As you may have heard, Google recently made a change to their algorithm that has affected some site owners. It has been dubbed the MayDay update. You could have either benefited by this, or had your traffic slashed. The difference seems to be in what type of site you are.
This is an algorithmic change aimed at improving the search results returned for longtail search queries. Large sites that have product pages with scant unique content within them, and precious few links as well are the most impacted. Many times they contain only a manufacturers product description, and very little more. To complicate this, they are several tiers removed from the home page, internal linking is suspect, and not enough deep linking is to be found. The days of popping in a manufacturer’s product description and perhaps changing a few words are likely gone.
This would seem to make a case for flatter site architecture, as well as the need to pump more original content into “thin” product pages. Much like when Google targeted “thin affiliate pages”, this seems to be along the same lines.
Many people ask me, (at least a few times a week) this question:
“When you’re creating all this content, sometimes on very similar keywords, how do you keep it fresh, unique, and not sounding like everyone else in my market, especially since we’re using them as research and source material?”
Very good question! My answer? Don’t sweat it so much! Unless you are flat out lifting material and claiming it as your own, (which you would NEVER do right?!?)your own voice will shine through. Aim to keep as much of your personality as possible intact as you create your content. Don’t park it at the door and put on your “web content creation” hat! By injecting yourself into the content, using idioms you use, not trying to sound like an expert, but rather a trusted friend or adviser, you’ll be rewarded with a larger following and far more interesting writing!
Which brings me to another point. I was reading something yesterday from Chris Brogan’s new book “Social Media 101″. He talks about falling into the trap of positioning yourself as an “expert”, versus an adviser or trusted friend. It has to do with the altitude from which you speak! Unless you really are an expert in your field, strive to put yourself in their shoes, with perhaps something cool to share!
Infuse your content with personality, humor and value, (which of course is the challenge facing ANY writer in ANY medium! No one said this business was easy) and you will be miles ahead of the competition who doesn’t take the time to do so.
There may very soon come a time when you’ll feel the need to outsource so me or all of your content or marketing needs. Unless you are very savvy, prolific and related to the Energizer Bunny, this happens to us all!
The best company I’ve found for this is called Content Divas. They are a content creation and web marketing firm located in the US, with more than 300 writers and marketers on staff to handle your every marketing need! All of their writers are native English speakers, located in the US.
Whether it’s a simple article package, content for your web pages, link building, Web 2.0 marketing, Social bookmarking, keyword research or any other activity designed to help you make more of a splash with your business, The Divas are well versed and more than capable!
They have developed a reputation for high-end quality content creation, and are actively used by many of the “gurus” populating your inbox today! (You would know them If I mentioned them here!)
Email me at keith@social-marketer.com for a special deal, and and we’ll see if the Divas can be a good fit for you!
Tying up a bunch of loose ends, and re-shaping the business model. Not as easy as I thought it would be, and certainly more time-consuming. We basically came to the conclusion that Jerry West was right when he said to (paraphrased) “fire all your clients and start using all this knowledge for yourself!”
While that is exactly what I’ve done, it doesn’t mean that we’re out of the loop when it comes to all things social marketing. Quite the contrary. We’re applying them to our own properties and are more than happy to share our insights here.
Google the other day quietly unveiled what is to be their in-house answer to Digg. Since they opted out of outright ourchase of Digg, (more than likely because they felt; rightly so, that they could do a better job anyway) there was much speculation about what Google would do. Well, here it is.
Kudos to Chris Lang for bringing “Google Reader Adds Friends List, Sharing, Bookmarking and Blog Recommendation Engine” to our attention. In his post Chris goes into much detail as to how Google will be using this new capability, and what it may mean for those of us who use social bookmarking services, want to keep up with Google, or who merely want a sane alternative to the capricious whims of Digg.
Some of the more interesting items to me include the ability to add individual pages (posts) to your Google Reader, amd then share them with your friends, which you can now import from Gmail. They even provide you a sweet little bookmarklet to make the task ever so much more simple. It also appears that your Google Reader profile will take on more significance, and that Google may even use this to base rankings upon. More to come on that one. However, it is interesting to note that does follow links that appear in each shared post. It uses the permalink to the blog post and also links to the domain in each shared item.
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The best company I’ve found for this is called 