Content is key to a business’ success online. Frequently changing, engaging content not only adds value to your website for your visitors but a dynamic site will always be favoured by search engines.

The goal is always to persuade visitors onto your site, but more importantly to convert those visitors into clients or customers. Engaging content can bolster your reputation and increase a potential customers’ trust in your brand, and ultimately leads to increasing conversion rates.

Many websites remain static for years, and it may be difficult to justify the expense to pay an agency to produce, upload and distribute content for a business. But if you’re considering handling the process in-house, knowing where to start, knowing what constitutes valuable content, knowing where to source it and knowing how to then distribute it can also be daunting.

The truth is businesses have been producing content potential customers are likely to find both relevant and interesting for years - they just haven’t realised how it may be leveraged online.

I’m going to take a look at some of the content you’ve probably already produced offline, consider some of the activities your company already undertakes which have the opportunity to yield valuable content and also look at how all this content may be housed online.

Re-purposing Old Content…

Newsletters

Whether sent by email or on good old paper, content from previous newsletters, with a few tweaks, is likely to still be relevant today and suitable for distributing online. Future newsletter content should find a place on your site within a news or articles section.

Corporate videos or photos

Upload them onto your site. Better still upload them onto You Tube or flickr.

Presentation Slideshows

Presentations made at seminars or industry events are often great additions to a website or can add value to your brand when uploaded to online content sharing sites like scribd.

Case Studies & Collateral

You may have case studies or pieces of research that have formed part of your printed marketing collateral or have had internal purposes. Consider how they may have value on your website or distributed off-site.

Leverage Existing Activities…

Also consider existing activities that may also have the potential to spawn relevant content.

Philanthropy

If you sponsor a charity tell everyone about it with an article on your website. If you’re raising some money or doing some work in your community shout about it and keep your visitors up to date with it all.

Industry News

Chances are you know exactly what’s going on the industry in which you work and the markets in which you operate. Have a dedicated news section on your site and, in addition to adding your new newsletter content, regularly add some industry commentary.

White Papers

Heavier weight content such as technical or business benefit white papers can be leveraged further to build contact databases by requesting an email address prior to providing access to the resource. Well written white papers not only reach your target market, they may also have the ability to influence them.

Trade Shows & Seminars

If you attend a trade show or conference make an effort to do some ‘live blogging’ – that is use your company blog as a platform to report and comment on what is happening.

Think about your staff

It’s likely that there are some amazingly talented people sat nearby with some expert subject knowledge. Utilise skill sets and get staff involved in all your content generation activities. If you have subject experts have them writing the occasional article for your website or guest blog posts for other sites.

Where am I going to put all this content?

Start with your company’s website. A company blog is a great place to present and archive content. Wordpress can seamlessly integrate with your existing site and provide all the functionality you could need. In addition to a blog, try to incorporate a news section and article or video archive.

There is also a wealth of opportunities to expose your content to an even wider audience by distributing online. Videos can be posted to You Tube, slideshows to scribd, photos to flickr, good article and news content to free article sites.

While I’m not suggesting that content creation and distribution strategies should be central to all your employees daily schedules, consideration of how you can increase your interaction with potential customers online by providing them with engaging content both on and off your website should certainly be given some thought, especially if you don’t want those potential customers drifting off to your competitors site where they do.

There are just two things I would suggest bearing in mind. The first is to not duplicate your content all over the internet; it will only devalue it. The second, more importantly, is to carefully consider what content you do place online – one way or another it is likely to be there for a long time.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nightthree

Google have today announced a new link spam detection algorithm, alongside a new form to report competitors with.  While both link spam detection and reporting of link spam have both been possible for many years, today’s announcement could cause the practise of reporting competitors to become more popular.

Whether this proves to be significant will depend largely on whether Google takes the reports submitted seriously. If there is a strong indication that submitting such a report leads to your competitors rankings suffering, it’ll become too tempting for many SEO’s to ignore.

As it becomes increasingly easier to analyse your competitor’s backlinks, it also gets increasingly harder to hide what you are doing.

Such a scenario create a tricky dilemma – are the benefits of reporting your competitors more significant than the drawbacks? While the benefits might seem obvious (your competitor could drop in the SERPS, possibly below you), the drawbacks are probably more complex than you might first think.

Firstly , the new form isn’t anonymous, meaning that you need to submit from an actual Google account , and whilst I’ve no doubt that most would-be-reporters will use a fake/spare Google account for this purpose, it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be traced back to your website. If there is any way of Google knowing who’s behind the report, then you better be sure your website would stand up to similar scrutiny.

Then there’s the problem of shared links – even if you have used a disconnected account to report your competitors from, you might still lose out if you have shared links with your competitor. Should the algorithm be used to apply penalties to sellers (and it likely will be), you might find that Google discounts all links from websites linking to both of you. Imagine you gained a natural editorial link from a website – it wouldn’t be unforeseeable in competitive industries for your competitors to have approached the publisher and ended up paying for a link; in this scenario it’s quite possible that both the editorial and paid links were invalidated.

