Figure 10-1: Look for these sorts of icons and links to indicate that an RSS feed is available.
Chapter 10
Bulking Up Your Site — Competing with Content
In This Chapter
Creating content yourself
Understanding copyright
Finding free material
Paying for content
Content is an extremely important factor in getting a high ranking in the search engines. Content is a geeky Web term that means, in the broadest sense, “stuff on your Web site.” A content-rich Web site is one that contains lots and lots of information for people to see, read, and use.
For search engines, content has a more narrow definition: words, and lots of ’em. So if you’re interested in search engine optimization, you should concentrate on the text part of your Web site’s content (the right text, of course, using the keywords you find out about in Chapter 6). You don’t need to worry about pictures, video, or sound — at least as far as the search engines are concerned — because those forms of content generally don’t help you get higher rankings. (Which is not to say that these things don’t have a place in a search-engine strategy — see Chapter 19 for information on using video, for instance — but it does mean that when you’re talking about getting Web pages ranked, it’s the text that counts.) You don’t need Flash animations, either, because although some search engines index them, they don’t index well; how often do you find a Flash page ranking highly in the search results? As explained in Chapter 8, if you do use Flash extensively, you should also use alternate text for the search engines to read.
What you should be concerned about is text — words that the search engines can read. Now, it’s not always necessary to bulk up your site by adding textual content — in some cases, it’s possible to get high search engine rankings with a small number of keyword-laden pages. If that’s your situation, congratulations. Sit back and enjoy the fruits of your rather minimal labors and skip this chapter. But if you don’t find yourself in that happy situation, you need this chapter.
You may find that your competitors have Web sites stacked full of content. They have scores of pages, perhaps even hundreds of pages — or hundreds of thousands — full of text that is nicely laden with all the juicy keywords you’re interested in. That’s tough to compete with.
This is a critical issue, something that is often a real challenge for site owners. This chapter describes a slew of shortcuts to free and low-cost content, such as government materials, marketing and technical documents from manufacturers, and even something called copyleft.
Creating Content Three Ways
You can compete in the search engines in several different ways: Create a few well-optimized pages, get lots of links into your site, target keywords that competitors have missed, and put masses of content on your site. (Chapter 4 has more on these “basic” strategies.) In some cases, when going up against a well-entrenched competitor, you may have no choice but to fight on several fronts. You may find that you must do something to stack your site with content.
I’ve got some bad news and some good news about creating content:
The bad news: The obvious way to create content — writing it yourself or getting someone else to write it for you — is a huge problem for many people. Most people find writing difficult, and even if they find it easy, the results are often less than appealing. Perhaps you know someone who can write well, and you can convince this person to write a few paragraphs for you. But are your powers of persuasion sufficient to get you 10, 20, or 50 pages? What about 500 or 5,000? You can always pay someone for content, but the problem with paying is that it costs money.
The good news: You can use some shortcuts to create content. Tricks of the trade can help you quickly bulk up your Web site (even if your writing skills match those of a dyslexic gerbil and your funds make the Queen of England’s bikini budget look large in comparison). Note, though, that these tricks involve using someone else’s content.
Write your own content
Convince (force, bribe) someone else to create your content
Find existing content from somewhere else
Writing Your Own Stuff
The obvious way to create content, for many small-site owners anyway, is to start writing articles. That’s not a terrible idea in many cases. Thousands of sites rank well using content from the sites’ owners.
If you use the write-it-yourself approach, keep the following points in mind:
Writing content is time consuming, even for good writers. You may want to evaluate whether you can devote the time to writing and maintaining your own content and then allocate time in your schedule to do so.
Many people are not good writers. Not only is the writing process time consuming, but the results are also often sad.
If you do write your own stuff, pleeze spill chuck it. Then have it edited by someone who has more than a third-grade education and then spill chuck it again.
Do not rely on a word processor’s grammar checker. This tool is worse than useless for most writers. Grammar checkers are of benefit only to those what already has a good grasp of grammar.
