As a result of content being relatively new, the perception of content remains unclear in the minds of many. After all, most people understand the concept of search engine optimisation. You make changes to a website to ensure that it’s optimised well for search engines, so that it ranks better in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

It’s a process that is generally done once to a website and is then supported by an off-page campaign that aids the website’s rankings. While the intricacies of SEO remain very complex, the notion of SEO is fairly well known.

Why then is content so shrouded in confusion? What is essentially a very simple thing to do (in contrast to SEO) is still relatively hard to understand for many people, including Internet marketing companies, again in contrast to SEO.

The reason you should add content to your website is very simple. The more content you add, the more often your site will be indexed, the more pages you will have to rank within Google, the more search terms you will rank for and, ultimately, the more traffic you will receive. The key though – and this is the part that seems very hard for some people to grasp – is to update your content regularly. If you update your site every day for a month and then leave it for six weeks, you’re wasting your time. If you add nothing for a month and then upload twenty pages at once, you’re wasting your time.

To put it as simply as possible (and here comes the science bit) Google has become the most successful search engine in the world by offering its users the most relevant results to their queries. If Google offered up useless websites to a user’s search, the user wouldn’t use Google again (which is what MSN, Live.com, or whatever it’s called this week does).

Now, when a website is SEOd, the SEO work tells Google what the website is about. It lets Google know what the website should be classified as and what the context of the website is. What content does is offer Google pages of information which it can use to show its users answers to their search queries. As Google wants to offer its users information, you’re helping Google fulfil its purpose and helping it to make money from its sponsored links.

Without regular content, Google has no real reason to offer your website as an answer to a user’s search.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

What could be easier?

You could even visit some article sites (of which there are many) and steal as much content as you can before pasting it onto your website. This is almost guaranteed to get your website banned by Google.

Why am I giving this advice? Well, it would seem from looking around the Internet that many people are on a fast track to a Google banning, going out of their way to get their websites thrown out of the index. They seem to understand the importance of adding content to their websites, knowing that it will help their rankings, but are blissfully unaware that by stealing other people’s content they’re asking Google to throw their website out.

Yes, you need to have lots of content on your site in order to improve your rankings, but this content has to be unique. If you just add the same content that you find on other websites, you’re making your website a duplicate of other sites, which Google doesn’t want to see, or offer as a result to its users.

What you need to think about is why Google works, and how it makes money. Google makes money through sponsored advertising, so the more people who use Google to search, the more money Google makes. If Google offered nothing but duplicate results, nobody would use Google to search for information, so Google wouldn’t make any money. This is why Google filters out the duplicate results. This is why your website will be filtered out of the index if you copy content from other sites.

There is no quick and easy fix to adding content for better rankings, but there is a quick and easy way to get your website banned.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

No, by adding news and blog posts to your website on a regular basis, about information pertaining to your industry, you’re ensuring that your website becomes a resource for your industry. It will rank within Google for a myriad of longtail search results – results that you wouldn’t have thought of optimising for and results that will bring you traffic.

For example, I was asked for a quote by Sky News yesterday for the news story surrounding the huge losses ITV suffered last year and their impending sale of social networking website Friends Reunited. Sky wanted to run a feature about how Friends Reunited had lost the battle to Facebook, making a mockery of the £120 million that ITV had paid for it less than four years ago.

The reason Sky News came to me was because of a blog post I had written last year about Friends Reunited becoming free to use, but how as it had already lost its market share to Facebook, it was too little, too late to save it.

I had not optimised for ‘Friends Reunited’ or for ‘Facebook’, as both phrases are highly competitive in the SERPs (search engine results pages) but because I had written about the two sites together, they created a longtail search phrase, the search phrase ‘friends reunited facebook’.

This, coupled with the high volume of quality content, ensured that the website ranked for phrases such as this, without even needing to optimise for them. It was then found by a journalist for Sky News researching the story, who requested a quote on the subject, furthering the brand.

So while writing content on your website does have the advantage of making sure your website gets indexed by Google regularly, remember that the quality of the content is equally important. Don’t get hung up on using your keywords and remember to write about news related to your industry. You never know where it will lead and what links and enquiries you will garner from it.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

