Here are 5 reasons creating link bait might just be the biggest waste of your time.

1. You think keywords aren’t necessary – Content is searchable. Even link bait. You must think about how your website visitors are going to find your content before you decide to publish it. What will make them think your article is worth a link? If it isn’t the keywords and it isn’t the way your content is written, then what is it?
2. Link bait isn’t a magic carpet ride – No link bait is ever just created and published without a plan. If you’re too lazy to plan your content, how it will be written, what it will look like, what graphics will accompany it, etc., then there’s no use in creating it.
3. You think it will promote itself – Even link bait needs to be promoted. Will you push it out with social media? Video marketing? Your blog? Will you share it with high profile bloggers in your niche? Include your promotional efforts in your plan for your link bait.
4. You expect too much too fast – You can’t predict how many people will link to your content and when. You can write it, you can publish it, and you can promote it. The rest is up to everyone else. Focus on what you can control.
5. You think quality doesn’t count – All link bait is based on quality. If you don’t think that’s true, then you shouldn’t be trying to create link bait. No one is going to link to content that doesn’t provide value.

Link bait is more than just some fancy SEO trick. It’s a content strategy. Build your strategy on sound marketing principles, not crazy viral hype.

1. Descriptive URLs – Let’s start with the URL. Instead of using dynamic URLs, use descriptive URLs that utilize your best keyword phrase for each content page. Your product name, a product description, or a phrase that best identifies each individual product is best for your product description pages.
2. Create Unique Content For Every Product – Every product page should have unique content, and I’ll add that each should have at least 250 words of content. If necessary, combine several like products on one page and give each one a unique description. Is there really that much of a difference between a blue widget and a yellow widget? Do they need separate pages? If so, make sure you provide enough content on each page that you give them maximum SEO value, and that means no duplicate content.
3. Use Category Pages – People don’t just shop for individual products. They also search for categories of product. If you sell cameras, have a section for digital cameras. Have another for camcorders. Make sure each category page has unique content.
4. Link Your Pages Together With Anchor Text – Link your pages together with appropriate anchor text. This alone can give your website a huge boost. Figure out the best internal linking strategy based on consumer buying habits, keyword phrase associations, and complimentary products.
5. Allow User Reviews – Every time you add new content to a page, the search engines return to crawl that page. When they do, they also re-index and re-rank it. Allowing user reviews, even negative reviews, can give your product pages a huge boost in the search engines.
6. Allow Social Media Sharing – Social media sharing can encourage your content to travel far and wide. That means more potential traffic, more potential product reviews, and better SEO overall.

Each of these specific on-page content solutions has at least one associated SEO benefit. If you want to improve your online shop’s SEO, try these on-page content tricks.

The key to this SEO philosophy is in the use of keywords and links. Keywords are the fuel in every search engine optimization strategy. You don’t want to overdo it, but you must do it.

What does that mean, exactly?

Keywords are a matter of targeting the right phrases for the right audience. If you are trying to reach people who purchase automobiles, then you have to target the right key phrases that attract automobile buyers. If you sell Ford vehicles specifically, then target your phrases to people who buy Ford vehicles. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

It is, but you’d be surprised at how many SEOs target the wrong keywords for their audiences.

When it comes to links, you want your links to compliment your keyword phrases. They shouldn’t dominate. Anything in moderation is better than the same thing in overdose. Use links that compliment your keywords by incorporating the keywords into the link anchor text and pointing them to relevant pages on your website. Title attributes can also compliment your anchor text.

By complimentary title attributes, I don’t necessarily mean repeating your anchor text key phrase. I mean use a phrase that compliments it and is a more nuanced way of using your important keywords.

SEO is not a science. It certainly isn’t rocket science. Your first concern should be in creating great content. Make the SEO compliment the content.

It’s called duplicate content.

Duplicate content is a phrase that has scared a lot of webmasters into unnecessary paranoia. The problem with duplicate content has always been scraping, not two articles by the same author that are somewhat similar.