What will you write about? The obvious topic, of course, is your product or service (assuming that your site is selling something). The more you can say about each item you sell, the better. That should keep you busy for a while, but eventually, most businesses find that they have written all they can about their products, and they still don’t have a large site, so the next few sections present a few other ideas.
Summarizing online articles
Here’s a quick way to get keywords onto your page:
1. Use the search engines to track down articles related to your subject area.
2. Create a library area on your Web site in which you link to these articles.
3. For each link, write a short, keyword-laden summary of what the article is all about.
The advantage to this kind of writing is that it’s fairly quick and easy.
You may want to include the first few sentences of the article. This strategy comes under the gray area of copyright fair use. What really counts is what the article’s owner thinks. In most cases, if you contact the article’s owner (and you don’t have to contact that person), the owner is happy to have you summarize the article, excerpt a small portion of it, and link to her site. Most people recognize that this process is good for them! However, occasionally you find someone who just doesn’t get it and creates a fuss. Just remove the link and move on.
By the way, a number of highly popular and successful blogs (in particular, celebrity and news blogs) are based on this very concept — that is, summarizing other people’s work.
Reviewing Web sites and products
Similar to how you summarize, you can link to useful Web sites and write short (yes, keyword-laden) reviews of each one.
You can also write short (um, keyword-laden) reviews of products related to the subject matter covered by your site. An additional benefit of such a program is that eventually people may start sending you free stuff to review. There are many successful sites — earning money mainly from advertising — based solely on this concept, such as PopGadget.net and Engadget.com.
Convincing Someone Else to Write Content
You may find that having articles written (by others) specifically for your site is rather appealing, for two reasons. First, someone else does the work, not you. Second, if it doesn’t turn out well, someone else (not you) gets blamed.
One approach, assuming that you can’t force someone to write for you, is to pay someone. Luckily (for you), writers are cheap. For some reason, people often have a bizarre vision of a glamorous writing life that’s awaiting them. (It has been 19 years since I wrote my first bestseller, and I’m still waiting for the groupies to turn up.) So you may be able to find someone to write for you for $10 or $12 an hour, depending on where you live and how well you lie. Or, maybe you can find a high school kid who can string together a few coherent words and is willing to work for less.
If you work for a large corporation, you may be able to convince a variety of people to write for you — people who may assume that it’s actually part of their jobs (again, depending on how well you lie). Spread the work throughout various departments — marketing, technical support, sales, and so on — and it may turn into a decent amount of content. Still, you can use quicker and easier ways to get content, as described in the next section.
There are also companies that will manage content for you. They’ll work with you to develop a content plan and write the content. For instance:
Brafton: www.brafton.com
IdeaLaunch: www.idealaunch.com
Using OPC (Other People’s Content)
Writing or hiring is the slow way to create content. Using someone else’s content — that’s the quick way. See the following list of quick content sources for your site (I explain the details later in this chapter):
Product information: Contact the manufacturer or distributor of the products you sell on your site for marketing and sales materials, technical documentation, and so on.
Web sites and e-mail newsletters: Contact the owners of other sites and e-mail newsletters and ask whether you can use their work.
Government sources: Check U.S. government Web sites for free materials.
Content-syndication sites: A number of sites provide free content for the asking.
“Advertorial” services: Companies such as ARAcontent (www.ara
content.com
) provide free articles, often known by the term advertorials (because they are generally ads posing as editorial content — advertorial firms don’t actually use the term advertorial, of course). These companies provide both print and Web content.
Traditional syndication services: Numerous companies sell materials you can use on your site.
RSS syndication feeds: Check out this new, geeky technique for feeding syndicated content into Web sites.
Open content and copyleft: This unusual new movement is probably based on the old Internet maxim “Information wants to be free.”
Search pages: You can search at a site to generate a search results page with your favorite keywords.
Press releases: You may be able to find press releases related to your area of business. They’re copyright free, and you can use them as you want. (Of course, you should make sure that they’re not from competitors.)
A Q&A area on your site: This is a way to serve your site visitors and get keywords onto the site.
Forums or message boards: With forums and message boards on your site, your visitors create the keywords for you.
