Traffic Flow SEO: January 2011

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Content is King! TContent is King! The Value of Good Content to Your Online Presence

For a little change of pace, your host and blog moderator Chris Westmeyer has given me this opportunity to share with you some information on the future of online content, and a discussion of some important points to understanding its future significance. Hope you enjoy!

When talking about content, the first premise to consider is that for most companies, competing online via “new technology” has become more and more difficult. The truth is, regardless of company size, there can only be a select few winners in the contest to be the best “technology-driven” business online.

True, the technological lead sometimes changes hands, like it did away from AOL and MySpace to the current leaders in their respective fields. But those occurrences are becoming rare. Companies such as Google have gained so much mass, brand equity and momentum that it may be years before they are supplanted in any meaningful way. They won’t be handing off their lead in many categories anytime soon.

No, the way to compete today is by becoming a purveyor of content. Drive traffic to your website, platform or service by creating and sharing valuable information to your target audiences. Fill a niche market. Find a group or segment with unmet needs, and fulfill them.

And this is exactly what AOL and MySpace have done. AOL bought the blog network Weblogs, home to many popular blogs, such as Engadget and Joystiq; and they now employ over 3,000 freelance writers and more than 150 full-time journalists. And the AOL portal is still popular, and drives traffic to their many in-house publications.

MySpace decided to become a home for music and celebrity content. The platform is no longer about networking with friends, passing that baton to Facebook some time ago.

So, MySpace is now focused on a wide variety of entertainment channels, and features a huge supply of new music and music videos. Their plans to offer Facebook Connect functionality clearly show how re-focused their business plan has become. They couldn’t beat Facebook in social networking technology, so they shifted to becoming a content provider.

So becoming a “destination” is the key to competing online, for almost every small and mid-sized business, and even for most large corporations. It should also be noted that we’re obviously talking about a continual and ongoing process for creating content, not a singular campaign or event.

And when analyzing the examples above, it’s easy to understand why content must also be “fresh.” Ask yourself the question: Would you read the exact same newspaper two or more days in a row? Probably not. You need to view your web content in the same manner.

Without ongoing content being added to your website, readers have no incentive to return. And though your website may be highly-ranked today, without fresh content being added the search engines will (eventually) simply move on to sites with newer information.

Ideally, this means you’ll have new content every time the search engine crawler (for SEO newbies, an automated program used to review websites) visits. You need to show the engines that your site is being actively monitored and managed, obviously a good thing in their eyes. This ensures the crawler always has fresh content to index, and new links to explore. It won’t ever see your site as “stale”, and decide to drop it in the rankings.

So, think about your web content as accomplishing two equally important goals:

1. The first is to provide clear, compelling information about your brand, products and services, to influence the buying behavior of visitors.

2. The second goal is to attract (and keep) the attention of the search engines, to build your potential audience and prospective business going forward.

Knowing exactly what keywords to focus on within your content is a conversation for another day, but SEO pros can analyze your business and let you know which words are the ones you should include in your content. But, once these keywords have been established, where can you find source material that can assist you in writing your web copy?

There are a number of effective strategies that you can use to generate your content. First, look around your desk or office, and you’ll probably see some marketing materials or sales tools that you have used to educate and solicit new business. This is an excellent place to start. If you send an email newsletter, or print and distribute a traditional version, that information should be shared on your website as well. Writing and distributing press releases online is another good strategy.

After you have found source materials, how do you share your content? Creating standard web pages is obviously one possibility. Starting your own blog and either writing it yourself, or hiring a freelance writer to assist you, is another winning strategy. A well-written blog can establish you as an expert within your business category; a “trusted advisor” that readers will consult with before making purchasing decisions. And having your own blog provides you with an open forum to share new developments and news items, sales, discounts and special promotions with your readership.

A blog also allows you to receive comments from your readership, which creates a more collaborative and interactive environment. This type of feedback is vital to understanding the changing wants and needs of your customer base, and responding appropriately.

Of course, we cannot ignore the massive amounts of new content generated on social media, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These networks also allow for a back and forth conversation with your most loyal customers and biggest brand champions, as well as your prospects. Your content communicates directly with your network, providing the opportunity for feedback, and also the opportunity for current customers to spread the message about your business with their other connections.

