on the value of backlinks from syndicated articles. It simply determines which version of the article appears in the SERPs. I’ve never cared much whether my articles appeared in the SERPs ‘cos I’ve written them primarily for the links, not the direct traffic. (That’s not to say I don’t care about the traffic. And in fact, new articles always bring me a lot of traffic. It’s just not always target market traffic.)

No, the real key to the value of backlinks in syndicated articles is still the site they appear on. If it’s a crap site, the links will be worth squat. If it’s a good site, they’ll be worth heaps. Sure, your articles will always appear on crap sites; you’re giving them away, after all! But who cares? Those links may not help much, but they certainly don’t hurt. More importantly, if you write great articles, they’ll appear on great sites, and that’s when you get some truly valuable backlinks.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that article pr is the best/only way to generate links. Far from it. For me, it’s been great, but I have to say, I don’t do it much these days. Distribution takes too long. Also, I don’t like having all of my eggs in one basket. These days, I’m focussing more on the combination of link baiting and social media (i.e. having great content on my site, and making sure the right people know about it).

Have a great day!

Which do you use? US or British (Australian) English in your web copy?

Your website is globally accessible, so your readers could come from anywhere. It may seem a trivial consideration, but many readers really care. British readers, for instance, tend to have a strong preference for British English. US readers tend to prefer US English. (Australian readers prefer British English, but will usually tolerate both.)

What’s more, it’s not just a question of pleasing readers when they’re actually reading your copy. You may also have to consider the search engines. e.g. What do you do if half your target audience Googles “search engine optimisation” (with an “s) to find you, and the other half Googles “search engine optimization” (with a “z”)? Although Google is smart enough to know that “search engine optimization” is the same as “search engine optimisation”, if someone searches for “search engine optimization” (with a “z”), most of the results will be about “search engine optimization” with a “z”. And the opposite applies when someone searches for “search engine optimisation” (with an “s”).

So in reality, your primary concern should be the search engines. Whatever choice you make could significantly impact the traffic you actually attract, not just how that traffic reacts to your copy.

Fortunately, for most businesses, it’s not the quandry it might first appear to be. To answer the question, just think about your target audience. Unless your business is truly global, you’ll probably be most interested in customers from a particular country. That being the case, just use whatever version of English they use. If your target audience is American, use US English. If Australian or British, use British English.

It only becomes tricky if you’re juggling audiences. If you’re a multinational, there’s a very simple answer: create localised versions of your site (one for US, one for Australia, one for Britain, etc.). You’ll probably have non-language reasons for doing this anyway; things like currency, legal and product versions.

However, if you’re a small business, you have to make compromises. You can either figure out which of your audiences delivers the best revenue and write for them, or you can try to write for both audiences (i.e. sometimes use US English, and sometimes use British English). The problem with the latter approach is that many readers will notice the inconsistency, and thus pay more attention to your choice of language. The other problem is that you’ll be diluting your keyword density for both the US version of your keyword and the British version, so you may, in fact, harm your search engine ranking for both audiences. (But that’s a discussion for another day…)

If you run a phpBB forum (as I do), and it’s older than v3 (as mine is), and search engine presence is important to you (as mine is) then you should probably consider upgrading to phpBB v3 (as I am).

Apparently older versions of phpBB create something called a ‘bot-trap’ because they generate urls with session id’s for non-authenticated visitors (like bots). This means the bots encounter an endless number of links.

This phenomenon is also a problem if you automatically generate a Google Sitemap. The sitemap generator spiders the site like a bot and also encounters an endless number of links. This apparently chews up bandwidth and stops your generator from finishing the task.

I haven’t finished investigating this issue, but it all seems to point toward upgrading to v3 of phpBB - which apparently sorts all of these issues automatically.

See here and here for more info.

I’ve just upgraded FreeCopywriting.com. Here’s how it works:

1. You write some copy and submit it to FreeCopywriting.com
2. Google automatically displays ads whenever someone views that copy
3. Google pays a commission whenever someone clicks on one those ads
4. Half the time, that commission goes to me. The other half of the time, it goes to you (assuming you’ve told us your Google AdSense ID)

It’s the ultimate annuity income. You write and post your copy once, and you earn income from it indefinitely! It’s like selling the same piece of copy again and again.

Find out more…