The ultimate question in both of the above cases would be your view of the playing field – given most websites will likely have some questionable backlinks (even if you haven’t bought links or spammed blogs, there’s previous SEO agencies to think about, ex-employees, competitors, or just being unlucky enough to have attracted links from websites that are usually spammy), your strategic call would depend on where you see your websites links compared with those of your competitors. If you are low in the SERPS but have a much cleaner link profile than your competitors, then you are probably well placed to submit reports.

Even if you do judge yourself of having more to gain though – it doesn’t mean you will actually want to do this. I’ve never personally reported a competitor, and I know many others who would say the same – it just feels wrong. Even if you do feel it’s the right thing to do, do you really have time? It’s kind of like playing a game of Darts – you can try and put off your opponent, but may just prefer to focus on your own game.

All things considered, savvier SEO’s may come to another conclusion altogether – whether or not you choose to report your competitors, future proofing your own links has to be the way forward.

Image credit Drew_

One of the great things about working online is that you can track and monitor virtually anything and everything. That is of course, as long as you have some sort of analytics package set up. We use Google Analytics for most of our clients. It a pretty powerful solution (when used correctly), and of course has the added advantage of being completely free… and we all like free, right?

Google Analytics is pretty easy to set up – you simply need to insert a small snippet of code into every page of your website. However, there are certain instances whereupon URL structure can adversely affect the data which you get out of the package.

For example, if you want to monitor conversions through your website via Google Analytics, the easiest way is to set up goals and funnels.

Goals are very easy to set up – all you need to do is insert the URL which all users who complete the goal hit. For example – if you were looking to track purchases, you’d probably use the ‘thank you’ page URL which users hit once the goal is completed.

Funnels are simply the steps a user has to go through in order to complete a goal. So, again taking our purchase example; step one might be a page where the user completes their name and address; step two might be where they insert their payment details; step three might be the confirm purchase page; and step four might be the thank you for purchasing page.

All of this sounds simple enough; however, you are reliant on all users hitting the same pages. Which, if a site uses Session IDs can be a problem…

We came across one such example a couple of weeks ago. We won ourselves a lovely new insurance client. Like many they were using a white label quote engine. Not unusually, the quote engine utilised dynamically generated session IDs. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem as the URLs are typically configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html?uniquesessionid

These types of session IDs are simply ignored by Google Analytics, and as such you can get aggregated data on all of the users who viewed www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html – this means you can track conversions by setting up goals and funnels as normal.

However on this particular site the URLs were configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

As such a new URL was being dynamically generated for each user. This was causing problems in Google Analytics, making it impossible to track conversions via goals and funnels in the usual way.

However, there’s a nice little work around – by using a filter you can solve the problem:

Let’s use this URL as an example:  www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

1. Login to your analytics account, however rather than clicking on ‘view reports’ click on ‘edit’.
2. You’ll be taken to your profile setting page
3. Click on add filter
4. Give your new filter an appropriate name
5. Select ‘Custom filter’
6. Select ‘Search and Replace’
7. From the Filter Field drop down list, select Request URI
8. In the Search String box insert:       quote-form/.*/
9. In the Replace String box insert:     quote-form/
10. Select ‘No’ for Case Sensitive
11. Hit ‘Save Changes’

Effectively this will filter out all of the Session IDs from the URLs – so rather than reporting on individual user’s URLs you will be able to view the data in aggregate, and set up goals and funnels as usual. Smart, huh?

The first step in any SEO project is to establish which keywords/phrases we should pursue rankings for. For some clients, the question is an easy enough one to answer - I sell blue widgets, so I want to rank for ‘blue widgets’, ‘buy blue widgets’, cheap blue widgets’ and so on; but in most cases it’s somewhat more complex.

A typical ‘old school’ SEO keyword research technique would be to simply divide the volume of searches for the keyword by the amount of websites ‘competing’ for the search query, and find the keyword with the most favourable popularity/competition ratio. Whilst volume and competition should of course form part of the keyword research process,  this approach can be a little too simplistic.

As such, we typically consider the following factors when selecting keywords for our clients:

Relevance (and what converts!)

Before we even start looking at search volumes and competing websites we need to fully understand what kind of keywords would be relevant to our client – typically this involves looking at all the products/services offered and working out what a searcher might use to find the service/product in question.

The temptation here is to go too broad with keywords,  if you sell golf lessons, you’re probably likely to find that your best converting traffic comes from keywords like ’golf lessons’, or ‘golf lessons in <location>’. You might *want* to rank for ‘golf’  but unless you’ve a huge budget and have little or no concerns about seeing ROI from your activity, this probably isn’t the best choice of keyword.

