Category: SEO

Content requirements have gone up. If we really wanted to do something with a site to get traffic we need content similar to thewirecutter. Long, in depth content targeted to converting keywords.

Yes, there is a 7,500 word guide for.. paper shredders.

2012 thewirecutter – “revenue is low, about $50,000 a month, but it’s doubling every quarter”.

So how to go about this? On the cheap, at least to start..

Target Low Competition Products

Identify a product or preferably group of products that sell and does not have extensive reviews written . If you look at thewirecutter their roundups work well, because you get coverage for search on more than just the single product. The “not as good” products receive exposure. This product(s) needs to have enough features to write about extensively. I would find it hard to write about a moulded plastic garden chair but something like a tape gun (as an example) I could write about even though I know very little about them. There is the grip, the wheel the tape goes on, the rolling wheel where the tape lives, the plastic tab at the top, the spring loaded thing that holds the tape against the These products are found using amazon best sellers or similar. If we had an active site you could use trending new products to find new products without lengthy reviews written.

So continuing the tape gun example. Search for tape gun on amazon, pick a relevant product, click through to the product page then click through to the category “Packaging Tape Dispensers”.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Office-Products-Packaging-Tape-Dispensers/zgbs/office-products/1068984/ref=zg_mw_tab_t_bs

Here we have the best selling tape dispensers. Sweet. Pick 5-10. The top few best sellers are obvious picks here and then we can go for other models that are high up but look/operate slightly differently for variation.

Tape guns are not the best example because we should aim for something a little more expensive…

Mega Article Structure and Content

Introduction – Introduction to tape guns. Who uses tape guns. Why use. What a good tape gun is. Etc. This is split here and the “additional generic product details” section below.
[Product block linking to best + runner up products]
Additional generic product details
Product 1
Product 2
Product 3
Product 4
Product 5
Overall comparisons if applicable
Pros and Cons of each product.
Multiple buying locations where possible + opinion about the best place to buy (the one we want them to buy from obviously)
Closing

The articles are incredibly detailed buying guides. The will list pros and cons, reference other places on the web where needed and in general try to persuade the visitor to buy the product. and use keywords to target customers who are more likely to convert is key here.

http://backlinko.com/commercial-intent

How to get articles written?

The writers on Fiverr range from terrible to ok. I would not have confidence approaching any of them to write a 5000 word article/review* – because the good ones will be on other freelancing sites already. However because there are so many to choose from we could potentially build a team that writes sections of articles independently we then edit into the mega article.

Introduction – Additional generic details : This is basically a description of what the product is, what its purpose is, qualities that are good (and on the flip side qualities you don’t want). This can be quite long, depending on the product type. An outline would need to be written for the writers – this could be split between multiple 500 word jobs across multiple writers. This is intended to pad out the reviews, adding more potential keywords.

Product reviews – This is the meat of the article. The content needs to be written in such a way that it reads like we have actually used the products. The writers will need to use the product reviews on amazon to glean the necessary information. Why it is good, standout features, potential failings, pros and cons etc. An outline is required for this.

Keywords to provide. I have a tool that pulls keyword phrases from amazon reviews, this can assist in quickly narrowing down good/bad product qualities. If “Breaks tape” appears many times this is something to look into. On top of this a tool to pull all the key phrases off the wirecutter will help narrowing down what generic “best of” “your best” etc phrases to use. Finally some quick basic keyword research to round out what we give them.

Initially we should order 10 articles and then sort the terrible writers (and not use them again) and note down the decent ones. If the terrible articles can be edited into something worthwhile we can do so and add to the initial post. We repeat this process till we have 10-15 writers who we know write acceptably, follow our guidelines and use keywords in a decent manner.

In this way we outsource a huge article into many small, manageable pieces of research among a group of writers that do not have the ability to create the whole thing themselves. It will also organically add to the word and language variation as, in my experience, these guys use the same phrases repeatedly – cutting down on manual editing later.

*I would hesitate to put this on the previous copy-writer we had as well even though she was quite good. It is quite a daunting task which is why the idea outlined above of cutting it up into smaller chunks might work well. There is a decent amount of research involved in each section.

More notes

Custom images would assist with lending credibility to the article. Lifestyle images would be preferred over straight up product on white background type deals. They can be used to highlight good/bad points and show differences between each product. If we select a product that is not prohibitively expensive it can be on sold on ebay.