Hopefully this post helps to explain the vital importance of your web content now, and going forward. In future posts, we will explore some winning tactics that you can use to successfully create and share what you have created.

Jim

Jim Haynes is the owner of Hat Trick Associates (HTA), a firm specializing in the creation of online content. HTA designs, writes and distributes completely custom email newsletters, writes professional blogs for companies, and also sets up and manages social networking accounts for businesses. His team can assist you with any writing or online content needs, and can be visited online at: www.hattrickassociates.com.

2010 - The Web Shown in Numbers!

Are you curious as to what happened in 2010 on the Web, well you have come to the right place as Pingdom recently released some stats from a large set of different sources and I am going to also share those here for your viewing pleasure.

Original post - Internet 2010 in Numbers

Here we go.....

Email

* 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
* 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
* 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
* 480 million – New email users since the year before.
* 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
* 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
* 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
* 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

Websites

* 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
* 21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.

Web Servers

* 39.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2010.
* 15.3% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2010.
* 4.1% – Growth in the number of nginx websites in 2010.
* 5.8% – Growth in the number of Google GWS websites in 2010.
* 55.7% – Growth in the number of Lighttpd websites in 2010.

Domain Names

* 88.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010.
* 13.2 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2010.
* 8.6 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2010.
* 79.2 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
* 202 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2010).
* 7% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet Users

* 1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
* 14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
* 825.1 million – Internet users in Asia.
* 475.1 million – Internet users in Europe.
* 266.2 million – Internet users in North America.
* 204.7 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
* 110.9 million – Internet users in Africa.
* 63.2 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
* 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social Media
* 152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
* 25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
* 100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
* 175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
* 7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
* 600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
* 250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
* 30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
* 70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
* 20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

Web Browsers

Videos

* 2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
* 35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
* 186 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
* 84% – Share of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
* 14% – Share of Internet users that have uploaded videos online (USA).
* 2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.
* 20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.

Images

* 5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
* 3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
* 130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
* 3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
* 36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Data sources and notes: Spam percentage from MessageLabs (PDF). Email user numbers and counts from Radicati Group (the number of sent emails was their prediction for 2010, so it’s very much an estimate). Website numbers from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user numbers and distribution from Internet World Stats. Facebook stats from Facebook and Business Insider. Twitter stats from Twitter (and here), TwitterCounter and TechCrunch. Web browser stats from StatCounter. YouTube video numbers from Google. Facebook video numbers from GigaOM. US online video stats from Comscore and the Pew Research Center. Flickr image numbers from Flickr.

SEO Faction - The Next Big Thing in SEO

I have to give out props to my buddy Zachary at SEO Faction. His new SEO/SEM corporate website is launching soon, but he has already released a great new marketing blog that is sure to become a 'must read' for all online marketers.

His first post is entitled, "Company Branding: Learning From Coca-Cola And Pepsi" is a great read and deeply thought out. I am always amazed (and a little jealous) by people like Zachary and others such as Aaron Wall (SEO Book) who can provide posts with such insight that are not only interesting to read, but make feel like a better person for reading (okay maybe not a better person, but maybe a bit smarter).

Check it all out here - SEO Faction Blog
(in addition you can always find a link in my favorites section in case you forget)

Another (Great) FREE Website Analysis Tool

I am always on the lookout for new or better webmaster tools and it never hurts if they are also free. My newest find (maybe a bit older for some who have already found it) is woorank. It is probably one of the best and most accurate website analysis tools I have found in quite a while.

What I really like about woorank is that it provides a scoring system that helps frame all the data easier. While you may or may not agree with the scoring variables, I do give kudos to them for trying.

