SoloSEO

Learn SEO Basics: Long Tail Keywords

Posted by Michael D Jensen on October 18th, 2007

As you’re learning about search marketing and SEO, you will definitely run into the phrase “the long tail”. Let’s turn this odd term into a familiar one by looking into long tail keywords.

What are Long Tail Keywords?

When you are identifying keywords for your internet marketing (both SEO and PPC), the metric used most to compare keywords is its popularity. If you put all the keywords that “exist” into a graph, it would look something like this:

The y-axis is the popularity and the x-axis are the keywords themselves. On the left hand side we have the most popular keywords, which are also highly competitive. Because these are the “opposite” of our main topic, long tail keywords, we call these just “keywords” or for fun, “short tail keywords”.

On the right hand side of the graph are the long tail keywords (looks like a tail doesn’t it?). Despite these keywords being less popular, they are still used every day by searchers around the world. And the exciting part is, they are (1) less competitive and (2) easier to rank well for without a ton of work!

Recently a company shared their long tail vs short tail keyword data, and they showed that almost 70% of their search engine traffic came from the long tail. This company is not alone, long tail keywords can be powerful sources of search engine traffic for any site!

Is it a Keyword or a Long Tail Keyword?

Separating out short and long tail keywords is best done by counting the number of words, although there can easily be overlap between the two. Short tail keywords are often 1-2 words in length, sometimes 3 words. Long tail keywords are typically 3-6 words in length, but they could be even longer than that!

How Can I Find Long Tail Keywords?

Finding keywords is pretty easy, there are lots of tools available, from Google Adwords to WordTracker to our own tools that aggregates several of these keyword databases (free trial). But before you get too excited, there is one important thing to know:

YOU WILL NEVER IDENTIFY ALL THE LONG TAIL KEYWORDS

Why is that? The main reason is that new searches happen every day, a lot more than you would think. Google has said that 20-25% of searches haven’t ever been seen before. That is amazing! What that really means is that there are tons of opportunities for you to get traffic, and with keywords that aren’t highly competitive!

How Can I Capitalize on Long Tail Keywords?

Let’s make this one into a step-by-step process:

1) Today’s Long Tail Keywords – Start figuring out what long tail keywords people are using right now to find your site. I recommend HitTail. They have both free and paid services that track who hits your site. You can do it with Google Analytics too, but I like HitTail’s interface and focus on just the long tail.

2) Tomorrow’s Long Tail Keywords – (a) Brain storm by yourself, with co-workers, friends, and family for long tail keywords. Email a bunch of people you know asking for 10 searches they would use to find your product or service. (b) Use keyword search tools (like ours) to find keywords that are 3-6 words in length. Start with a popular keyword and see what comes up. Add it to your list of keywords but mark them in some way that they are “new”.

3) Unique Content – You’ll find it rather tough to rank for a long tail keyword without actually using that keyword in your content. Either write or pay someone to write content (like one of our companies) based on each of your keywords, one per page. I suggest doing no less than 250 words, and 350 words is probably better. I wouldn’t worry about keyword density, but have it in there 3 or so times, as well as in the title and header (h1) tag.

4) Internal Linking – The easiest links are internal links! Of course they don’t count the same as external links (backlinks), but they are useful and make a difference. Make sure you link to your new content in some organized way (Read about theming by siloing), preferably more than just one link on one page to your content. Site-wide links should probably be reserved for your “short tail keywords”.

5) New, Fresh Content – After getting content for your site with your “new” list of long tail keywords, you need to stay on top of your game by constantly adding fresh, new, unique content. We started our content company, Applied Content, two years ago for just this reason. If you can’t afford to buy new articles weekly (we recommend 3-5 new articles per week), there are other options. Starting a company blog is a great way to do it, and you can share the writing between yourself and other employees. Have a set day to post so everyone knows to have a post ready. If you don’t want a company blog, then just write articles and expand your site. The point is to have new content with new phrases and potential long tail keywords.

Armed with the steps to capitalize on long tail keywords for your site, you can be well on your way to realizing the hidden potential of long tail keywords!

For an advanced look at the topic of short and long tail keywords, look at my post about Links vs Content.

21 comments Visited 21733 times October 18th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

Related Posts:

Image Isn’t Everything, But It Is Something.

