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by Sage Lewis

This is a question I get asked all the time. Get the final answer right here.

Inspired from this article at Search Engine Roundtable

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by Stoney deGeyter

Much like life, websites have to adapt over time. When they don’t, they risk becoming stagnant, outdated, stale, and boring. As times change, so should your content. Content that was once relevant becomes irrelevant or in need of an update, old products get dumped in favor of new products, and data becomes outdated and needs to be replaced.

There are any number of reasons why content needs to be changed, freshened up, or removed altogether. But rarely, if ever, do you want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Something can usually be salvaged. Previously valuable content can be made valuable again. Here are four ways you can keep good content alive, even when it’s old.

Keep content up to date

Keeping your content up-to-date may sound like a simple task; but, the larger the site, the more difficult it is. Sites with hundreds or thousands of pages often have a lot of little hidden gems that can easily become stale or irrelevant. Over time, you see products and services change. A simple reference to an old pricing structure or outdated way of doing things can really throw a wrench in the works for the reader. Conflicts and contradictions breed mistrust.

Failing to find and correct these nuggets will send your readers a message that perhaps you are stale and irrelevant as well. So, spending time on a regular basis, perhaps yearly, reviewing all your editorial content and brushing it up to keep it current is an important item to put on your task list.

Redirect deleted pages

Pages on websites often get moved or deleted over time. Perhaps you are restructuring your information architecture, removing services that you no longer offer, or deleting tutorials that have become obsolete. Just because this content is considered old, doesn’t mean that it can’t still work for you.

Simply adding “301 redirects” or a building a custom “404″ page can capture that traffic and send them to other areas of your site. This allows them to stick around long enough to see if you still have something that will meet their needs, even though you no longer have exactly what they want.

Adding redirects allows you to keep visitors on your site if they have arrived, say, from a bookmarked page or an old page in the search results. Instead of losing those visitors, this gives you the opportunity to keep them engaged with your site, with the possibility of attracting them to your other excellent content.

Repurpose old content

Blogs are a great place to re-purpose old content and provide an updated spin on it. If you’re running out of ideas for what to publish on your blog, you can go back several years in your archive and find old topics and discussions for which you can provide a new take.

Blog back history can give you a wealth of topics that you can pull from to create fresh, new content for your readers.

Another way to re-purpose old content is by removing excessive content from your site and moving it over to your blog. This can be necessary after years of site content build-up. This happens when you keep adding content to your site and it becomes so bloated that your readers end up spending too much time working through your site instead of being moved through the conversion process.

A couple months back, I worked on the Information Architecture for a client, and they had this very problem. We were able to take dozens of pages of content and move it off of their main site onto their blog. The content was good, but it was excessive. This hindered the conversion process, making the site both convoluted and confusing at the same time. By moving this stuff to the blog, the main site was better able to do the job of selling and the blog became the avenue of informing readers.

Link to historical pages

Content, especially blog content, often gets buried after months and years of time passing. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the content isn’t valuable or even needs to be re-written.

What you can do is write new content that links to this valuable content that was written long ago. You’re giving your readers something fresh, while linking to something historical, that you can use to make your point or provide more detailed information for the reader to peruse at their leisure.

Take advantage of any area of content that allows you to link to another page that provides more information. The web isn’t a brochure, it’s more like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. That historical content can be a goldmine of information, provided you’re giving your new readers a way to access it.

Good content never has to die. If you’re treating it right, it never will. New people are coming to your site every day. These people have not had the benefit of reading all your past or historical stuff. No need to let it go to waste. Instead, keep it alive… and keep it working for you.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Mike Moran

Some of you might know that I like to take Augusts off. While not completely off the grid (I still clean out my e-mail—although I don’t reply much—and I still moderate comments on my blog), I don’t write any blog posts (on my blog or here at Search Engine Guide), and I stay off Twitter. I also don’t read any blog posts or check out what others are saying on Twitter—it’s a social media fast. Each year, it’s interesting to find myself picking up a newspaper again. This year, I did something a bit different, because I actually returned to work on August 25th because of a client need, but I continued to stay away from social media for the last week, just to see what it was like. It’s one thing for me to avoid social media while I am on vacation, but what would it feel like during my work day?