Social and links

Use a social network autoposter to send content to facebook/twitter/pintrest/etc.
Use Fiverr facebook/twitter mentions initially. I used this on the aquabuy hatcher kickstarter campaign with reasonable results. One time payment for one time mention to tens of thousands of fb/twitter users. Key here is to use unique tracking URLs in order to ascertain which are scams and which work. The fact that aquabuy worked quite well for such a niche product leads me to think that a more mainstream product could generate significant traffic. Unfortunately it does not work well for our normal australian sites.
Buy some fb/twitter followers to raise overall status.

Finally

That is basically the plan. It is an attempt to create long, in depth review content on a budget. The type of content that is required now but is expensive (or requires very specific knowledge by one person) to create.

Overall the goal is to index content that is content and not junk pages. Category pages could be removed from the below by adding content to each category page – otherwise

1) Permalinks. Change this away from default before starting page/post creation. I like “post name” but day and name / month and name are also ok. You could go for something custom like category+postname but imo this gets a little long, depending on category names used. The default uses post number id or something retarded so you end up with www.sitename.com/12312/ for a post “how to improve at shock rifle” rather than www.sitename.com/how-to-improve-at-shock-rifle”. This can potentially be changed when making posts/afterwards but inexperienced users will probably not notice it and I have had issues changing the slug after posting. Easier to force a meaningful default and leave it at that.

2) Archives use post title+excerpt only or simply list post title. This is to avoid the post showing up in multiple places in its entirety. eg a post about “shock rifle improvement” might be put in the tutorials category and then also tagged for “weapons” “shock rifle” and “cool stuff”. If archives/categories/everything uses full posts the post will be duplicated for each category as well as the date archive it was posted for. 5-6 times instead of having one strong page with the content.

The question of how? I am not sure. I do not recall what I used in the past for this. It might be a default wp option. Maybe not.

3) Yoast seo. Plugin. Primarily to stop unnecessary indexing of cruft. The main changes here are in “Titles & Metas” settings. Post types, Taxonomies, Archives and any other things that end up being created by themes/plugins. An example would be portfolio and pricing tables.

The goal is to not index duplicate content or content that is useless. I would start selecting “noindex, follow” as below. This plugin has a lot of useless functions.

Post types – Posts, Pages, Media (noindex, follow)

Taxonomies – Categories (noindex, follow), Tags (noindex, follow), Format (noindex, follow)

Archives – Author Archives (noindex, follow), Date Archives (noindex, follow)

Other – If you want to prevent /page/2/ and further (noindex, follow)

This allows indexing of all posts and pages but nothing else. This is partially achieved by point 2, but we want to make sure that the pages with excerpts are not also indexed and traffic sent there over the “real” content.

The follow allows search engines to crawl these pages and links on them to find new content but it does not allow engines that follow the directives to index and use these pages in results. These pages will always be weaker than the post/pages they are linking to.

4) Disable sitemaps using yoast for the above sections that were noindex’d. Option for this in yoast. The remaining sitemaps can be submitted to webmaster tools for potentially better indexing.

5) Make sure that posts/pages have the post/page title as h1 and the site name is not taking up the h1 spot. This is very common in themes and generally requires some butchery to fix.

6) Give the front page content beyond a post feed. If the site is to be the hub for au/nz ut then 500-1000 words should be spent explaining this. Use lots of terms for the same thing. eg australia, au, aus. unreal tournament 4, ut4 and include the older title names/abbreviations as well. This might be an ok place for a “history” to go for long tail stuffing.

Why is it called a fablet? Phone? Tablet? What!

Um, pretty obvious right? The smaller size is perfect for one handed use. Fapping – thus fablet.

It is called a fablet because it is a tablet for fapping, a fablet!

I read the whirlpool photography section semi-regularly, less these days than in the past but I still browse the new photo thread to see what interesting shots the posters turn out.

This guy has done a "100 strangers" set that is quite inspirational. I believe he originally started in order to get over a phobia of talking to and photographing randoms on the street. He has some amazing characters and his portraits are really sharp. Check them out. Beyond that Neil writes a nice story with each photo, with a little bit of information about each person, how he approached them, shooting specifics, etc.

He then posts this story along with the photo on flickr. I followed the first 50 or so shots and then drifted away and have only checked out a few recently. However I visited his site this morning for the first time. Ignoring the possible problems causes by the theme I was immediately struck by the fact that none of the story he posts on flickr is listed on his site. None at all.

But before we go into that lets look at a phenomenon somewhat unique to internet photography circles. Watermarking. People love watermarking their work. Their name, their photographic business name, their website, their twitter account.. and so on. Some are intrusive and some are subtle. Some are useless (a logo with no text) and some would have the possibility to get traffic. Watermarks are applied to images to stop people “stealing their work”. Often watermarks are applied to bad photos that noone is going to steal anyway. A few posters at whirlpool have a good attitude – unless you were planning to make money off the image why not offer an unwatermarked image, better for 99% of viewers to enjoy.