Look at it this way. You have two articles that overlap. They are both on your website and clearly have you as the author. What’s the worse that can happen? In Google’s world, you could have one of the articles de-indexed. While that could be an inconvenience, it pales in comparison to an article you wrote being de-indexed while the same article with someone else’s byline being catapulted to a No. 1 ranking. That would hurt.

Google’s problem with duplicate content is knowing which version of an article came first. If they get it right, no problem; if they get it wrong, that’s a problem.

When you publish your content on the web, article directories may not be the best place to go to. That’s because you are competing with thousands of articles and if your article appears elsewhere on the web, there’s no guarantee that your article in the article directory will be recognized by the search engines. Send original content to niche publishers that link back to you with a bio. Make sure those article are indexed fairly quickly.

• Notifying bloggers that you are not a spammer
• Making your name and website more brandable
• Easily identifies you as authentic everywhere you go
• Unifies your blogging, commenting, and social media presence across all channels

Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. It’s easy to set up. You just head over to Gravatar.com and upload your photograph or image – the one you want to be associated with a particular e-mail address. It’s important to note that if you own several websites and have different e-mail addresses for managing those websites and often comment on blogs, forums and social media sites under your various names, then you can have more than one gravatar. You can have one for each e-mail address you own because the gravatar is associated with a single e-mail address.

Every time you enter your e-mail address into a comment form, your gravatar will appear beside your name. This makes you recognizable to other commenters while branding you online and shows that you are a legitimate poster, not a spammer.

I highly recommend that you set up your own gravatar – especially if you blog regularly and comment on other blogs regularly.

1. On-Page Content – On-page content is everything that appears on your web pages and is visible to human eyes. It can be Google AdSense, videos, articles, your blog, or a widget. It’s the content that either adds to or subtracts from your page’s ability to achieve high search engine rankings.
2. Off-Page Content – Off-page content is designed to do one thing – send visitors to your website. Some off-page content may also provide you with link building benefits. This, too, can be any type of content visible to human eyes. Videos, articles, blog comments, forum comments, social media content or anything that appears on a website other than yours and either serves to build inbound links to your website, boost your reputation, or drive traffic to your site – maybe even a combination of the three.
3. Code – In the code category of content is anything that is read by the search engines or rendered by Web browsers. This includes your HTML code, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, and other “behind the scenes” elements that are viewed only by the search engines and Web browsers unless your human visitors View Source.

All three types of content have the potential to affect your search engine rankings and your website’s reputation. Guard them well, present them professionally.

Due to the Google Fresh update, it is likely that your static content will fall in the SERPs if you do not have a strategy for updating your website on a regular basis. That means coming up with ways to keep your content fresh and interesting.

Here are five ways to do that:

1. Add a blog to your website and update it daily.
2. Start a forum on your website and appoint someone to be the moderator.
3. Write and publish periodic press releases.
4. Build a community around your brand by allowing user-generated content on blogs, forums, and other UGC community assets.
5. Post often to social media.

Maintaining a constant presence in the search engines ensures that Google does not forget about. It also ensures that your audience doesn’t forget you. Your website will grow all the more if you continue to update it with fresh, unique content that is deemed valuable by your community.

This is why community-oriented and news sites tend to do better in the search engines. Don’t just build web pages then forget about them.

This is a question that pervades almost every single discussion on web design, Internet marketing, and search engine optimization. What is content and what makes it king?

Traditionally, content referred specifically to your on-page content – keywords, text, images, etc. But the broader view is that content is anything you produce that is tangible in an online environment and that produces intangible results. In essence, content is both on page and off page. It includes links, videos, and might even in some situation refer to code.

Content moves beyond design elements. Simply having a website with a pretty header and a nice layout is not content. Filling it with images that pop, content that sells, and videos that rip roar and demand attention, that’s count. Writing articles and guest blog posts for other Web properties that link back to yours and drive steady traffic to your site, that’s content too. Bookmarking your pages and networking with others through Facebook and LinkedIn, that’s content too. And content IS king.