Blogs: Blogs are simply content management systems that make creating Web pages very quick and easy. Placing blogs on your site can provide a way to let people create content for you.
This list gives you a good idea of the sources of content, and the “Hunting for Other People’s Content” section, later in this chapter, explores how you find, evaluate, and procure content from these sources.
Understanding Copyright — It’s Not Yours!
I’m continually amazed at how few people understand copyright — even people who should know better.
Let me quickly summarize copyright law so that you have a better idea of what you can and can’t use on your site:
As soon as someone creates a work — writes an article, writes a song, composes a tune, or whatever — copyright is automatic. There’s no need to register copyright; the creator owns the copyright whether or not it has been registered. Most copyright works, in fact, aren’t registered, which is a good thing. If they were, the Library of Congress, which houses the Copyright Office and stores copyright registrations, would be the size of Alabama.
If you don’t see a copyright notice attached, it doesn’t mean that the work’s copyright isn’t owned by someone. Current copyright law doesn’t require such notices.
If someone owns the copyright, that person has the right to say what can be done with, um, copies. Therefore, you generally can’t take an article you find in a newspaper, magazine, or Web site and use it without permission. (There are exceptions, which you find out about in a moment.)
In the United States, certain kinds of copyright infringement are felonies. You may not only get sued but also prosecuted.
If you don’t know whether you have the right to use something, assume that you don’t.
You can’t just rewrite an article. Derivative works are also protected. If the result is clearly derived from the original, you could be in trouble.
Copyright has to be expressly assigned. If you hire me to write an article for your Web site and I don’t sign a contract saying that you own all rights or that the work was a work for hire, you only have the right to place it on your Web site. I still have the right to use the article elsewhere.
If it’s really old, you can use it. Copyright eventually expires. Anything published before 1923, for instance, is free for the taking. Some things after that date are expired, too — most materials published before 1950 are probably in the public domain — but it gets complicated. Search for copyright flowchart to find charts that may help you figure it out.
If the “guvmint” created it, you can use it. The U.S. government spends millions of dollars creating content. This content is almost never copyright-protected.
If it’s donated, you can use it. Authors often want you to use their materials. If they have given the public permission to use it, you can use it.
It’s only fair. Copyright law has a fair use exception that allows you to use small parts of a work, without permission, under particular conditions.
I strongly suggest that you read the free chapter at http://SearchEngine Bulletin.com
to get the details on copyright and make sure that you beg or borrow, but not steal, other people’s work.
Hunting for Other People’s Content
I list different types of other people’s content and warn you about copyright earlier in this chapter. Now it’s time to get out there and grab tons of content. You’re about to find some great places to look.
Keywords
When you’re out on your content hunt, remember that the purpose is to find keywords to add to your site. You can do that in several ways:
Find content with the keywords already in it. You want content that has at least some of your keywords, though you’ll often find that it’s not enough.
Add keywords to the content you get. In some cases, you shouldn’t edit the content because you’re expected to use the content without changes. In other cases, you may be allowed to modify the content. You can, for instance, modify open content (described later in this chapter), and some syndicators allow it. As syndicator Featurewell says, “Clients can make minor edits to stories and photos, provided they do not modify or change the meaning, tone or general context of the articles. . . .” Thus, you can replace a few words here and there with your keywords, as long as the article still makes sense and retains the same tone and context.
“Chunk up” the article. Break it into smaller, Web-friendly pieces and separate each piece with a heading (containing keywords, of course).
Newspapers often modify content they buy. A syndicated column you read in New York may be different from the same column run in a paper in Los Angeles, because newspapers cut and modify for space reasons or because they don’t like the way something is worded.
When adding content, you’re generally interested in adding pages with a variety of keywords sprinkled throughout. Remember, if you have a rodent-racing site, you want lots of pages with the words rodent, racing, race, event, mouse, rat, and so on.
Product information
Does your Web site sell products that you buy from a wholesaler or manufacturer? If so, contact your source and find out what materials are available: brochures, spec sheets, technical documentation, or user manuals. Take a look at anything the manufacturer has available. (I have one client who built an entire retail Web site around the idea of scanning and posting brochure content from wholesalers. It’s a multimillion dollar business now.)