Below is an example of terrible watermarking. Please don’t do it 🙁

At any rate, photogaphers want to protect their goods, even photographers that do not want to sell their goods. Many photographic portfolio sites do not have much text, many do not even have alt text. This means that, from a search point of view, the sites themselves are very content-light. However Neil writes a nice story for Flickr that would add content to his site. When he does this he is giving flickr content. This makes no sense, especially when you take into account the lengths photogs go to when watermarking.

I say, instead of posting nice stuff on Flickr, 500px, facebook, etc, post it on your site with your photographs! Besides adding content you add character and make your site more human. It makes very little sense that you would watermark your images then give away free content!

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Somewhat on the same topic, try practicing some basic SEO when posting on flick. Name the photo to describe it, refrain from giving it an artsy name that means nothing.

Here are some high value domains linked with really weird anchor text. Will they pass value? Lets find out 😀 Content below from theverge comments

• We are ruled by our awesome goat overlords
• Bow down to some of the best tech stuff on the planet
• The superior online encyclopedia for free
• Really average daily news in australia
• smashing magazine can be cool at times

I don’t mean to be a detractor or anything like that, but has “Android activations” ever been defined? It would seem to me that that would count anytime anyone resets their phone or buys one second-hand would count as a new activation. I highly doubt that would be a significant number that Google would report that instead of actual device sales to make it look better than it actually is, which begs the question, why not report actual devices?

Because there are at least a dozen Android manufacturers so Google can’t track their sales…
Are you really asking this question? Apple is the sole manufacturer of iOS devices, so they know how many they sell. Google doesn’t commercialize all the Android devices just their branded ones, so they can’t track the sales, what they track is the software getting online once it’s activated and since it’s linked to specific components within that device even if you flash ROM the phone, it’d still count as one activation. Now please stop being intentionally obtuse and implying Google is padding their numbers while Saint Apple is always legit.

But you have to remember all of the non-cellular devices that run on Android as well, including mini-pc, all of the various WiFi only pure Android tablets and media devices, Amazon Kindles, Google TVs, actual TVs, set-top boxes and all of those other Android devices that are not even counted here. According to Google, those devices don’t figure into the count at all. Given that Android products increased their world-wide market share to 42.7 percent from 39.8 of tablets now, that is a significant number unaccounted for. In the US, that percentage may be even higher.

This is from the SEO Theory newsletter by Michael Martinez.

So far as I know no one has written about this concept using the expression “direction of exit”. It’s really something I should (and probably will) write about on the SEO Theory blog but I share it here with all of you first.

SPECIAL NOTICE: You have my permission to share this article (not the whole newsletter) on your blogs or in SEO presentations/webinars. All I ask is that you give me proper attribution if you heard it here first. If you summarize the information I’ll still appreciate a mention.

There are four ways a visitor can leave a Web page:

1. They click deeper into your site
2. They click away from your site (to another site)
3. They close the browser window
4. They click on the BACK button

These are the four “Directions of Exit”. Although intuitively most people have acknowledged these four directions of exit in various ways through the years, I have never seen anyone discuss how they impact the interpretation of “Bounce Rate” data in analytics.

Bounce Rates are complex things. If you really want to analyze bounce rates properly you have to add to the documented complexity and try to determine the directions of exit from a given page because all four directions can be interpreted as bounces.

For example, if a user clicks through to a deeper page on your site that does not contain your analytics code (such as an order form or — if they land directly on the order form and use it — a “thank you” page) that user’s visit appears to last 0 seconds and consists of 1 page view. Most analytics software (maybe all) would classify this as a “bounce”. Some analytics software might try to look at what the user clicked on (the Javascript would have to be configured to record clicks).

Also, if a user clicks away from your site (or just enters a new URL in the browser address bar) the analytics software is again left with only a 1-page visit of indeterminate length.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to detect directions of exit. You can ensure that your analytics code is on every page of your site, including order forms and thank you pages (this should be done for conversion analysis and goal tracking anyway). You can also try to record clicks but that might slow down performance. I’m not sure how Google Analytics does that. A sophisticated log file analyzer should be able to track a user’s IP address by click path (HTTP-ANALYZE and WEBALIZER cannot do this).

I do not share many SEOs’ concerns about high bounce rates. I explain many reasons why in my SEO Theory article but the four directions of exit are also an important reason in their own regard.

– Michael Martinez

I am posting this because I cannot find it indexed anywhere yet – lets see if anyone else ends up listing it too!