1. Make the most of social networking
   Creating a profile on sites such as Linkedln and Facebook can help reach a wider audience. Niche social networking sites are often overlooked. Find ones that are relevant to your industry.
2. Boost positive pages through SEO
   By optimising positive reviews, posting media coverage on a website and having a welloptimised blog, you can help ensure Google displays the content you want people to see. These practices should be adhered to regularly, not just as a reactive measure to negative online content.
3. Monitor forums and review sites
   Google Alerts will flag up any instances of specified keywords (such as your company name), ensuring that anything negative can be counteracted and positive stories or postings can be optimised.
4. Embrace social media
   Social bookmarking is a way to store and share web pages, so links to these sites are saved on the public internet. Use sites like del.ici.ous, StumbleUpon and Digg.
5. Update your blog
   Blogs that are regularly updated with interesting and relevant content wilt be placed higher in the rankings. Search engine spiders place more importance on btogs with fresh content, which helps to manage online reputation by ensuring that a btog is ranked highly over any other potentially negative content. Blogging also provides the opportunity to increase incoming links and build relationships.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

source: issue #187 .Net Magazine

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

However, I’m not going to write about how you can make tweaks to WordPress to get the maximum SEO impact from it, nor am I about to tell you which plugins are the best to get your site ranked at the top of Google. No, I’m going to discuss why WordPress is the best blogging platform and why you should point and laugh at anyone who attempts to tell you otherwise.

Firstly, WordPress has been in development for several years, being constantly tweaked and revised by the best developers in the world. It’s impossible to put a total in terms of man-hours for how long WordPress has been in development, but you can safely assume, because of the number of different people working on it and the years it has been in development, that the total runs into millions.

How much would your web developer have charged for that project?

Despite this, many web development companies still insist on devising their own CMS (Content Management System) claiming that they can build something as good as WordPress, something that will get you the SEO results you need, something that is as feature rich and easy to use.

You can see where this is going.

When your web development company says they can build you a custom CMS, and they quote you for the work, ask them if it can do everything WordPress can. For example, can it:

• Get free updates and bug fixes, for life, with a single click of a button
• Allow you to add an infinite number of plugins to configure it the way you want it
• Ping Google, and other sites, when a new post is added, allowing it to be indexed in a matter of minutes
• Allow you to schedule content for days, weeks and even years ahead
• Allow multiple authors to add content, and for you to create new authors easily
• Allow SEO friendly URLs (this one’s a killer!)
• Auto generate sitemaps based on your content
• Automatically create links based on your keywords, without you having to do any extra work

I could go on, but there’s no sense labouring the point. Why anyone would use a custom built CMS instead of WordPress is beyond me, and it’s a costly mistake that a great many people make (and pay their developers extra for the privilege).

Do you want to pay to re-invent the wheel, or just use WordPress?

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

Sometimes however, you’ll find that if you’re writing within an industry that is extremely competitive, your blog posts may not rank at the top of the SERPs due to the fierce competition from other websites also writing content.

However, with a clever blog writing strategy you can combat this and ensure that your posts rank above other websites’ posts. For example, by using the ‘follow up’ post, you’re able to cement your position at the top of the SERPs by increasing the content on your website and giving your first post an additional boost by linking to it in your second post.

Our recent post that gave advice on optimising your blog for SEO explained how to create good quality blog titles for your blog posts, that will not only send you traffic, but will also rank well in the SERPs. If you were unsure of the quality of the advice (as believe it or not, some people actually doubt SEO advice given on the Internet) then you can have a look at the SERPs for the phrase ‘How to optimise your blog for SEO’.

Harness the power of the blog, if used correctly it could be your greatest weapon in the world of Internet marketing.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

For example, some websites are heavily image based and devoid of text on the home page. This is done to make the page more attractive, almost like the cover of a magazine. However, while a decorative magazine cover may work well for, say, a magazine, when it is sat on the shelf of a newsagent, it won’t work for your website. A website with a decorative cover, devoid of text, won’t attract customers because there is no text there in the first place to be indexed.

Google indexes content, not your pictures. Without content you won’t receive any traffic, or any custom, or any profit – therefore your attractive looking website will be useless.

By the same token, if your website is designed too rigidly in its framework, and can only accommodate text of a certain length (for example, titles less than 20 characters, or pages with fewer than 300 words) then you’re restricting the effectiveness of your website because of a poor design.

Your designer may try to defend themselves by saying that nobody wants to read long posts, or shorter titles look better, but they say things like this because they can’t design for the Internet. They don’t know what Internet marketing entails. They’re print designers.

Remember, your design is important but your content is essential. Never let your design compromise your content.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

For example, if you’re writing a blog post about optimising your blog post titles (as I have done here) you should give your post a title that someone might conceivably search for in Google, such as “How to optimise your blog titles for SEO”, as opposed to a cleverer title such as “The Title Says it All” or “It’s About the Title, Stupid”. This is where writing for the Internet, taking SEO into consideration is different from writing for a magazine or a newspaper. When you write for a printed medium you can afford to be cryptic and clever in your titles as you already have your reader’s attention. The obvious nature of your title in a printed medium isn’t going to attract someone from across the shop to open a magazine, unless it’s on the front cover of course.