In many cases, the material may be available in Adobe Acrobat PDF files. You can post these files on your site within seconds, and they will be indexed by the major search engines, including Google. However, such files generally don’t rank well in the search engines, so the ideal approach is to also convert the work to HTML files.
In fact, you may want to convert PDF files to Web pages for several reasons:
Web pages load more quickly than PDF files.
After a file is converted, you can link from the document into your site, whereas a PDF file itself becomes orphaned in the search result — a file with no indication of, or link to, the site it comes from.
You can insert keywords into the <TITLE>
, DESCRIPTION
, and KEYWORDS
tags, and stress keywords by putting them in bold, italic, and <H>
tags.
You can add links to other pages within your site.
You can do more keywording in Web pages, adding headers, side navigation, footer links, and so on.
Just how do you convert PDF files? If you own Adobe Acrobat, you can try to use that program, though you may not like the results. Search for pdf to html converter. None of these tools is perfect, so you may have some clean-up work to do on the PDF files.
Web sites and e-mail newsletters
The Web is so full of content that it’s about to sink. (Well, not your site, obviously, or you wouldn’t be reading this chapter.) Why not grab a few articles you like from other sites or from the e-mail newsletters you subscribe to? In fact, you may want to go hunting to find articles for this very purpose.
If you ask nicely, many people are happy to let you use their content. In fact, as I explain in Chapter 16, many people use content-syndication as a strategy for site promotion. They want people to use their stuff, as long as the sites that are using the material provide attribution (clearly state where the material is from and who wrote it) and then provide a link back to the site of origin.
Asking for permission is quite easy: Simply contact the owner of the article you saw on a site or in a newsletter and ask whether you can use the article. I did this recently and, within 10 minutes, received a positive response. Within 16 minutes, I had an article on my site that was loaded with keywords and that ranked very highly in the search engines in its own right. (I realized that the author’s page ranked #3 for one of my critical keywords. Thus, within minutes, I had a page that had the potential to rank very highly for some important keywords.)
When you talk to the article’s owner, make sure that you praise the article. (After all, you do like it, or you wouldn’t be asking. Too much good content is out there to be using garbage.) Also, clearly state that you will provide the owner’s bio at the bottom of the article and a link back to the owner’s site.
Try searching for a combination of one of your keyword phrases and the words article and newsletter — for instance, rodent racing article and rodent racing newsletter.
How do you know who owns the copyright to the article? Here’s a quick general rule: If the article has an attribution attached to it, contact that person. For instance, many e-mail newsletters are either written by a single person (in which case you contact him) or have a variety of articles, each one with an author bio and an e-mail address (in which case you contact the author, not the newsletter itself). In many cases, the author has given the newsletter one-time rights and still owns the copyright.
Government sources
I love government sources because they’re huge, with a surprising range of information. In general, documents created by the U.S. federal government are in the public domain. Under the terms of Title 17 United States Code section 105, works created by U.S. government departments do not have copyright protection.
The government may still hold copyrights on works that have been given to the government — bequests or assignments of some kind.
The law is a U.S. law, making U.S. government works copyright free. Most other governments hold copyrights on their works.
In some cases, works that nongovernmental agencies create on behalf of the government may not be protected by copyright — the law isn’t clear.
Works created by the National Technical Information Service (NTIS; www.ntis.gov
) may have a limited, five-year copyright protection.
The United States Postal Service is exempt from these regulations. The Postal Service can have copyright protection for its works. (It doesn’t want people printing their own stamps!)
In some cases, the government may publish works that were originally privately created works. Such documents are copyright protected.
Even with these exceptions, vast quantities of juicy government content are available. Now, don’t think, “Oh, there probably aren’t any government documents related to my area!” Maybe; maybe not. Where do you think all the tax billions go? The money can’t all go to defense and schools. It has to be spent somehow, so some of it goes to creating vast amounts of Web content!
You can place this content directly on your Web site. You’ll find the content in Web pages or Adobe Acrobat PDF files; as discussed earlier in this chapter, you’ll probably want to convert PDF files to HTML.
