No Bull, Just Honest Discussions

Two of the biggest avenues and thus the biggest “sells” in SEO and web content creation are article marketing and blogging.  Chances are, if you ask for an SEO firm to give you a price quote, they will be pushing one of these two options.  While they might sell you “linkbuilding” packages, blogs and article directories are two of the easiest - and most effective ways - to create quality links.

In the past, article marketing had a distinct advantage over blogging, since many blogs had low traffic, while popular article directories benefited from high “robot” traffic - they were being crawled and indexed rather quickly, thanks to the popularity of their site and their huge number of links.  The latest algorithm updates from Google, however, changed this dynamic.  Sites that “over-optimized” were penalized with the latest updates, while social network sites, news sites and even company or individual blogs were rewarded with higher rankings.

Google’s three latest algorithm updates have set the Internet marketing industry ablaze. Since February of 2011, when Panda was first released, the world’s top search engine has declared war on websites that have “low quality content.” Just as everything was settling down in the SEO world, two new algorithm updates make headlines: Venice and Penguin. Just to review what we’ve learned from Google thus far:

Google Panda: Lowers the SERP rankings of low quality sites, including “content mills” and pages with little content but heavy advertising. Sites that benefit include social network pages and news sites.

If you are working on an SEO campaign for your small business, or perhaps already publishing content, then it’s time to think about how to distinguish yourself from the competition.  This is not only a smart strategy for dealing with Google (which values unique content) but also for dealing with your human visitors.  They are more likely to remember you if you stand out. 

So what you might try is taking a look at your competition, including their sites, their chosen keywords and their linking strategy.  This is why the best SEO companies always insist on analyzing your competition. One common SEO technique is to use keywords repeatedly, when research shows that the best approach may be a subtle repetition, rather than constant copying and pasting.  Actually, it’s quite the SEO dilemma at times.  The more you aim for popular keywords, the higher keyword density competition you’re facing.  Your competitors may not use 100 keywords per page…but they could publish 100 pages with matching keywords.  Suddenly, the competition is intense and you’re feeling pressured to maximize keyword usage.