Image via Wikipedia

Well, the verdict is in. It felt very strange. As easy as it is for me to drop out of social media while on vacation and just hang with my wife and play with the kids, once I am back at work, it felt very odd to not know what is going on.

I mean, I had been away for three weeks on vacation, so I really had no idea what was happening, but to be working in that kind of darkness was a different experience. The first thing I had to do was to fly to a distant city and make a speech on Internet marketing to hundreds of people. In doing so, I was gripped by this semi-insane fear that I couldn’t make the speech without knowing what is going on. I mean, what if someone asked a question about something that just happened and I didn’t know the answer?

Of course, the speech went just fine. Internet marketing apparently hasn’t changed all that much in the last month (even though apparently the Web died while I was away).

But I also noticed how much I wanted to say, with no one to tell. I usually tweet about where I am traveling, so I had to resist the impulse to tell people about my trip last week. People would send me links to things to read—not only didn’t I read them, but I didn’t tell anyone about them. I’ll probably catch up over the next week and tweet some of them.

But it was the blog ideas that just kept coming. And I wasn’t writing any of them.

Usually, I post to my blog once each day (usually I am the writer of the article, but I also edit contributions from some other excellent contributors), so every day it is a struggle to get that done. I take for granted that nice people out there are actually interested in hearing what I have to say. It was strange to have a few work days where I wasn’t publishing anything. (Frank Reed published several posts on my blog while I was away, but I didn’t have any work to do while on vacation.)

I now have dozens of ideas for blog posts. most accumulated during the last week at work, with only a couple from my vacation. So, while my vacation definitely recharged my batteries, my social media fast during my first week back from work filled my creative coffers. Perhaps many of you post just once a week, or even less frequently, so this is not an issue for you. And while I’ve never felt like I am running dry for ideas, going a few days without having to write anything has been an eye-opener.

So, I still haven’t completely caught up on what’s been going on, but I will soon. My social media fast has proven to me both how important social media is and how important it is to take a break now and then. Some have told me that they only look at social media during defined times of the day (I know some who do this with e-mail, too). I never understood that before, but maybe I am starting to.

Anyway, I am glad to be back, and I’m honored that a few of you actually want to listen to what I have to say. Thank you.

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by Eric Brown

Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of The Social Media Bubble. I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future be any means, but it sure seems more probable than not. While having little experience predicting the future, we have had an up close and personal relationship with the real estate bubble. Developing real estate used to be a pretty fun endeavor, however the past couple of years of operating our boutique apartment rental business in SE Michigan has had more challenges than we ever imagined. But as with all struggles, there has been a bright side, a bubble burst quickly trims out the weeds and the low hanging fruit. 

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by Mike Fleming

If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn’t you?), you’re always testing. 
Always.  It’s the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain
insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels. 
One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.

Yes, you could test them, but only by comparing metrics from
different time periods (except for ads).  For example, you’d have to run
ads at a certain bid price for a while, change it, and run them at the
new bid price for a while.  Then, you’d have to compare the results from
different time periods.  The problem?
When you would compare the results, you would be likely to assume the
differences in those key metrics to be the result of the changes.  But
fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and uncontrollable
circumstances (special events, etc.) can complicate things.

Google’s example of this involves advertising for soccer balls. 
“Let’s say you’re advertising soccer balls, and you decide to increase
your bids to get more traffic. Two days later, the World Cup starts, and
your clicks and impressions increase substantially. If you had simply
raised the bids in your campaign without running an experiment, you
wouldn’t know how much of the increase in traffic is due to the World
Cup, and how much is a result of you increasing bids.”