You will find not only useful documents for your purposes (text-heavy documents that search engines can read) but also other materials that may be useful for your site, such as videos.
FedWorld: www.fedworld.gov
Government Printing Office:
• Catalog of U.S. Government Publications: http://catalog.gpo.gov/F
• New Electronic Titles: www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/ locators/net
Library of Congress — Government Web Resources: http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/news/extgovd.html
CIA’s Electronic Reading Room: www.foia.cia.gov
Or, just try this search syntax: site:.gov your keywords. For instance, typing site:.gov rodent racing tells the search engine to search within .gov
domains only for rodent racing. (A lot of search results are returned for that search, though, surprisingly, very little is returned when you search for site:.gov “rodent racing”.)
Content-syndication sites
In the “Web sites and e-mail newsletters” section, earlier in this chapter, I discuss the idea of finding Web pages or e-mail newsletter articles you like and asking the owners for permission to use them. Well, here’s a shortcut: Go to content-syndication sites.
Content-syndication sites are places where authors post their information so that site owners or newsletter editors can pick it up and use it for free. Why? Because you agree to place, in return, a short blurb at the bottom of the article, including a link back to the author’s Web site.
Here are a few places to get you started in the wonderful world of content-syndication:
Article Dashboard: www.articledashboard.com
EZineArticles.com: www.ezinearticles.com
FreeSticky.com: www.freesticky.com
GoArticles.com: www.goarticles.com
IdeaMarketers.com: www.ideamarketers.com
The Open Directory Project’s List of Content Providers: www.dmoz.org/Business/Publishing_and_Printing/Publishing/Services/Free_Content
There are scores of these syndication libraries, so you’ll have plenty of choice. (You’ll find a lot of duplicates, though.)
Some Web sites have their own syndication areas — libraries from which you can pick articles you want to use. Also, see Chapter 16, where I talk about syndicating your own content and point you to other syndication sites.
Geeky stuff you must understand
I have to get into a little technogeeky information now, I’m afraid. I hate to do it, but if you don’t understand this topic, you may be wasting your time with content-syndication.
Many syndication systems use a simple piece of JavaScript to allow you to pull articles from their sites onto yours. For instance, take a look at this code I pulled from a site that syndicates news articles:
<script src=”http://farmcentre.com/synd/synd.jsp?id=cfbmc”> </script>
This piece of code tells the Web browser to grab the synd.jsp
file from the farmcentre.com
Web site. That file uses JavaScript to insert the article into the Web page. Articles or other forms of content can be automatically embedded in other ways, too, such as using <iframe>
tags.
The problem is that the search engines may not read the JavaScript that’s pulling the content into your site, as I explain in Chapter 8. They can read JavaScript, and sometimes do. Google, for instance, can read content placed into Facebook pages. Have you noticed that as you scroll down a Facebook page, the page grows? This is done using all sorts of scripts (look at the source code; you won’t see much content, but plenty of scripting). Google can read the content that is pulled by the scripts.
Does that mean it will do the same for your pages? Will Bing? I don’t know, but my advice is not to risk it. If you want to ensure that the search engines read your content, avoid placing it onto the page using JavaScript.
So the risk of using JavaScript to drop content into your site is that the coding gets ignored. The syndicated article you wanted to place into the Web page never gets placed into the page that the searchbot reads! All the time and energy you spent placing content is wasted.
As for <iframe>
tags, search engines follow the link that’s used to pull the page into the frame and view that content as though it were on the origin Web site, leading to the orphan problems discussed in Chapter 8.
This whole geeky topic strikes me as quite humorous, really. Thousands of people are syndicating content or using syndicated content, mostly for search engine reasons. People syndicating the content want to place their links on as many Web pages as possible, for two reasons:
Readers will see the links and click them.
The search engines will see the links and rank the referenced site higher.
Also, people using the syndicated content are doing so because they want content, stuffed with good keywords, for search engines to read.
In many cases, both the syndicators and the people using syndicated content are wasting their time because search engines aren’t placing the content, seeing the keywords, or reading the links!
To make sure the content you use works for you, follow the suggestions in this list:
Don’t use browser-side inclusion techniques. That includes JavaScript and iframes.
Use server-side inclusion techniques. That includes server includes, PHP, and ASP. If you’re not sure whether a technique is server side or browser side, ask a knowledgeable geek — you want an inclusion technique that loads the content into the page before it’s sent to the browser or searchbot.
Use manual inclusion techniques. That is, copy and paste the content into your pages directly. Plenty of content relies on manual inclusion, and you may even get content owners who are using automatic-inclusion techniques to agree to let you manually copy their content.
The problem with automatic updates
Another problem with content-syndication sites involves automatic updates, which allow a content owner to change the content immediately. For example, sites that provide weekly or monthly newsletters use automatic updates. The content provider can use this technique to update the content on dozens or hundreds of sites by simply changing the source file. The next time a page is loaded on one of the sites with the syndicated content, the new information appears.
But if you’re adding content for keyword purposes, automatic updating may not be such a good thing. If you find an article with lots of nice keywords, it could be gone tomorrow. Manual inclusion techniques ensure that the article you placed remains in place and also allow you to, for instance, break the article into chunks by adding keyword-laden headings. (Although it’s hard to say whether a site owner who uses automatic updating is likely to let you use manual inclusion, plenty of content is out there.)
Traditional syndication services
Content-syndication is nothing new — it has been around for a hundred years. (I just made up that statement, but it’s probably true.) Much of what you read in your local newspaper isn’t written by the paper’s staff; it comes from a syndication service.
Some syndication services sell content for your site. In general, this material should be better than free syndicated content. However, much of the free stuff is pretty good, too, so you may not want to pay for syndicated material until you exhaust your search for free content. (This content is often fed to Web sites using RSS feeds, so see the upcoming section “RSS syndication feeds.”)
Here are a few places you can find commercial syndicated material:
Featurewell: www.featurewell.com
Brafton: www.brafton.com
Moreover: www.moreover.com
StudioOne: www.studioonenetworks.com
uclick: www.uclick.com
YellowBrix: www.yellowbrix.com
The Open Directory Project list of content providers: www.dmoz.org/News/Media/Services/Syndicates
Yahoo! News and Media Syndicates page: http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/News_and_Media/Syndicates
Specialty syndication services provide content for particular industries. For example, Inman (www.inman.com
) provides content for the real estate industry.
RSS syndication feeds
RSS is one of those geeky acronyms that nobody can define for certain. Some say it means really simple syndication; others believe that it means rich site summary or RDF site summary. What it stands for doesn’t really matter. All you need to know is that RSS is an important content-syndication tool.
RSS systems comprise two components:
An RSS feed, or a source of content of some kind
An RSS aggregator or news reader, or a system that drops the information from the feed into a Web page
For example, all top search engines provide RSS feeds of their news headlines, at least for personal or noncommercial use. You can install an RSS aggregator on your site and point it to an RSS news feed. The page will then contain recent searches on news headlines.
The big advantage of RSS feeds is that you define the keywords you want to have sent to your site. Tell the feed that you want feeds related to rodent racing, and, naturally, content is fed back to you with the keywords rodent racing
in it, along with lots of other, related keywords.
What you need, then, is an aggregator that you can install into your Web site. Aggregators range from fairly simple to quite complicated — and that’s assuming you have some technical abilities in the first place. (If you don’t, there’s no range; they’re all complicated!) RSS feeds can be integrated both browser side and server side. Again, you need server-side integration to make sure the search engines read the inserted content.
Also, often RSS feeds merely pass a link to material on another site, in which case you don’t benefit much. Make sure that you’re getting useful content passed to your site. (Many content-syndication companies use RSS feeds to distribute their work.)
To find RSS feeds, keep your eyes open for RSS or XML symbols and other indicators showing that an RSS feed is available — many blogs, for instance, provide RSS feeds. You can see examples of these icons in Figure 10-1.
Figure 10-1: Look for these sorts of icons and links to indicate that an RSS feed is available.