It’s important that webmasters not get too wrapped up in definitions, but you should take a broader view of content. And crown the king.

In case you’re wondering, that’s what the infamous Google Panda was all about. It’s got everyone talking.

It’s also got everyone thinking. As well it should.

The most important thing to keep in mind is not that your content needs to be long. You might come away with that impression if you just looked at the surface of the Panda updates. What you should do, however, is look under the hood. Quality content is the name of the game.

So what is meant by “quality?” The truth is, quality is in eye of the beholder. And lest you think that in all cases Google is the beholder, think again. You should not be writing your content for the search engines, or for a search engine. Instead, write your content for your human readers. Quality is whatever your website visitors make it. Quality is what they want.

How do you do that?

For starters, ask yourself this question: “What do my website’s human readers want? What do they really want?”

Then, give it to them.

Quality isn’t about some search engine algorithm. It’s about delivering on a promise – the promise to feed your website visitors with the very best content in your niche. Do that and the search engines will be happy.

But that hasn’t stopped the second place search engine from posting its own content quality guidelines. In a nutshell:

• Avoid duplicate content
• Don’t create pages with thin amounts of content
• No pages with only text or only images – mix it up
• Share your content through social media
• Don’t use automatic translation tools
• Proofread your content
• Keep your videos short
• Turn excessively long pages into multiple-page articles
• Don’t create content just for the sake of content

About the only one of these that might be different from Google’s content guidelines (and even that is questionable) is the suggestion to not use automatic translation tools. I say this might be different from Google’s guidelines because Google actually has an automatic translation tool, but I wouldn’t vouch for its accuracy.

In short, if you follow Google’s content quality guidelines, then you will likely do well in Bing as well. And since Google still delivers over 60% of the Web traffic for most websites, that’s sort of a no-brainer. In fact, Google delivers more than 70% of the Web traffic for most websites.

While it’s nice to hear from Bing just what its content guidelines are, I still think the better bet is to follow Google’s guidelines and you should do well in both search engines.

Why is it so important to consider yourself a self-publisher? Because when you think about it, publishers own and control the flow of information and information is the key to your business.

It doesn’t matter if you run a brick and mortar busines or an online-only business, if you are marketing online, then you are publishing information. Articles, blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, Facebook pages, social bookmarks with content summaries, answers to questions on the Q&A sites, the list goes on and on. It’s all content that you publish – whether on your own site or someone else’s.

While this is marketing and the intent is to drive traffic back to your website so that you can close sales, it’s also publishing. You’re in the information publishing business no matter what other business you consider yourself in.

When you think of yourself as a publisher, then you gain a lot more clout. You gain instant credibility. You can suddenly own and control the flow of content and information. If you aren’t doing that, then it’s controlling you.

1. Add a copyright notice to your website – While this won’t protect your content 100%, it will put content scrapers on notice. Some scrapers will see your notice and leave well enough alone, but enough content scrapers will ignore it that you should do more than just state your rights publicly.
2. Send a request for removal – Many websites will remove your content if you simply ask, however, many more more won’t. That’s why you should be prepared to send a Cease and Desist Letter from your legal representative followed by a DMCA complaint filed with Google. But remember, you can take them to court, however, many content scrapers are in third world countries and out of reach of U.S. law.
3. Use your Robots.txt disallow – If you know specific robots that are scraping your content, block them.
4. .htaccess – Block robots from crawling your content using your .htaccess file.
5. Use Creative Commons – Like traditional copyright, Creative Commons has its limitations. However, you can assign a wider variety of rights to your content if you want to encourage sharing, adaptive uses, and other types of creative licenses.

When it comes to protecting your content, be diligent and aggressive.