With the Internet, the title is the most important part of the article, so should be very literal in its construction. One way of optimising titles for blogs is to phrase them as questions, such as “How do I optimise my blog for SEO?” or “How do I compose traffic winning blogs?”, as these are the sorts of things people will search for. If your post titles accurately match a user’s search query, your chances of ranking for that query are greatly increased.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) conducted a study into Internet marketing spend in the UK, including SEO and PPC spend, and found that Internet marketing in the UK was worth a total of £2,812,600,000 in 2007, which was up 38% on the previous year. Online advertising was worth 15.3% of all advertising spend in the UK that year, a rise from 11.4% in 2006.

Furthermore, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted spend for Internet marketing going on to 2011 in a report entitled the ‘Global Media Outlook Report’.

2008 £3.6 billion
2009 £4.3 billion
2010 £4.9 billion
2011 £5.4 billion

The figures produced by PwC and IAB have been forecast to underestimate Internet marketing spend in the UK.

Internet market research firm E-consultancy has estimated that of the £3.6 billion that will be spent in 2008 on Internet marketing, £2.75 billion of that will be on SEO and PPC budgets. This represents a growth of 24% on the previous year.

Of that spend; E-consultancy believes that £2.42 billion will be spent on paid search (such as Google Adwords) this year – a rise of 23% on last year. Search engine optimisation (SEO) will account for £330 million worth of marketing budgets in 2008 – a massive increase of 32% on 2007.

According to Chris Lake, the editor in chief at E-consultancy:

Search spending is continuing to increase at a healthy pace, although the growth rate will not match the increases seen over the last few years.

There are various reasons for the lower growth rate. Economic concerns will affect the overall ad industry, and search isn’t entirely immune from a dip in budgets. Marketers and agencies are savvier than ever, so scope for growth in ROI is limited. And growth in consumer internet usage is flattening out. But the sector is certainly more robust than other media channels that have a less measurable return on investment, and should continue to grow for years to come.

Budgets look set to increase into 2009 as well, with 63% of companies surveyed by E-consultancy saying that they planned to increase their PPC budgets next year, while 61% were looking to increase their SEO spend.

The prominence of Internet marketing has been magnified by the drops seen in conventional advertising, with TV and radio advertising falling this year. Indeed, without the increase seen in Internet marketing spend, taking its share of marketing spend to 18.7%, the total spent on advertising in the UK would have dropped by 4.6% in the first part of the year.

As it stands however, Internet marketing spend stands just 0.6% behind press advertising and just 3% behind TV advertising.

The reasons for the success are quite apparent, with a total of 31.6 million using the Internet in the UK this year (Source: BMRB Q2 2008) the market for online advertising has grown year-on-year. Also, the demographic split of Internet users in the UK is an accurate reflection of the UK as a whole, with a 52%/48% split between male and female users. 21% of Internet users are between 25 and 34 and the UK is seeing increasing Internet usage from the over 50s, who account for 30% of the total time the country spends online.

The IAB’s chief executive office, Guy Phillipson, stated:

Online is not immune from the economic downturn, but while other sectors see falls in expenditure, the internet is still experiencing an incredible increase and is propping up the entire advertising market.

The growth in internet advertising spend is beating all expectations as advertisers look to maximise their budgets, and take advantage of new display advertising formats such as video. They are also increasing their investment in paid-for search marketing because it delivers measurable returns on investment.

With TV, press and radio advertising on the decline, Internet marketing, including PPC and SEO, looks set to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK in the next two years.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

However, this doesn’t mean you need to allocate a substantial budget to link building for your site. No, as buying links is frowned upon by Google, and when you buy links you can’t control the websites they appear on anyway, it’s not the best use of your budget.

A much better way to build links to your website is with linkbait. Linkbait is when you create a post on your website, or a page on your website, that has been designed and crafted with the express intention of driving links. It’s important to note that the post or page may not necessarily be relevant to your services, or drive through sales or enquiries for your site, but it will drive links.

For example, the posts written on the Just Search website about Internet Mistakes, Expensive Domain Names and PHP v ASP weren’t written with the intention of driving enquiries for Just Search, but instead they acted as linkbait, and each page built up dozens of external links from other sites, which in turn drives PageRank through to the website.

This is the important thing to consider when adding content to your site. If you just write about your services, about how great your company is and what you can do for your clients, you won’t receive any IBLs, any traffic from it, and no boost in PageRank. By adding interesting content that readers want to read and want to pass on, you’ll benefit from the magic that content can offer.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC