The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Fresh unique content on a regular basis is probably more necessary now than it ever has been. If you haven’t learned about Google Fresh yet, you should read up on it.

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.

Does “content is king” mean the same thing in 2011 as it meant in 1995? Is content still king?

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.

Google has spent the better part of 2011 clamping down on bad content. Not “bad” as in dirty or pornographic. Rather, “bad” as in not high quality.

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.

Answer: It isn’t.

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.

If you plan to do any Internet marketing at all, then the most important thing to keep in mind about your business is that you are first and foremost a publisher. A self-publisher, but a publisher nonetheless.

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.

In this day and age of content scrapers, website owners must be diligent in protecting what is theirs. Here are 5 ways you can ensure that you protect your content.

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.

In February of this year, Google came out with the Panda Update and smacked down some very authoritative sites, including EzineArticles and several other popular article directories. A lot of smaller sites were affected as well.

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.

Everyone these days wants to go viral. They’d give their left arm (and probably a leg too) to see their content hit the viral craze meter boiling point. If you’re anything like me, you’d definitely like to see your content shake the virtual money tree. So how do do it?

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.

Every blogger at some point runs out of ideas and has to look for ways to spice up the blog machine. So how do you go about finding things to blog about? Matt McGee knows. He suggests:

• 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.

Are you one the many webmasters trying to figure out how to bounce back after being slammed from the 2011 Google Panda update? You can beat it and it doesn’t take a great deal of effort.

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.

Content and links go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or like a hot dog and mustard (or ketchup if you are under 10 years old).

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.

HTML 5 is in full development mode and I believe we’ll see the first iteration go public within the next year, maybe two. One of the most interesting changes from HTML 4 to HTML 5 is how page sections will be used during the design phase of website development. Here are 10 web page sections HTML 5 offers that will lead to better and more efficient website design.

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.

SEO copywriting is really nothing new. It is based on the same principles that copywriting has been based on for thousands of years. The difference is that the content being written is geared toward both human readers and search engine spiders, with keywords being a principle anchor to hold it together.

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.

From time to time you might find it prudent to take a look at your old content and analyze it to see where you might improve it. Sometimes information is outdated, or it could just be that your mission and company goals have changed. That’s OK. Make sure your content changes to go with it.

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.

If you want to ensure that you have great content on your blog or website, there is one way to make sure that you always have great content. It’s called surveying your clients or site visitors.

If you ask the right questions, then you’ll get the right answers.

Ask your customers and/or site visitors what information they would like on a web page that discusses (fill in the blank with your topic). For instance, if you are planning a page on baseball hats, your customers might want to know the following information:

• What size are they?
• How large is the brim?
• Are they adjustable size or are they made for one size head?
• Is there a logo, writing, or a picture on the hat?
• What material is the hat made of?

These are just a few of the questions your customers and site visitors would want to know about your baseball hats.

So now you can take that information and customize it to your situation. Find out what people are looking for when they search Google or Bing on your topic. Then, write your pages to answer those questions. It’s really that simple.

When you do it this way, you’ll not only ensure great content, but you’ll also ensure your web pages are search engine optimized.

Viral marketing is something that everyone wants, but few people really know what it means. It’s a bit of a fancy word. We know it when we see it, but we’re not sure how to go about accomplishing it for ourselves. A WebProNews article can shed a little light on it.

Jonah Peretti describes viral marketing in real simple terms:

Simply, stuff that has the best opportunity to spread is stuff that people want to share with others.

So the essence of viral marketing is really finding something that appeals to a lot of different people. If one person likes it, you’ve got one fan. If a thousand people like it, it’s viral material. Take that to the hundred thousand person level and you’ve got viral content on the go.

How do you create content that goes viral? Is it planned or does it just happen? There are examples of both kinds of content, but I think the best kind of viral marketing is planned.

Your content must possess three qualities if you want it to go viral. It must:

1. Appeal to a large number of people
2. Be published and in a format that is easy to share
3. Be a positive representation of your company or brand

With those three qualities, your content has the potential to go viral. Think about what your audience likes. Give it to them. Then the promote the Dickens out of it.

The first step to any good marketing is research. But that can entail any number of things. Usually, it means

• Competitive intelligence
• Market research data
• Keyword research
• Industry background research

And that’s just a start. Take a look at one of our case studies to see how a success start with market research ended with a well thought out plan that made our client successful.

While research is important, going through the steps to learn about the competition, the competitive landscape of the playing field, and your own keyword research will not necessarily guarantee success. You’ll also have to implement your plan.

There are a lot of moving parts to an effective Internet marketing strategy. There are content development initiatives to oversee, paid search initiatives, social media opportunities to exploit, and some additional research along the way to uncover unseen opportunities that might arise during the course of a campaign.