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on October 11th, 2007

Taking a look at the corporate logs in the image to the left, how do you feel about those brands? Do you feel anything? Much in marketing is focused on influencing the public’s perception of our companies, our products and our brand. We want others to think our products/services are high in quality, a good value, safe, reliable, fun, entertaining, satisfying, or simply the best. So how is this done online, is it different when compared to more traditional ad mediums? For, example in TV commercials we have just about seen it all, from diet cola commercials, which appeal to our hip and healthy side, to luxury cars like Lexus, BMW and Mercedes, which tout their extreme quality, and attempt to impress us with their prestige. All this presentation created simply to influence our perception toward these brands. And with TV being so visual, the advertiser can use all sorts of techniques to spin their products in a very positive light. Many are now wondering if TV advertising is as effective as it use to be? I’ll bet there are a million or two Tivo owners who will tell you it probably isn’t, but that is a discussion for another day, but does suggest a need to come up with other methods to improve our corporate image.

We all know TV ads aren’t real life, and although I doubt there is any girl that choose to hang out with a guy because of the type of diet cola he drank, at least I hope not, we all know some people drink certain brands of soda or diet soda because they believe they are being perceived by others to be cool, sophisticated, wealthy, discerning, or concerned with their health, etc. Many choose to use these brands because of the brand image they have in their own head, will hopefully be identified by others as the product is consumed. My wife loves Diet Coke, and I mean LOVES it. She says it tastes better than all the other diet beverage choices out there, without question. I personally disagree, I think Diet Coke tastes like licking dirt off a pitching wedge. She also thinks Diet Coke portrays a certain image, say of an attractive blonde girl cruising along a beach-side path on roller skates, bopping to the music as she enjoys her Diet Coke. But while I like the commercial quite a bit, and it matches the image of my wife well, I personally still see Diet Coke as the drink of choice for attendees of a 1929 high school reunion, held last weekend, and not the drink of anyone remotely hip. So this ad, although excellent in my opinion, has not changed my perception of Diet Coke one it, or its brand, it is still yuck, but many others feel differently. So when we work on our brand, we attempt to positively influence as many as we can, knowing full well we can’t change everyone’s perception, and that is ok.

Online we obviously don’t have the ability to visually create an image as well as a TV commercial can, although with YouTube and others we are getting closer. So we instead have to rely on other marketing opportunities to influence potential clients. In search marketing, our prestige and our perceived value are currently tied to how well we do in the SERPs. Many of us know that being on page 1 of a SERP isn’t necessarily the best way to determine if the particular product or company is the best (no offense to Google and Yahoo). And we know a high ranking it is not a guarantee of a good quality product or of excellent customer service either, but there is no doubt we notice the sites on page 1 more quickly, and we take a look at sites on page 1 more often than potentially better products and sites buried on subsequent SERP pages. So in a sense, the work of SEO directly influences the perception potential clients and the public will have on our businesses, at least initially. If we are ranking well on the results page, then we will be perceived as being market leaders, the most popular, the most cutting-edge, the highest quality, whatever, whether it is reality or not. The better we do on the SERPs, the better we will be initially perceived, and they more clients will visit our site. Then it is up to us to make sure our sites are designed well enough to deliver what client needs. We need to ensure visitors can easily find the information they need, that they feel comfortable with us, and we need to be sure they can easily order when it is time to purchase. Online, SEO should be seen as our ability to influence the initial perception of searching clients. SEO can be online marketing and online PR, all wrapped up into process, and really our opportunity to make a better first impression.

When considering the benefits of SEO, we need to remember that through the SEO process, we are improving the perception of our companies to potential clients. It isn’t just a matter of gaining more traffic to our sites, it is a matter of promoting and influencing the long-term image of our company and products. If we can make them initially believe we are great, then prove it to them with our site, products and customer service, then we have won a tough online battle.

Add comment Visited 3151 times October 11th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

Related Posts:

Can you do SEO with just Content?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on October 5th, 2007

Michael Martinez has a great blog called SEO Theory and recently wrote about the myth about search engines favoring large domains. When I read this my first thought was it was a response to Rand’s post (from the day before) about Why it pays (in search) to be big and popular compared to small and niche. In some respects Rand is right, there are definite benefits to being big and popular. However, and this is the point that I think Michael Martinez was making, it is not impossible to do very well in search having a small and niche site.