Check out these RSS feed sites:
NewsKnowledge: www.newsknowledge.com
Feedzilla: www.feedzilla.com
You can also find RSS feeds by searching for blogs. Google has a blog-search function at www.google.com/blogsearch
.
However, you must remember that just because you find an RSS feed available doesn’t mean that you can put it into your site without permission. In fact, many blog owners provide feeds so that their readers can view the blogs in a personal RSS reader; you can, for instance, subscribe to RSS feeds within Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, and a Yahoo! or Google account. Before you use a feed, read the feed license agreement or, if you can’t find it, contact the owner.
If you decide that you want to go ahead with RSS, you need an aggregator. Try searching for news aggregator or rss aggregator and either check out the following software directories or ask your favorite geek to do so for you:
freshmeat: http://freshmeat.net
SourceForge.net: http://sourceforge.net
If your geek has never heard of freshmeat or SourceForge, it’s just possible that he isn’t quite geeky enough.
Open content and copyleft
Have you heard of open-source software? This type of software is created through the contributions of multiple individuals who agree to allow pretty much anyone to use the software, at no charge. Another movement that doesn’t get quite the same attention as open-source software is the open-content or creative commons movement. Open content is free and available for your use.
Open content relies on the concept known as copyleft. Under copyleft, the owner of a copyrighted work doesn’t release it into the public domain. Instead, she releases the work for public modification, with the understanding that anyone using the work must agree to not claim original authorship and to release all derivative works under the same conditions.
Stacks of information are released under copyleft. Start at these sites:
Creative Commons: www.creativecommons.org
The Open Directory Project’s open content page: http://dmoz.org/Computers/Open_Source/Open_Content
You should check out open content — in particular, the open-content wikis, the best known of which is Wikipedia.org, which has information on just about anything. (You can find a list of them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis
.)
Search results pages
The great thing about search results pages is that they have the exact keywords you define, liberally scattered throughout. When you conduct a search in a search engine — whether you’re searching Web sites, a directory of magazine articles, or news headlines — what does the search engine return? Matches for your keywords.
RSS provides one way to insert searches — in particular, searches of news headlines — into your pages. Even though the page’s content changes continually, you don’t have to worry about the content changing to a page that doesn’t contain your keywords, because the content is a reflection of the keywords you provide. You may also be able to find search pages that you can manually copy and paste. Sites that contain large numbers of articles and a search function may be good candidates. Run a search; then, copy the results and paste them into a Web page.
Press releases
The nice thing about press releases is that you can use them without permission. The purpose of a press release is to send it out and see who picks it up. You don’t need to contact the owner of the press release, because you already have an implied agreement that you can simply post the release wherever you want (unchanged and in its entirety, of course).
You may be able to find press releases that have the keywords you want, are relevant to your site in some way, and are not released by competitors. For instance, if you’re in the business of running rodent-racing events, companies selling rodent-racing harnesses and other gear aren’t direct competitors and may well have press releases you can use.
Where do you find these press releases? Try searching for press releases at a search engine. Combine the search term with some keywords, such as rodent racing press release. You can also find them at press release sites, such as these:
EmailWire: www.emailwire.com
Free-Press-Release.com: www.free-press-release.com
Hot Product News: www.hotproductnews.com
I-Newswire.com: http://i-newswire.com
M2PressWIRE: www.presswire.net
Online Press Releases: www.onlinepressreleases.com
OpenPR.com: www.openpr.com
PR Newswire: www.prnewswire.com
PR Web: www.prweb.com
PR.com: www.pr.com
PressBox.co.uk: www.pressbox.co.uk
PR-GB.com: www.pr-gb.com
PRLeap: www.prleap.com
PRLog.org: www.prlog.org
TransWorldNews.com: www.transworldnews.com
Q&A areas
After you attract sufficient traffic to your site, you may want to set up a question-and-answer (Q&A) or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) area on your site. Visitors to your site can ask questions — providing you with keyword-laden questions in many cases — and you can answer them.
A number of free and low-cost software tools automate the creation and management of these Q&A areas. Search the utility sites, such as www.resource index.com
, for these tools and find a friendly geek if you need help installing a tool.
