A marketing resource for the small business owner
content marketing
How Much Content Do You Have On Your Home Page? Is It Enough?
Sep 27th
I have spoken with and have engaged in relationships with clients whose home pages aren’t highly ranked in the search engines. The first thing I typically look at is the amount of or lack of content. Instead, they have of lots of images and links to products. The truth is – having a content-rich site these days is good for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is better SEO rankings. It’s a well known fact that it’s much easier to rank a site competitively when there is actual content on the page for Google to algorithmically score.
A couple of side notes: Not only do excessive images impact site speed (which can decrease customer usability and lead to higher bounce rates), but they don’t look as attractive.
But the question remains – if content on your home page is a good thing - how much content is enough? In our opinion, enough content is that which easily and effectively communicates your product and service offerings to your audience and the search engines.
Is this a quantifiable figure? Probably not. For some of you with shopping sites you may want to take the Zappos.com focus and provide less direct information but more linking text and contextual content around the breadth of features and products they offer. However, for those of you with blogs or information-focused sites, you may want to emulate the sites of Dave Taylor and Jim Boykin. Both provide a TON of content in the form of blog posts, industry links and customer testimonials that Google is clearly using to effectively place them at the top of the search engines for dozens of competitive queries. Just “google” them and you’ll see what I mean.
What Does Google Say?
As for Google’s stance on this question, check out the below Google Webmaster Help video from Matt Cuts:
In the video Matt addresses this exact question but doesn’t give a clear answer. He does say that you wouldn’t want to have a home page containing 20MB of data since that would clearly be too much. He then continues to relate the following:
“But in general, if you have more content on a home page, there’s more text for Googlebot to find, so rather than just pictures, for example, if you have pictures plus captions – a little bit of textual information can really go a long way”
In the end, only you can decide how much content is enough for your home page. In our opinion though, it’s always better to have too much content as opposed to not enough.
Want your news site included in Bing News? Here’s what to do!
May 1st
Bing News is one of the most popular online aggregators of news and is certainly worth your attention. Unfortunately, unlike other popular news aggregators who make it very simple to submit your news through a single interface, you’ll need a slightly different approach with Bing.
As of this writing, there does not exist a direct way to submit your news stories individually into Bing – but there is a method to include your site as a whole. Before you submit, however, we suggest you implement the following preliminary steps that can increase your chances of being listed.
First, sign-up for a verified Bing Webmaster Account. As with Google Webmaster Tools, the Bing Webmaster Account has similar functionalities that will allow you to monitor your site’s performance in Bing. It’s also your lifeline to Bing if/when they want to contact you about your site in the future (including letting you know if you got into Bing News).
Second, open a support ticket at Discover Bing. Click on the “Bing” option in the list of options to create your ticket.
You’ll then be prompted to provide your full name, email address for contact and email address associated with the account you’re inquiring about.
Next, select “Other” from the drop-down menu then use the description box to include information about your Web site as a news source.
In order to increase the chances of getting your site included, you should address the following in the description box:
- An introduction, historical background and credentials of your Web site.
- Credible ranking of the site in its field, if any.
- Name the local area or audience scope that the site covers. Be sure to provide the state/city names and zip codes for the stories or describe the groups of users.
- Provide statistics on the site – including traffic, Alexa ranking, etc. (Anything that shows that your site is credible and popular)
- Mention if the site is mostly news-related and if not, explain the unique news angle.
- Give the URL of your main news entry point, as well as entry points of major channels.
- Provide an RSS link to your site.
- Be sure that your site complies with technical requirements on the Bing Webmaster Tool Blog and state in your request that your site complies.
Finally, click “Continue” and you’re done! If you get approved, you should receive a notice within about a week.
It is our belief that by addressing your request for inclusion with a specific eye to the above particulars, you should be in a good position to be accurately reviewed for inclusion in Bing News. Good luck!
Burning Down the House… Google Burns ‘Content Farms’ in Feb Algorithm Update
Mar 5th
Google Burns Down Content Farmers
Content is King… you’ve heard it stated over and over again. Well, this month Google has decided to show us once again exactly what that means.
Algorithm Update #1 – The Scraper
The first of two algorithm updates has been quietly dubbed the “Scraper” algorithm and is intended to block low quality content scraper sites from showing up in the Google index. Immediately after it released some webmasters complained that their traffic had dropped as much as 40-60%. These same webmasters also claim to have in depth content, and point out that the real content farms and scraper sites have either maintained or risen in ranks. Good news for some, bad for others.
Google Wants to Level the Playing Field Again – Get Rid of Those Sites that House or Generate Poor Content.
Google’s Matt Cutts stated that the algorithm is very targeted and only 2% of queries were changed in some way and only 0.5% of the results would change enough that anyone would notice. He also stated that the algorithm is designed to elevate those sites which created the original content over those sites who republish it.
Algorithm Update #2 – The Farmer
Later in the month Google released its second algorithm update dubbed the “Farmer” update that is believed to specifically target content farms. Google has stated that this update impacts 11.8% of queries which is pretty significant compared to most updates in the algorithm.
The dust is still settling, however – this may leave you wondering how exactly Google is defining a content farm. In the past this has been a very loosely used term with no clear definition. However, thanks to this update we can see by example who Google feels has made the cut and who has taken a big ranking hit and been labeled a “farmer”.
Again, there is nothing wrong with these sites in general – but the auto-generated content abuse has taken it’s toll and quite frankly, this “BURN” was way overdue, IMO. Here is the list so far:
Farmer:
Mahalo.com
EzineArticles (all article directories for that matter)
HubPages.com
Business.com
faqs.org
Wisegeek.com
The Other Guys:
Facebook
EBAY
Wikis (wikipedia, Google Knol)
YouTube
Instructrables & Ehow (both are VERY surprising but were not touched)
Yahoo Answers (very surprising here)
Etsy.com (comparison shopping)
Amazon
If your site was hit by either one of these updates you should consider “changing your ways”… you can do it! Create original high quality content and replace any auto generated content and you’ll insulate “your house” from any future “burnings”.
Cya.
RE-Purpose, RE-Utilize, RE-Optimize and… STRIKE!
Mar 5th
Need to write a new blog post and don’t know where to begin?
Look over yonder for good content...
Can’t think of new content? That’s fine – look over yonder, to some of posts you’ve written in the past. There’s gold in dem der hills!
Look over there for great content!
What content from a year or two ago (or less even) could be modified or updated to include a new slant on an old problem, new data for an old trend… or old information for a new trend. Bottom line – do you have a content asset that with a little polish and re-utilization, could attract new attention?
You might want to review an old blog post from 12 month’s ago and create a new post… cross-linking the two – and relating it to a specific trend of today. OR, yo umight consider turning articles into videos (or vice versa)… we have a great methodology here for doing that. It’s called our Article-9 Power Tool.
Content re-utlilization and re-optimization not only breathes new life into old content, it gives you a cost-effective way to re-purpose content that can work for you today – saving you time and money. No need to go back to the well or re-invent the wheel each time. Engaging in this process will help search engines and consumers rediscover the value you provide.
It IS…. that simple.