As I was reading Michael’s post the one thing that stood out to me was his stance on links, content, and social media. He is a big believer in content, and not one to buy links and spend a lot of time submitting to social media sites.

I agree 100% with his stance on the power of content. It is the blood of the Internet when you really think about it. Content is why you get on your computer, to read something, to learn about something, to be entertained by something. Content is what makes you go from one place to another. Your navigation is driven from what one content piece makes your brain think and what content it connects with. What Michael is saying is that if you build quality content, the rest essentially falls in place. I agree, but I do think there are situations where content isn’t all you need.

When Content Is Not Enough

There are industries where the topic does not drive links and traffic because of the audience of the industry. Let’s take the construction industry for example. We’ve launched a software company in the construction industry, and we have lots of relatives in the business, so we are familiar with it. Yes, a lot of construction companies and their subcontractors have Internet, but they aren’t Internet savvy. Most of them aren’t on Facebook, or Digg, or delicious, or Redditt, or anything like that. They check their email, read the news, watch a funny youtube video, buy from Amazon, and get a movie from Netflix. If that is the audience, how do you get your construction content to move, to get linked to, to get featured? It’s tough, and that’s why, the audience. For this situation you may need to buy links, you may need to do email marketing, you definitely need to do PPC, and you might find other ways (video advertising?) to get their attention. Even at a tradeshow, the product has to be very innovative (and useful, and cost effective) for it to spread by word-of-mouth.

So can you do SEO with just content? Yes, I really think you can. There are tons of things to consider obviously, not just writing something. It needs to be presented well, it needs to be found, it needs to be helpful, and it needs to be shareable.

1 comment Visited 4240 times October 5th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

Related Posts:

Unexpected Features Gives Product Passion

Posted by Michael D Jensen on September 21st, 2007

I took up running about a year and a half ago, starting with a 4K. I’m hoping next year to run the St. George marathon with Aaron. Being a gadget guy, and an Apple guy, I asked my wife for the iPod Nano and Nike+iPod kit for Christmas. This gadget tracks how far and fast you’re running, and reports to you on your iPod and also on Nike’s website (data gets uploaded when you sync with iTunes).

In one of my runs last week I ran the first mile at my top sustainable speed. After running several miles after that and finishing my workout, a voice came on and said something to the effect, “I’m (some famous athlete), congratulations! You just ran your fastest mile!”. I had no idea who the athlete was, but it was so fun to be surprised at the end of my run with a personalized congratulations. My next run I ran further than I had ever run before, and afterwards Lance Armstrong congratulated me for having done so.

Impressed? Yes! It got me to thinking though, if I had known about the feature, like if it was printed right on the box, it wouldn’t have been as exciting when it actually came on and congratulated me. I can see the marketing language on the box now…

“And when you finish your fastest mile or longest run, famous athletes will personally congratulate your accomplishment!”

The lesson learned, not every feature needs to be marketed or “featured”. Some of them should be left to be discovered. When people “discover” on their own, they often enjoy it more than having been fed or delivered it without any action on their part at all.

1 comment Visited 3644 times September 21st, 2007 Michael D Jensen

Related Posts:

Hey Businesses… Its about Blogging time.

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on September 7th, 2007

A good friend of mine, Thayne Peterson, called up yesterday and asked what he should do with his website to just help it perform a bit better. As you can imagine we get that question quite a bit around here, especially now that more people have kind of figured out what SoloSEO is about. This friend owns an auto dealership in Provo, UT (free link alert) and deals mostly in high-quality, used BMWs. He also has a repair shop as well, where they specialize in repairing most German made cars (this needs to be stated more clearly on the website). He, like many of us, just wants to be a bit more visible online.

In our conversation he mentioned he was considering signing up for a local online business directory, and perhaps purchasing some advertising on their site. He wondered if I thought it was a good idea, so I took a look. After some initial poking around, it was soon obvious that signing up was free, and the site existed solely on ad space it sold on the site. So I had no problem with him signing up, at least it is a new link to him, and this directory is well put together and has quite a comprehensive overview of local business, organized by category. I didn’t tell him if I thought purchasing an ad on this site was a good move or not, I don’t know enough about this directory’s traffic mix, or his business to understand if online advertising will provide a high enough ROI to make the ad price worth the investment. I will leave that decision to him.