In addition to the website woorank the report also provides insights on:

- Visitors:
--- Traffic Estimation
--- Current Alexa Rank
--- Current Compete Rank
- Content:
--- Google Indexed Pages
--- Popular Pages
- In-Site SEO:
-- Homepage:
--- URL
--- Title Tag
--- Meta Description
--- Meta Keywords
--- Headings (H1, H2, etc.)
--- Image Alt Text
--- Text/HTML Ratio
--- Frames?
--- Flash?
-- Inside Analysis:
--- Inside Page Analysis
-- Website Compliance:
--- WWW Resolve
--- Robots.txt
--- XML Sitemaps
--- Language
--- Doc Type
--- Encoding
--- Google Analytics
--- WC3C Validity
--- Microformats
--- Dublin Core
--- Geo Meta Tags
- Off-Site SEO:
-- Popularity:
--- Google Last Crawl Date
--- Backlinks
--- .edu Backlinks
--- .gov Backlinks
-- Directories:
--- DMOZ Listing?
--- Yahoo Directory Listing?
-- Social Media:
--- Delicious Links
--- Twitter Recent Backlinks
--- Twitter Account Check
--- Wikipedia Backlinks
--- Feeds
- Usability:
--- Readability Level
--- Favicon
- Website Information:
--- Load Time
--- IP Address
--- Location
--- gzip
-- Other Facts
--- Safe Browsing
-- Related Websites:
--- Related Wesbites and WooRank
-- Domain:
--- Whois

Check it out now and Get YOUR WooRank - WooRank

FREE Automated Social Bookmark Backlinks!!!

Okay, now that I have your attention I want to tell you that it really is a FREE offer. I recently stumbled upon IMAutomator ad signed up for a FREE account to see if there was a catch.

There is a catch, it will only submit your website to 15 of the different social booking marking websites within their list and it will only perform 10 submissions a day. For FREE, that is fine with me. While the social bookmarking websites are ones you probably have never heard of, it is a FREE service and it does create a backlink with your specifications (including deep-linking).

So, why do they give the service away for FREE? Well, the idea is to move you up at a later date to the PRO account at $24.95 a month which gives you access to all their social bookmarking websites and more.

Here are some videos to better explain the service:

IMAutomator Introduction:

They have a lot of great training video here - IMAutomator Training Videos

So, what are you waiting for? Get your FREE account today and start submitting those bookmarks:

Homepage - IMAutomator

FREE Sign-up Page - IMAutomator Sign Up

New FREE Website SEO/Social Media Analysis Tool

I am always looking for a great and clean (and accurate) way to show website SEO/Social media analytics and Rank Checker just happens to do that in a very aesthetically pleasing format.

Currently, what it shows is this:
- Domain Age
- Domain Name
- Alexa Ranking
- Alexa Backlinks
- AlltheWeb Backlinks
- AltaVista Backlinks
- Google PageRank (PR)
- Google Backlinks
- Google Bot Last Visit
- Google Indexed Pages
- Yahoo Indexed Pages
- Yahoo Backlinks
- Yahoo Directory Listing(s)
- DMOZ (The Open Directory) Listing(s)
- Bing Indexed Pages
- Ask.com Indexed Pages
- Digg Links
- Delicious Links

Check it out for FREE at - Rank Checker

RIP - The End of Business.com and Ask.com

First, on November 9th we hear that Ask.com decided it no longer really wants to be a search engine. You can read more here - Ask.com Update from their blog (I think it is weird that the President of Ask.com decided to write his name in all caps, what is that supposed to mean?).

Then, 1 day later, on November 10th we hear that Business.com is going to 'realigned' into some other Dex One Offering. There press release is here - Dex One Realigns Interactive Operations

This after all the excitement of Yahoo! also deciding to get out of the search business earlier this year, has created a lot of change within the search space in such a short time. The problem is that as we lose things we seldom get anything back and/or if we do get a new web property it is usually never as good as something else we lost.

Hopefully, Blekko, a new search engine proves me wrong and fills in the void of Ask.com. So far it does not appear to be happening, but there is always hope....:-)

What is Your Website Worth?

I have run across hundreds of websites claiming to help determine the value of your website. The problem with most of them is that either they are broken, outdated, use the wrong data sets (in my opinion) or are just plain so far off that you know it can't be right.

Well, every once in a while you run across a new(er) service that seems to actually have their act together. The one that I recently found is called Real Website Worth and it tends to do generally do a good job and is somewhat accurate. I really like the amount of data sources and information that it all pulls into one nice report within 60 seconds. The great part about all of it is that the service is free and has no strings attached.

So, check it out today for FREE at - www.RealWebsiteWorth.com.

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