Let’s say you raised your bids at the beginning of June and noticed this trend when doing analysis in July….

Alright,
looks great.  Let’s go ahead and keep that new bid.  What?  What’s
that?  That might not be the best thing.  Well now, why would that be?

Ouch.  That’s web search volume trends for that keyword phrase.  Not so fast my friend.

Enter the newest “seedless watermelon” in the AdWords system called AdWords Campaign Experiments
(ACE).  With ACE, you can run simultaneous split tests with most of the
key variables in your campaigns by splitting traffic between you
“control” group (original) and your experiment group…AND…you can
analyze the results of your tests before you apply them to all auctions. 
This lowers the risk of diving into new, unproven strategies by
enabling you to control the amount of traffic you send to your
experimental groups; which ultimately helps you make better decisions in
your optimization efforts.  You can split your traffic in 10% intervals
from 90/10 all the way to 10/90.

The cool thing about this is that if you want to run a low-risk
experiment  and send 80% of your traffic to your control group and 20%
to your experiment group, you can analyze the results and find if the
changes performed better.  If they did, then you can run what is called a
holdback experiment
before you fully applied the changes to your campaigns.  A holdback
experiment involves running the exact same experiment again, but this
time with the control at 20% and the experiment at 80%.  This way, you
confirm that the positive effects of your experiment are truly there as
the experiment is exposed to a larger amount of traffic.

When you go to analyze an experiment, you want make sure that the
statistical differences in your numbers is meaningful rather than the
result of random chance.  Statistical significance is calculated based
both on the number of auctions your campaign participated in, and on the
size of the differences in metrics. Google AdWords provides icons
in your campaign when the math indicates that you can be 95%, 99%, or
99.9% confident that differences are meaningful, and not just due to
chance.

The icons are arrows that show you whether a particular element
you’re experimenting with has achieved statistically significant
results, and how confident you can be that those results will carry over
to your campaign if you apply the experiment (one arrow meaning there
is a 5% probability your results occurred due to chance, two arrows
means there is a 1% chance, and three arrows means there is just a 0.1%
chance these results are due to chance).

The introduction of this new feature saves the account manager time
and makes testing in your AdWords account much more accurate, efficient
and profitable.

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by Stoney deGeyter

When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it’s your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town. If there is anything that all the years of marketing research has proven it’s that people need to be told what to do if you expect them to do anything at all.

Think about it. If you’re not telling your visitors what to do next, how can you expect them to do it? Sure, they can guess, make assumptions or “figure it out on their own”. But, for anybody that’s doing anything new, directions are a God send.

I recently spent 2 hours putting together a desk that should have taken me 20 minutes. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m generally more destructive than constructive when it comes to these kinds of things, but with a little help (a.k.a. reading directions), I can usually get the job done. But, on this particular desk, the directions actually didn’t help. Not even a little.

The desk had two pieces: the main desk and a small side table. Both look nearly identical, only the size is different. The directions started you out building the small table…but they didn’t make that clear. I spent at least 30 minutes putting together the larger desk with the small table instructions, wondering why things just weren’t making much sense.

Once I figured that out and moved on to building the desk with proper directions, I found several pieces that all looked similar, but with subtle differences. The directions didn’t make those distinctions, neither verbally nor visually. Luckily, I was able to stay calm and keep the cursing to a low mumble that my kids couldn’t hear!

Your content should work like directions. It needs to inform and make clear what the next step is. Giving your visitors clear directions doesn’t have to be difficult. You don’t have to re-write all of your content, adding in long prose of “here’s what we want you to do next”. All you have to do is some simple re-working of key areas.

Action Words: We often tend to write passively. We talk in terms of how things are, not in terms of what we are doing, what we’ve done, or what we want to do. This makes our content stagnant.

Instead, use words that convey action. Tell visitors how you achieved your knowledge or skills. Tell them how they will benefit from your product or services. Give them examples of the results they will see. And, most importantly, give them some calls to action.