But after a quick review of his site, I just gave him a few ideas that I think will help its performance in the search engines. First off, he does an excellent job of keeping the inventory of current cars up to date. As soon as they receive a new car, they clean it up and takes some nice pictures of the car, and then put those up with a simple description of each car on the site. I suggested that they should spend a bit more time on creating content for each car, focusing more on some keywords they are targeting, as well as the specifics of each car. These keywords should come from what they feel their strengths are, with local references included, like Provo, UT, Northern Utah, 40 South of Salt Lake City, UT, as examples. Additionally, I would have them use SoloSEO tools to analyze other local automotive sites doing well in the search engines, and then start targeting those keywords as well. Finally, they should also make sure the photos for each car are labeled clearly, and using an occasional keyword here and there, in a picture description, isn’t going to hurt rankings either.

Once a car is sold, they currently take the content and the pictures of that car off the site. I think this is a mistake many of us make. Rather, I would suggest they create a sold page, or past inventory page, then organize all the cars by model and year on this sold/directory page. Keep all that content written about each car, and the descriptive photos for each in play for the search engines. If they spend time creating the content, then they should continue benefitting from it. Plus, it might help potential clients find a model of car they are looking for. Thayne does a great job finding cars according to a potential buyer’s specifications. He did this for me, and it worked out great. So, if a potential buyer found a car on Thayne’s site by browsing the past inventory, which takes no time from Thayne’s sales people (truly a major benefit of any well conceived site), and Thayne gets a new client to work with, along with all the specs he needs to find a similar car, it is a win/win for everyone.

Next, I would suggest they start a company blog, it is another easy way to add content. We of course love WordPress Blogging system, we use it ourselves, and highly recommend it to everyone. On the Independent Import’s blog I would have them blog about sales they are having on certain cars, about automotive tips, about information on recalls, about new performance parts or options to “pimp our rides,” and even about the new innovations BMW is coming out with all the time. The automotive industry is one of constant innovation and change, and this provides excellent and frequent topics for a blog. Keep the blog fresh, with one or two posts a week at least, and also let his current and new clients know about the blog. Many new car owners are passionate about their cars (especially BMW owners), and reading new info about their brand of car and possible improvements/options, is very interesting and will increase business. I’ll bet Thayne could get quite a good subscription base fairly quickly, I know I would sign up.

I would guess there are many of us who feel like we need to do better online. Our site is there, but we need it to perform better, if at all and bring us some new clients. This is most easily done through search. Look for ways to increase your content, adding new pages, and a blog. Then write about products, changes in the industry, and keep your content, don’t ever throw it away. It may need to be tweaked or placed on an archives page of some sort, but you worked hard to create it, let it continue to work for you, it will make a difference in search engine rankings. As far as all the free advice to Thayne, I will take it on trade for a M3 convertible, black… of course.

1 comment Visited 5170 times September 7th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

Related Posts:

Discount or Ignore Paid Links

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on August 16th, 2007

There has been some post and comments lately which have expressed frustration with Google’s attempts to discount the referral power of links purchased to bolster rankings. Why people have a problem with this makes no sense to me. I personally don’t have a problem with any SE discounting paid links. Why wouldn’t they attempt to discount paid links? Isn’t the whole purpose of a search engine to provide clients with the most relevant results possible, results not influenced by tactics or games? I personally want my organic search results to only contain sites that are reputable, sites where the owners have worked hard to get there, have written good content, have naturally established themselves in relevant circles, have referral links from past clients, or associates, based on a good product, solid customer service and historic proficientcy. I don’t want directories, no matter how “good” the content is, or fly by night companies looking to make a quick buck, who have paid for links to sneak themselves on the first page. it is sites like these which muck up the SERPs organic results.

Some will spew that ads on the SERPs are actually paid links, to which I totally agree, but we know they are paid links, we understand the bias there, and they are obviously quarantined away from the organic results. In my mind the search engines have earned the right to sell space on their pages based on the traffic they attract. This incredible level of traffic is based on the satisfaction of searchers, due to the accuracy of previous organic search results. So, in my mind, if you want qualified traffic quickly, then paying a search engine and picking out some targeted keywords in a PPC campaign might be the best way to go to get started. But there is no way someone should go out and attempt to purchase a bunch of paid links in an attempt to bully their way onto the organic search results page, that is not what organic search pages are there to provide, and the search engines are looking to stop you. Don’t risk your business in this manner.