When there is so much at stake for the future of a company, you cannot afford to hand your Internet marketing over to amateurs. You need a professional to manage the process from beginning to end.

First, do your research. Then, take what you find and mold it into a plan. Execute your plan aggressively and monitor. Internet marketing success is not an accident.

Can the addition of a blog help your online presence? There are lots of arguments both for and against a blog and the answer to that question very much depends on who you talk to. From our perspective, the positives that blogs deliver far outweigh the negatives, especially if you publish your blog in the most appropriate manner.

Blogs are especially beneficial to those who try to market a business on a small budget. In fact, apart from your time, blogs can be published and used as a marketing tool, virtually for free. However, don’t make the mistake of adding a blog and then publishing anything and everything. Like all business processes, a little planning can go a long way. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

Consider your audience:

Your blog should be targeting your audience, and that starts with simple things like your theme and the language used. If your audience is young, then a bright, cheerful, and fun theme may be appropriate. If your target audience is more mature, then a more mature blog may be more appropriate.

When it comes to language, if your target is a youth audience, then using the language of youth could be appropriate – you could even consider hiring a young person to write your blog. Likewise, if you are targeting mothers, getting a mother to write your blog could pay dividends.

Focused content:

Plan your content. One of the biggest mistakes that many business blogs make is to oversell. Use your blog as a social communication tool rather than as a formal business tool. This is where niche related writers often bring better results than marketing people. Your content should be focused on your business, be entertaining, and should take a ‘helping hand’ approach – even when introducing new products.

One of the benefits that blogs bring to any online presence is the steady stream of content. Search engines will visit a website more often if it is regularly publishing content. Naturally, your blog should be optimized for organic search to deliver best results.

Ultimately, your blog is a great communication tool. It draws interest from search engines, from social media communities, and from general readers. Make your content interesting and people will come back on a regular basis.

The real

Social media optimization can be a difficult process for some businesses.  If you have little in the way of social media experience, then simply knowing where to start can be hard enough. I see a lot of Facebook Fan Pages created by businesses, yet they look and feel incomplete and really do the business more of a disservice than provide any benefits.

Social media marketing is an all or nothing form of marketing. You cannot set up a presence then walk away. If you are going to become involved in social media, then do it, and do it well. If you’re stuck for ideas, have a look around you at some of the successful social media players. The leading brands can be a good place to start as they have had the budgets to play around with various options until settling on those that work.

If you look closely at these major brands, you will notice several common activities – these are obviously working for them and may well work for your Fan Pages as well. Some of these common activities include:

• Regular entertaining content – those are three important words -
  • Regular as in publishing something every day of the week,
  • Entertaining - there’s a word that surely speaks for itself
  • Content that is interesting, entertaining, interactive, or making an offer
• Interaction – no matter how big your brand is, people want to be heard and acknowledged. Set aside a small amount of time to respond to those who have left questions or made statements. There’s no rule that says you need to answer each person individually. Major brands often respond to a group of people at once, not always mentioning names, but discussing the common issue.
• Interactivity – there is one area of social media marketing that is bringing people back every day, and that is interactivity. This can take the form of interactive games and quizzes. In fact, online games are one of the major reasons users keep coming back to sites like Facebook.

You may not be able to incorporate everything on that list. However, you should be able to supply regular content that is interesting and entertaining, and you should be able to set aside some time for interaction. Major brands employ whole teams to cover these activities, but with millions of fans, they need them.

Writing copy for a website or blog may seem like hard work. However, often, the only reason it’s hard is because we make it so.  Constipated copywriter is a good term for it – you strain, you exert yourself,  but at the end of the day, you’ve written 200 words that deliver a message, but is dry and very formal.

There is a misconception that readers want to see facts in very short bursts. The reality is, we are training readers to want this type of information. Social media optimization almost insists on short punchy content. That’s fine for social media. When it comes to your website, users want to see that short punchy content expanded on a little more. Those small punchy Tweets for example are meant to attract visitors to your website. Why? Because you have piqued their interest.

If they arrive on your website to be met with dry fact-based content, they may well leave a little unsatisfied. Your content needs to be interesting. It also needs to be of a length that it can suitably address that content. If you feel it is too long, then break it into two pages. If your content is that interesting, most readers will follow.

Your content can still be punchy, and it can still be broken into short bite-sized pieces – we call them paragraphs, by the way, not the whole page. Produce content that you would want to read, produce content that is interesting, at times entertaining, but above all else, delivers on the promise made by the page’s heading.

If you’re guilty of constipated copywriting, then learn to relax a little, learn to deliver the kind of content that people in your niche are looking for.