If you’ve run PPC campaigns before, you should already have a goldmine of information to give you a good idea of which phrases are most relevant, and convert. If you’ve no such data, and poor rankings currently, it may be worth running a PPC campaign to test which keywords/phrases convert.

Commercial Value

This ultimately relies on having a clear understanding of the client’s business model – many businesses  either sell multiple products, or have multiple propositions for various  customer subsets e.g. for a site selling blue widgets – the keyword ‘luxury blue widgets’ might bring in higher margin business whereas ‘cheap blue widgets’ will deliver volume.

Volume

Once you’ve got an idea of what keywords might be feasible to target, the next thing you’ll want to consider is how many people are searching on the different variations – obviously more searches mean the potential for traffic is higher. Different variations can have surprisingly different search volumes even when the meaning is the same. For example, if you compare “caravan insurance” to “insurance for caravan” – 2 phrases which broadly mean the same thing – the search volumes are radically different.

Trends

Don’t overlook trends either – Google Trends is the most obvious source for information here, it’s not necessarily about only targeting keywords which are increasing in popularity but targeting a keyword in the descendance might not be the best use of time and resource.

Competition

Perhaps one of the most important considerations  – we basically consider this from 2 points of view:

1. What can be achieved for the budget available
2. What niches are being under-served

The budget , if known, will determine the absolute ceiling, while the keywords with low competition (yet reasonable volume and relevance) may represent easy wins. Assessing keyword competition can be tricky rather than relying on a purely arithmetic approach here we tend to look at several factors:

1. Strength of top sites (mozrank & domain mozrank of top websites)
2. What type of pages are ranking (homepage, powerful subpages or weak subpages)
3. Competing pages (allintitle search for the phrase in question)
4. Strength of sites at bottom of page one

There are more things that can be done (especially if the decision might require a high investment with a long payback), such as looking at whether the websites ranking have optimised anchor text or not, but it’s not always feasible to do this for every keyword.

Putting it all together

Good keyword research isn’t easy, it requires detailed thought and attention to get right, and when you have hundreds of potential keywords and many factors to consider it’s advisable to get the data into a format where you can make sense of it. There are many approaches but a balanced scorecard is probably the most obvious. An example might be as follows:

Your weightings will obviously depend on your clients priorities, and the data here is purely fictional, but hopefully it should give you an idea; in this case ‘Luxury Blue Widgets’ and ‘Dark Blue Widgets’ both look attractive, but given the competition differences it may be a wise strategy to target both ‘Blue Widgets’ and ‘Luxury Blue Widgets’ on the same page.

Even after you’ve done all of this work, it’s often just the start – combining primary keywords for pages (and secondary keywords you are able to pickup) will often follow this stage, as well as working out how to pickup mid/long tail variations of the keyword.

The one thing for sure though, is that if you spend the time to get this right from the start, you will be far more likely to see your efforts pay off….

What is canonicalisation in SEO?

In SEO, canonicalisation refers to web content that has more than one possible URL.

Why is it important?

In SEO, having multiple URLs for the same web content can cause problems with the search engines. It is best used in SEO to tell the search engine spiders, such as the Googlebot, about your websites’ preferred URL format.

How do canonicalisation problems occur?

Canonicalisation can be overlooked during the development stage. Problems are caused when the search engine spiders see multiple URLs pointing to the same page, as they then need to determine which URL is the most relevant to index. 

What effect can this have with your websites’ SEO?

There are a few negative effects that this could have with your websites’ SEO.

1. You could experience ’splitting of your site’; whereby your website receives more than one search engine index, which means that the search engine is seeing and indexing two URL addresses for the same content.
2. You could potentially become flagged as a content copier for having duplicate content.
3. Your website backlinks and PageRank may be split between the two indexed URLs.

What is the best practice to adopt with SEO Canonicalisation?

You can use any of the following commands for the SEO canonicalisation of your website.

A) Head Tag solution

You can insert the following head tag command to canonicalise your web pages. Insert your preferred URL into the tag and then insert the tag underneath the metatags in your HTML code within the HEAD tag.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.domain.com”>

View the example below.

B) HTACCESS solution

I. Web Page Redirect

You can insert the following command into your HTACCESS file to redirect your web page URLs to your preferred URL.

Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/

Click here to read more on redirects

 

II. Domain Permanent Redirect

You can redirect multiple URLs to your preferred domain via a domain redirect. You can do this by the following.

Option +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine onewritecond % {http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com

 

Best Practise For Canonicalisation

1. Make sure that the internal links within your website point to exactly the same URL, rather than different URLs with the same content.
2. If your website runs session IDs, be sure to canonicalise the web pages to your preferred URL.
3. Make sure to use 301 redirects if you need to canonicalise a URL address or domain. Alternatively, use the canonicalisation head tag in web pages that may automatically generate session IDs on URL addresses.

 

Image credit: Bull3t