Calls to Action: Using action words is never more important than ensuring your work calls action into your content. These are the directives that you provide to your visitors that lead them down the path to the conversion.

If you are not providing these directives, or are providing the wrong directives, you won’t be getting the response you want from your visitors. Keep in mind that there are multiple paths to the goal. Customers need to see your products before they can buy them. They also need to know product details. Trying to move your customers to the conversion too quickly simply won’t work.

Use your calls to action to lead visitors down the path of information they need to take the desired action. Some may need to see product reviews, others need to read more about your company, and still others might want to read more about what you offer. Provide calls to action to whatever your visitors might need… because they may not even know they need it.

Textual Links: Adding calls to action directly into your text is simply the best way to get visitors to heed them. Your navigation is important, but sites often put too much faith in the navigation getting the visitors to the information they want. If the visitors know where they want to go, and if they are willing to take the time to click through the navigation, then that approach would work. But, why force the visitor to disengage from your content to hunt through the navigation for what they want? Not a good idea.

That’s the biggest problem with not using textual links. You’re forcing your visitors to figure things out instead of providing them the directions they need right there where they are. If they are reading about your team’s experience, then link to your “About Us” page. If you mention a related product, link to it. If you discuss a significant achievement, place a link to the page that provides more complete information about it.

Visitors are curious. Providing links helps them satisfy their curiosity, which in, turns gives them more satisfaction that you have “what it takes” to provide what they need.

A website that’s not getting any action is a dead site. Conversion rates will be low, and bounce rates will be high. Using action words, calls to action, and textual links gets your visitors to “put out”. But, unless your content is willing to provide the goods, you may not even get to second base.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Sage Lewis

Best Buy wants you to tell them the moment you walk into the store.

From Marketing Pilgrim: “The “shopkick” system is designed to detect and reward shoppers just for walking into a Best Buy store. In order to accomplish this feat, consumers must download an application to their smart phone. ”

What do you think of this? I’m all about it!

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by Stoney deGeyter

In my last post, I talked about training your text to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. The first step is to make sure the content doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. In this post, I’ll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.

Teaching tricks the audience likes

There are two kinds of tricks you can train your text to do: the kind of tricks you like or the kind of tricks your audience likes. Obviously, training your text to do the tricks you like will make you happy… but it won’t make your audience happy. You think the tricks are cool, but nobody else does. And… that’s just not cool.

Most people who visit websites scan them first, then skim the text. But, they only skim read if they get intrigued by their initial scan, and they read it only if they find something compelling and interesting that warrants their full attention. There are four easy ways to train your text to be scan-able:

Paragraph headings: Your page should have a proper heading and your content should be broken up with paragraph headings throughout, depending on length. Don’t get carried away by placing a heading before each paragraph. That overkill. But the longer your text is, the more it needs to be broken up into easily digest chunks that allow your readers to consume it.

Internal linking: One of the biggest missed opportunities on business websites is linking their content to other relevant areas of the site. That’s what the navigation is for, right? Yes and no.

Your navigation needs to do a proper job of allowing people to find what they are looking for, but relying on it too heavily forces the visitor to know what they are interested in finding. But, adding links into your content streamlines both of those issues and also helps the visitor get to where they want to go much quicker. This is more intuitive and requires little thought or effort on their part.

Bolded Text: Bolding key words, phrases, and sentences can also allow your visitors to find key points as they quickly scan your content. Note that I said “key words”, not “keywords”. There is nothing wrong with using keywords in your bolded text, but that should not be the reason for using bold text. You bold text because it’s important, not because you want to get a keyword in bold font.

Bullet Points: Bullet points are another way to get your visitors to read key information without having to read every word of content. Most readers will read bulleted lists while ignoring everything else on the page.