Specifically, the update addressed low quality content on these sites. Many smaller sites were hit because they contained several pages of small amounts of content that didn’t really help their site visitors. For instance, an e-commerce site with 10 similar products might have had descriptions for those products where the only changes in the content were the names of the products. That doesn’t say much for originality and is definitely a characteristic of low quality.

Here are 5 specific lessons we can learn from the Google Panda update:

1. Quality Over Quantity – You are better off consolidating your products into one grouping if they are so similar that you can’t produce quality content for each product description.
2. Focus On Becoming An Authority – Authority sites reign supreme in Google’s eyes. To become an authority, you have to focus on consistent quality content over time.
3. Use Social Media – Social media authority is every bit as important as content authority. Branch out beyond your own web properties.
4. Photos Are Nice But …. – Instead of loading your site with photos, use the photos to enhance textual content. Your text is the meat of your content. Too many photos means too much fat.
5. Age Is Important Too – Quality + Time = Authority. The age of your domain is an asset. If you do everything right over time, you’ll do well in the long run.

Keep your eyes focused on quality content, authority, and social media branding. These are the tools that successful Internet marketers are using to get ahead post-Panda.

SiteProNews has a great article about viral marketing. It tells you the 7 techniques that work to make content go viral (however, I’d say there are more than 7). Here are those 7 techniques, just in case your wondering:

• Videos
• Social media
• Articles
• Tweet/Retweet button
• Share widget
• E-books
• Newsletters

The beautiful thing is, all of these techniques work. And while the article is a good article, what it fails to do is teach you how to go viral using these techniques.

The purpose of this blog post is not to give you a step-by-step plan for your viral marketing efforts. Rather, what I’d like to do is to give you the very basis of viral marketing itself. Each of these techniques will work for the right kind of content. But what do you have to do before you start your viral marketing campaign? That’s what I’m about to tell you.

In a word, the one thing you have to do before any content can go viral is to make your content incredibly awesome. Bad content won’t go viral. Mediocre content won’t go viral. Good content might, but it isn’t likely. Great content, well, maybe it will go viral – on a good day. But there is a ton of great content online that hasn’t gone viral. What you really need is out-of-this-world awesome content. If you hit a home run on the creation part, then your content can’t help but go viral. That is, once you put it out there.

• Delicious.com
• Question-based keyword research
• Look at your analytics (what are people reading most, and how are they finding your site?)
• Q&A websites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers
• Ask your readers

To be sure, there are more than five ways to find new blog ideas. In fact, there are hundreds of ways to generate ideas for content. Here are ten more ways to find new ideas for your blog content.

1. Read other blogs in your niche and write about the same topics (be sure you don’t plagiarize or steal the content, and don’t take ideas from the same competitor every time
2. Find an old post that was popular and write about the same topic from a different angle
3. Visit a niche article directory; what are the most popular articles about?
4. Use Google’s Wonder Wheel
5. Where are your pay-per-click clicks coming from?
6. Watch a few YouTube videos in your niche
7. Current events – Is there something going on around the world that you can play off of?
8. Your Twitter stream
9. Facebook
10. Use your RSS reader; scan the headlines till something pops out

As Matt says, there is always something to blog about. Just do it.

The one thing that I keep hearing over and over again is that webmasters had pages with minimal content just disappear from the SERPs all of a sudden. No amount of link building will fix the Panda slide. You need content.

There are generally three types of content pages that were affected en masse from the Google Panda update:

• Product Pages - These are pages with a picture of the product and a description. There are so many websites with an e-commerce system where the product pages contain one or two lines of description and that’s it. You need to do more to describe the product. Add more content and see what happens.
• Review Pages – Product review pages generally contain a short description (if that) and a visible star rating or other system that allows visitors to vote on how well they like a product, movie, song lyrics, etc. Again, you need to add a fair level of content on that page to fix the problem.
• Location Pages – These are pages that contain a location or directions to a store front. They have traditionally contained minimal content, but rather than simply host a map that is pulled in from Google Local, try adding some content with directions to your location from various known landmarks.