Message boards
Message board areas can be quite powerful, in more than one way. Setting up a message board — also known as a forum or bulletin board system (BBS) — allows site visitors to place keywords in your site for you! A message board often draws traffic, bringing people in purely for the conversation.
Do you own a site about kayaks? As you sleep, visitors can leave messages with the word kayak in them over and over. Does your site sell rodent supplies? While you go about your daily business, your visitors can leave messages containing words such as rodent, mouse, and rat. Over time, this process can build up to hundreds of pages with many thousands of keywords.
BBS systems — even cool ones with lots of features, such as the ability to post photos — are cheap — often free. They’re relatively easy to set up, even for low-level geeks. Don’t underestimate this technique: If you have a lot of traffic on your Web site, a BBS can be a great way to build huge amounts of content. Search for terms such as bbs software and forum software.
Blogs
Blogs are sort of like diaries. (The term is a derivation of Weblog.) These systems allow people to write any kind of twaddle — er, musings — they want and then publish this nonsense — um, literature — directly to their Web sites. My cynicism aside, you can find some extremely interesting blogs out there.
In fact, over the past few years, blogs have become important SEO tools — search engines seem to like them and to visit frequently to index them. In fact, Google even owns one of the top blogging-tools companies, Blogger (http://blogger.com
). (Would you bet that blogs hosted by Blogger are indexed by Google?!)
There are also free and low-cost blog programs that you can install directly onto your Web site. WordPress, for instance (www.wordpress.com
), is a very sophisticated blog system that’s free and relatively easy to install. (For everything you need to know about using WordPress, check out the latest edition of WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.) In addition, many blog-hosting services, such as Blogger, provide a way to integrate pages into your Web site, and blogs can be effective SEO tools, if you can find a way to create enough content. Although many people set up blogs, the number that maintain them is far lower!
Blogs can be quite useful for search engine optimization, but I don’t think blogs are an SEO magic bullet, as some people have suggested. Blogs are a way to get more content onto your site, and they may get reindexed frequently. They also have tools that interlink blogs, so if you run an active blog, you can get links back to your site. However, the big problem with blogs is that someone must have the time to write frequently, the inclination to write frequently, and the ability to write well and to write what people want to read. This is often a tall order!
A Word about Duplicated Content
The idea behind duplicated content is that search engines don’t like the same content appearing in different places; after all, why would they want to provide people with lots of different ways to get to the same information? As a Google employee stated on the Google Webmaster Central blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
):
Our users typically want to see a diverse cross-section of unique content when they do searches. In contrast, they’re understandably annoyed when they see substantially the same content within a set of search results.
What does Google do about duplicated content? In general, it tries to eliminate copies. For instance:
. . . if your site has articles in “regular” and “printer” versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one version to list.
A lot of paranoia exists about duplicated content; people talk about how sites can get themselves banned for using duplicated content. Most of this talk is gross exaggeration because sites often have good reasons to have duplicated content. Perhaps you’re running news feeds from a popular central source or using press releases about events in your industry. It wouldn’t make sense for search engines to penalize people for such innocent uses. Thus, as this Google employee stated,
In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments . . . so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that’ll befall webmasters is to see the “less desired” version of a page shown in our index.
(For more from this blog entry, search the blog for deftly dealing with duplicate content
.)
In fact, there are various reasons why search engines can’t penalize sites for republishing content. Whom will they punish — every site holding the content or all but the first one to publish it? Also, how would they know who was first?
Here’s another reason that the search engines can’t “punish” sites for duplicated content. Say that I’ve noticed that your rodent-racing site is coming up quickly in the search ranks, and you’ve got a lot of excellent, unique content related to the exciting world of racing very small animals. If I were of a nefarious bent (which I’m not, but if I were . . .), here’s what I’d do: Build a bunch of Web sites on different servers, but build them anonymously. I’d then “scrape” data from your rodent site and republish it on these other sites, forcing the search engines to penalize you.
In general, then, the dire warnings about duplicated content are wrong. However, if Google does figure out that you have duplicated content, it may drop the duplicate pages.
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