Bullets provide a very easy way to read quick bits of information that otherwise might get lost in a single paragraph. Bullet points also break up your content, which also makes the text more scan-able and skim-able. You can also use bullet points to link to other areas of your site that provide additional information without mucking up the current page content.

Or, to put it another way, bullet points:

• Provide quick bits of information
• Break up content to be more scannable and skimmable
• Provide linking opportunities to related content

People love tricks. But, they don’t like to be tricked. These tricks that you can use to train your content are not and should not be used as a means to deceive your audience. They are tricks that help you communicate with your audience in a way that is more to their liking. Giving people what they want isn’t deceptive, unless you are pulling the rug out from under them later.

You can train your content to do things that other sites are not doing. By teaching it to keep your audience engaged with the site, and training it how to direct your readers to other areas of the site they are interested in, you’re just helping people find what they need. If they don’t find it with you, they will with someone else… likely because their content has learned these tricks.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Stone Reuning

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One of the best ways to add content to your website and boost your search engine rankings is through an optimized press release. You can write about any newsworthy item going on at your company: a new product, an industry award, new hires are just a few examples.

Announcing these events has several benefits beyond search engine rankings too. Journalists and bloggers for instance will come across it and perhaps do a story about your firm. They make your company look active and lively, drawing more interest from prospective customers.

Regularly scheduled press releases do this and more provided they’re properly formatted. Simply writing some text and putting it online will not do a whole lot for you. Many distribution outlets like PRWeb and PR.com will reject your press release for syndication if it’s not properly formatted.

So what’s the proper way to format a press release?

Continue reading for ways you should format a press release for online distribution. Beyond the tips listed below, there are some additional ways you can format your press releases to further its impact in the search engines so check back next time for press release formatting tips from a social media and SEO perspective.

•    Be sure your press release is at least 400 words (including boilerplate/company description at the end) and no more than 600 words.
•    Write the press release in the 3rd person. Meaning, use words like he, she, they and them when writing about your company.
•    Mention your company by name in the title and include your target keyword too. Include a sub-heading below your title with additional details to complement your title.
•    In your opening paragraph, include your city and date first. Example:  Atlanta, Ga. – August 23, 2010. Be sure your first paragraph covers the “5-W’s and H” of your story – or who, what, when, where, why and how.
•    Next, the main body of your press release should contain further information on points in your introduction along with quotes from an important person at your company.  
•    Close out the press release by offering the reader a link to click and/or a place to contact your company for further information.
•    Include a boilerplate after the conclusion describing your company and website.
•    After the boilerplate, include your name, phone, email, title. This gives your press release further credibility. Once you have this, include a “###” or “END” to signify the conclusion of the press release.

Double checking spelling, grammar or formatting is critical to having a proper press release. Check out the AP Stylebook or some other resource for ways to format certain words or how you should abbreviate a state and more.

And here’s one of the biggies and where many website owners fall down

Don’t make your press release read like an advertisement. They’re meant to announce events of a newsworthy fashion. If your press release has a bunch of “salesy” type language, it will be immediately dismissed by any journalist or blogger that comes across it. You can talk up benefits of your new product or whatever news you’re announcing in your quotations a little bit but that’s about it.

Not to mention, most distribution outlets will reject it as well.

Take a few moments and carefully review each press release before posting it on your site and distributing it to newswires and social networks. Doing so will save you lots of time and maximize the value of doing a press release in the first place.

One way to write a well formatted press release is to carefully examine other press releases like this one from a rental cabin firm in the north Georgia Mountains.

In the end, press releases are about informing journalists, bloggers and potential customers of events at your company. They’re not meant to sell per se but draw the reader’s interest in enough for them to want to learn more.  

Check back again soon for more on properly formatting press releases – specifically for the search engines and how you can squeeze even more benefits out of announcing your company’s news online.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Sage Lewis

If you aren’t familiar with Google Places please watch this video. It’s growing and could be significantly affecting your business without your knowing.

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