Search engines attempt to deliver relevant results for search clients, these results consist of both organic results and paid ads attempting to match the purpose of the initial search. However, when a SEO uses other sites they own or control to provide links to improve their clients rankings, that too is a paid link. Do these sites, which have been artificially forced onto the SERPs, occasionally give the searcher what they need, perhaps, but not always, and that is the problem. Random links from a site, which only is linking out because it was paid to do so, can’t ethically be considered a link with any value, it is a tainted and usually irrelevant link. Search engines rightfully use the number of links and the quality of the sites providing the links, to assist in determining the quality of a site, that makes perfect sense to do so. But links from sites that have no relevance, or from individuals who have never used the product, really don’t have any business handing out a link and should be discounted, or not used in the rankings at all.

All a paid link can really tell us is the site buying the link has money to spend on links, and the site selling the links enjoys cashing checks. That really isn’t a sound foundation for a legitimate referral. So Google, Yahoo, Ask, all of you guys, please continue to weed out those sites that purchase links, and those SEOs that use other sites to game the rankings, they are attempting to bury small business owners who are working to establish themselves online by working on content and links the right way.

5 comments Visited 7086 times August 16th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

Related Posts:

Stay Online Stupid…

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on July 31st, 2007

Mike Moran’s post today, entitled Should Small Business Ditch the Web? discusses, well… I was going to say an “interesting point,” but I think instead I will say “ridiculously obvious point.” Mr. Moran essentially uses some of this post as a rebuttal to a comment to a prior post, by someone with the screen name of “Ikey.” It is Ikey’s view that big businesses have taken all the good keywords, and dominate the online marketplace to a point, that we as small business owners really have nothing left to live for online, and we might as well pack it in and move our marketing efforts offline, to more traditional forms of advertising.

AAAAAAAANNNNKKK! Wrong answer, terrible advice, and even sillier logic. Mr. Moran aptly points out that offline forms of advertising are much more expensive, which is true, and depending on the product, I would add they may not be as effective, or as beneficial to a small business in the long-term. I unfortunately took (wasted) the time to go and visit this Ikey’s site, and frankly it was, well… icky. It is my opinion Ikey isn’t going to sell anything from the site as now constituted, no matter how many folks happen to find him online. And this is probably where our online business discussion needs to go. Ikey’s site looks like many other cheap ebook, promise the world, deliver very little, type sites, and it is delivered in the almost cliche, early 90s look and feel, animating GIFs, etc. Now I realize that “retro” is cool with clothing and perhaps some models of cars right now, but retro isn’t cool with web site design. To really be successful online, I believe you must start with your site and company image. Online, the site essentially becomes the salesperson, and if the site looks cheap and sleezy, it reflects badly on the company, no matter the quality of the content. It is perhaps sad to admit the online world is as superficial as the offline world, but that has been our experience.

Being online is also important for small businesses because we never know who is going to find us. Michael and I have been surprised, no frankly shocked, at the number of clients that have found our companies, even some Fortune 500 clients, despite our poor performance in some search engine rankings. And we have been even more amazed at the keywords these clients used to find us.

Which kinds of leads us to another interesting post. Marketing Pilgrim posted an article entitled Business Doesn’t Need SEO by Jeremy Luebke last Thursday. Now it was quite an eye catching title, and thankfully the message was very appropriate. Do we as business owners need SEO to be a successful business? The answer is simply no, I know a number of business that have done very well without much help from an online presence, and they have done very little, if anything, in the form of SEO strategy implementation. I am sure you know companies like this as well. But is that the question we should be asking ourselves? Do we need SEO as small business owners? From my standpoint, no we don’t need it, but I believe we should all be doing it, at least a little bit. SEO is the difference between doing well, and doing extremely well for a long period of time. SEO strategies position a site to do well not only now, but even more so in the future. As a site improves in the rankings through implementing focused SEO strategies, and is indexed for a longer period of time, the search engine cred of the site will increase. As content is added, and links increase with time, the better the site’s ranking will become, and the better the chance potential clients will be able to find the site, even if it isn’t on the first SERP page. SEO efforts build on themselves, and where that takes a business in the future is anyone’s guess, but without a doubt it will drastically increase the potential that new clients will find us.