There are other types of pages that may have been affected by the Panda update. In most cases, if you just add a little bit of content, you can see your pages rise again.

Seriously, building content is one thing. You can write great content and even make it shine for the search engines as you sprinkle it with your favorite keywords, but you’ll find that your best content really takes on a life of its own when it starts to attract links.

Links serve some very important purposes:

• Inbound links are used by search engines to determine the authority of a web page relative to other web pages on the same topic
• Links are a reflection of your brand
• Links can serve as a reputation management tool
• Links are a very important path for traffic to your website
• Links often serve as a clue to website content readers about the nature of the content on a web page being linked to
• Outbound links can be a way to attribute a source upon which your own ideas are based.

Links serve many purposes, but they are important because search engines use links to crawl the web. A web page cannot be crawled by search engine robots – hence, cannot be indexed – unless there are links pointing to it.

When it comes to building your content, don’t just think about the content itself. You should also consider how links – your own as well as any the content itself might attract from somewhere else – can be used to enhance the content and make it more valuable for your audience.

1. Body Element
2. Section Element
3. Nav Element
4. Article Element
5. Aside Element
6. H-tag Elements
7. Hgroup Element
8. Header Element
9. Footer Element
10. Address Element

Most of these are new to HTML 5. A few, like Body, H tags, Header, and Footer are currently being used by HTML 4. While HTML 4 offers a way to include a navigation element on your web pages, HTML 5 changes the design process by including the Nav Element in the HTML and giving it its own code structure.

I’m particularly excited about the Section Element, Article and Aside Elements, and the Address Element. These HTML features will allow any website to be laid out in classic magazine style.

The Article Element will make it easier for web developers to add content to a web page that can be easily syndicated. The Aside Element will allow web designers to add sidebars to web pages easily and without fanfare. The Address Element will give content authors a way to provide contact information for each content element they produce.

HTML 5 is going to be a major new development in web design. I hope you’re looking as forward to it as I am.

Here are 5 basic SEO copywriting techniques that every content writer should keep front and center.

• Write For skimmers and scanners – Online readers don’t read, they scan. Make your content easy to scan by making it visually appealing with images, lots of white space, bullet points, and page layout structure.
• Use power words – Words like “free,” “easy,” and “powerful” are what veteran copywriter Robert Bly calls power words. Use them liberally in your content and snag your readers like a fish.
• Make a list, check it twice – Lists make your content easy to read and organizes your writing for your reader (so they don’t have to). Everyone loves lists.
• Quote the quotable – Why use your own words when someone else’s are more credible. If you can secure a famous quote, or a quote from a famous person, about your topic, then your content will earn instant credibility.
• Get their attention with headlines – Headlines are the first thing your readers will read. Make them bold and compelling. Guard their honesty, of course, but capture your reader’s attention with a bold promise (then deliver on that promise in your content).

These 5 copywriting techniques are powerful and easy to implement in your SEO content. Make it easy for your reader and you’ll see the big payoff.

This is easier than you’d imagine. It doesn’t all have to be done at the same time. You can focus on specific content a little bit at a time. For instance, take a piece of your content each month.

For instance, maybe you take a look at one section of your static website and all of your past January blog posts (from every year) during the month of January. Then, in February, you look at another section of your static website and all of your past February blog posts. In March, you might hit your Facebook content and past March blog posts. Etc. etc.

Keep in mind that you aren’t just looking to make sure the information is still accurate. That’s only a part of it. You also want to make sure your old content is operating under current SEO conventions and hasn’t been de-listed from the search engines for a violation. You’ll also want to make sure that it is working for you in other ways. And strong, popular content might work well in other formats – as a print magazine article, for instance.

You want to analyze that old content to make sure it is still working for you. But don’t don’t agonize too hard over it if it isn’t.