And what about these potential searchers/clients, who are they, and how do they eventually find us. This is an interesting phenomena as well. We are seeing the way people use search change, they are getting better at search, as they have learned how to better use long-tail search queries to more quickly and precisely find what they are looking for. Additionally, potential clients, both old and young are now not afraid to look online until they find a company that fits what they perceive they are looking for. Even my mother and father have become Googleites, and can find what they need very well. We have heard from some clients that they were just “searching” around and essentially stumbled on to us, if we had not been online, or at least trying to be visible online, this would not have happened. People are willing to look for what they want, and spend time doing it, because they have learned it does make a difference in their experience. I would also suggest that many searchers understand that the best company for their needs might not be on the first page of the search engine results page. Experience with the search engines results has taught us all this reality.

So if we add it all up, an online presence, meaning a welcoming site, with a good product/service, and good customer service equals a good chance for a successful small business. However, if we then throw in a good dose of SEO strategies, coupled with an ever-improving and discerning search population, and you have the recipe for steady to exceptional growth over time. So just stay online, going offline is just, you know…

4 comments Visited 5276 times July 31st, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

Related Posts:

The Increasing Importance of Content

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on July 24th, 2007

To really get an understanding of what good content is about and why it is so important, Copyblogger is a great site to visit. I subscribe to their blog and really find the advice and examples offered extremely helpful when it comes time for me to sit down and write. And because content will always be one of the most difficult and important aspects of site optimization, getting all the help we can concerning content is quite important.

Good content is simply a well written paragraph or page which communicates to the potential client, exactly what we hope to communicate, with no ambiguity, while it also offers info to the search engines so our site is categorized properly within their database. But the ability to write well isn’t something anyone can do without some training and practice. Writing is more than just using ones imagination, or creatively putting down ideas with nice verbiage, it also has to do with technical guidelines, such as proper punctuation, verb tense and sentence structure, etc. Online content is a very interesting animal, there is quite a bit of it, with more being thrown up everyday for a variety of reasons. All this new content is quite a bit of data for the search engines to process quickly and accurately, and then rank efficiently. However, site owners shouldn’t panic about all this new content, as much of the new and existing content if of questionable quality. In fact, I believe all this new content actually offers good writers an increased opportunity to shine long-term in the search engines ranking, if they continue to create high-quality content.

Let me explain, I personally subscribe to just over 50 blogs. And of these blogs, I would say there are only about 5 that could be considered well written. Most of these blogs are extremely informative, and good advice often abounds, but the sentences one needs to muck through to pull all the info out can be painful to read. I actually shudder at some sentences posted. In some cases reading poorly written blogs kind of feels like taking Nyquil to me. I really hate taking Nyquil, it causes me to gag, and the taste, as well as the aftertaste is putrid. It is a horrible experience. However, I will take it when I am really sick, even though I despise it, because I know I will feel better once I get it down. Reading some blogs is also uncomfortable, but I know by reading them I will learn something, but it sure isn’t enjoyable. (Which doesn’t bode well for their long-term readership numbers and growth rate)

Interestingly enough, some of the most knowledgeable SEO consultants seem to really struggle to write quality content. I originally found this odd, but it now kind of makes sense as I have had time to learn the history of SEO. Early on, when search engine marketing was in its infancy, some very bright individuals learned they could employ various questionable optimization tactics to get a site to quickly perform well on the search engines. One of these techniques was to simply fill site pages with random non-sensical text, then sprinkle in some carefully chosen keywords to fool the search engines into believing the site had some relevance on these keyword topics. Some of these individuals even had this phony content page creation technique automated, so they really had to do very little to have thousands of pages online in no time. So, in a very real sense, they simply used technology to employ their SEO tactics quickly, and frankly got good results with them. But now those days are gone, and they never thought they were going to need to really write something readable someday. Presently the search engines have become quite good at detecting and properly ranking these poorly written and non-sensical sites, while conversely awarding higher ratings to sites with quality content. And as the search engines continue to improve sniffing out poorly written sites, the importance and rankings of good quality content will increase. Think about it, with all the new content flying up online daily, how are site engines going to most efficiently deliver the search results most relevant as quickly as they need to? They are going to have to do better at determining the quality of content provided on sites, and award the well-written sites.

Above just the search engine results, there is also a more basic reason to focus on quality content, which is to give potential clients a good impression of the company. As a point, when searching for an expert on any given topic, it is much easier for us to feel comfortable with them, if we feel we understand them, and what they are about. If we can tell they have taken considerable care in presenting themselves in a professional manner, them we are more likely to believe they will take this care with us as well. Also, let’s face it, when search engines serve up quality sites, and reputable companies on their search results pages, it reflects well on the search engine’s algorithm and the firm’s image. However, when search engines frequently serve up garbage, irrelevant sites, no one will search with them anymore. So since search engines are going to do a better job of analyzing content, we need to make sure we are consistently adding quality content, or perhaps paying some professionals to do it for us. Many of you already know Michael and I started a content creation company, simply based on our understanding of the importance of quality content, and the difficulty to produce it consistently over time.

So how can we become better writers? The easy answer is to read well written content and attempt to learn by analyzing their techniques, but I am of the mind that this method isn’t always practical, possible or long-lasting. Case in point, I am historically not a good writer, I have been told as much by many a professor and teacher through the years. It is so bad, I was required to take various writing classes at almost every level of schooling, from high school, to college, to Master to PhD, each educational level was more challenging to write within, and I have struggled terribly to get my writing skill to a point where it was finally considered acceptable, even if it was only barely so, to some of my educators. But for me these courses were the only way for me to learn it. So, while I didn’t enjoy the writing courses when I took them, I am grateful for the stuff I learned now, and I strongly recommend writing courses to others who struggle as I do. There are many way to take writing courses out there; such as accredited online universities, local community colleges and universities, and even some good home study opportunities where you can move at your own pace. I am confident that any time spent learning to be a better writer will pay dividends in the future. And these benefits will far exceed any short term cost of time, or money required to make it happen. Even if writing content for a site isn’t what you plan do be doing in the future, becoming a better writer is still worth the time and can enhance your ability to communicate in the digital world.

Ultimately, I believe the future of quality content is incredibly bright, and it will continue becoming a more important measuring stick of a site’s quality. And as the search engines get better at properly analyzing the quality of a site’s content, and organizing accordingly, they will be able to more confidently recommend these quality sites to their search customers. It is kind of a cool turn of events, its like search has gone retro like everything else these days. For many years slick technology and automated tactics dominated the search engine rankings, and now we find out we need to draw upon the techniques and skills we were taught, and hopefully learned, in our 9th grade English classes. I guess all these English teachers were actually right, good writing never does goes out of style. Who would have thought that old codger, Mr. Burton, was actually correct all these years?

7 comments Visited 3213 times July 24th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

Related Posts:

Hyphens and Underscores, Together at Last

Posted by Michael D Jensen on July 24th, 2007

Big news for small punctuation! SERoundtable.com reports that underscores will now be treated as word separators as hyphens have in the past. This might mean a little ranking change up (maybe we already saw this change in effect, or it could be occurring right now). Most wordpress blogs (and others) already use hyphens in the URL naming structure, but I know many sites use exclusively underscores out of habit (I used to!).

Matt Cutts on dashes vs underscores

The announcement from WordCamp (covered by News.com)

Let me point out that domain names only allow hyphens, not underscores, and I don’t think they will ever implement underscores in domain names.

Some links about using your URLs to enhance your SEO:

Keywords in URL the New Google Search Optimization Winner?

Matt Cutts stating that they do contribute to rankings

1 comment Visited 5659 times July 24th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

Related Posts:

Empty Title Tag = Google uses WHOIS data?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on July 20th, 2007

What happens if you leave your title tag blank? It’s a bit embarrassing, but I developed a site for a friend years ago and after a modification to the homepage earlier this year the title tag has been empty (note, I wasn’t doing SEO, just the site). I noticed this not from looking into the code itself, but from checking some rankings manually through Google. I noticed the listing wasn’t the name of the site or the page, but rather of the company itself!

At first I thought, okay maybe it is pulling the name from another meta tag…nope! I did a quick site: query and found really only one page, the contact us page, that the company name could be pulled from. Then I thought, Google wouldn’t go to a contact us page for that, too much variability. Seeming that Google is a registrar, and we all know how important domain age is to the Googlerithm, why not go to the WHOIS data for the title page? Sure enough, the title listed in Google is an EXACT MATCH to the registrant data for the domain.

Obviously one instance isn’t enough to prove it, but I’m convinced that is what happened in this case. The only other example I could find is where Google used a header tag instead.

Anyone else seen this?

8 comments Visited 7552 times July 20th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

Related Posts: