SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

Part II. Building Search Engine-Friendly Sites

Chapter 11. 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 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 20for information on using video, for instance — but it does mean that when you’re talking about getting Web pages ranked, it’s mostly 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 9, 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.

Evaluate competing sites to help you determine at what point you should stop adding content. Compare your site to competitors that rank well in search engines. The major search engines also use link popularity to rate Web pages. If you’re sure that your site has more well-optimized pages than those competing sites, it may be time to stop adding content. You may want to focus instead on getting links to your site. (For more on that subject, check out Chapters 16 to 18.)

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.

Here are three different ways to get content for your site:

· Write your own content.

· Convince (pay, 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. The fancy term is content curation; if you think this might work for you, search for the term to learn more.

You may want to approach the owners of the sites you’re linking to and ask them to add a link back to your site. See Chapter 17 for more information.

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, and a number of companies that promote businesses by finding bloggers to review products; search for the terms influencer marketing and blogger outreach to learn about this form of marketing.

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 over 20 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 locally 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.

If you pay someone to write for you, draw up a simple contract saying that the work is a work for hire and that you’re buying all rights to it. Otherwise, you don’t own it and can use it for only limited purposes that are either stated in the contract or are more or less obvious. If you ask someone to write an article for your Web site and you don’t get a contract giving you full rights, you can’t later decide to syndicate the article on other sites or in newsletters. (Chapter 17 has more information on this syndication stuff.) Worse, perhaps, is that without a contract the writer has the legal right to sell the work to other Web sites. (This happens a lot, by the way.) If an employee writes the material for you on company time, the work is generally considered a work for hire and company property. However, if you have a very small company with an informal employment relationship and the writing is outside the scope of the employee’s normal work duties, you should request that the employee sign a contract.

A huge (politically incorrect) business has grown up over the past few years: overseas outsourced SEO work, specifically (regarding this chapter’s subject) the outsourcing of articles written for SEO purposes. If you hire an Indian writer or a Chinese writer, for example, you may find that the writing, um, doesn’t sound quite right. In fact, some of this work is truly dreadful. On the other hand, you can find people in these countries (and in other, less obvious nations, such as South Africa) who can write very well and can produce articles for your site for around $10 to $20 apiece. If you want to try this method, you can find writers on sites such as Elance.com, Naukri.com, Guru.com, and oDesk.com.

There are also companies that will manage content for you. They’ll work with you to develop a content plan and write the content. Search for the terms content creation and content marketing and you’ll find lots of options. 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.aracontent.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 syndicated materials you can use on your site.

· 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. This is a very powerful concept, by the way; in fact, it’s a basic building block for many online businesses. There are many very successful businesses that are purely based on letting other people create the content through the “community.” (Ever heard of Facebook?)

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.

Before I show you how to help yourself to someone else’s content, I need to warn you about a critical legal issue: copyright law. You must have a working knowledge of copyright restrictions so that you can properly evaluate whether (and how) it’s appropriate to use the content you find. The next section gives you an overview of what you need to know, and the additional free chapter at http://SearchEngineBulletin.com goes into excruciating detail, in case you’re curious.

Understanding Copyright — It’s Not Yours!

I’m continually amazed at how few people understand copyright — even people who should know better.

When I speak to clients about adding content to a Web site, I sometimes hear something like this: “How about that magazine article I read last week? Let’s put that up there!” Or maybe, “Such and such a site has some great information — let’s use some of that.” That’s calledcopyright infringement. It’s against the law, and although serious harm is unlikely to befall you in most cases, you can get sued or prosecuted. Plus, it’s just, well, not very nice. (That’s the perspective of a writer who has found his work stolen on a number of occasions.)

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.

A number of exceptions can prove very important when you’re gathering content, so listen closely:

· 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://SearchEngineBulletin.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 to find other converters. 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 17, 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 on one occasion 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. (Right now, maybe you’re thinking, but isn’t that duplicate content? Yes, it may be, but I get to that subject a little later in this chapter.)

If you own your own site, you have it easy: You can simply save the e-mail response from the article’s author as evidence of permission to use the article. If you’re working for a large corporation with a legal department, however, you have a bigger problem: Your lawyers, working under the principle of “common sense is dead,” will expect you to have the article’s author sign a 32-page document providing permission, declaring that he has the right to give permission, and signing over exclusive and lifetime rights to the article and any spin-off toys or clothing derived from it, in this or any other universe. (I didn’t make up that universe bit, by the way; I took it from a very real publishing contract.) Sorry, I don’t know how to help you here. (I would tell you to just remember what Shakespeare said — “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” — except that I’m sure my publisher’s legal department would get upset, and I actually do quite a bit of work in the legal business so I guess I shouldn’t complain … .)

Where can you find these articles? Search for Web sites that are likely to have the type of information you need. (You’ll want to avoid sites that are directly competing.) Keep your eyes open for blogs and newsletters.

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.

Some mechanisms used for syndicating content make it hard for search engines to read the syndicated content! So, you need to make sure that you use the right technique. See “Content-syndication sites,” later in this chapter, for more information.

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.

However, you should be aware of some important exceptions:

· 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 may still be 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, bridges to nowhere, and studies of crustaceans on treadmills!. And yet 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.

Here are a few good places to find government materials:

· FedWorld: www.fedworld.gov

· Government Printing Office:

· Catalog of U.S. Government Publications: http://catalog.gpo.gov/

· Federal Digital System: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys

· 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, nothing 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.

Should you use these sites? Perhaps, if you can find something relevant that is of high quality. I would search for the article (try using Copyscape.com) to make sure it doesn’t appear a thousand times elsewhere, though (a few times is okay; again, I discuss duplicate content later).

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

· GoArticles.com: www.goarticles.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 17, where I talk about syndicating your own content and point you to other syndication sites.

Make sure that when you grab articles from a content-syndication site you’re not using a competitor’s article! All these articles have links back to the author’s site, so you don’t want to be sending traffic to the enemy.

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 9. 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 9.

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.

And 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.

As long as you’re aware of syndicated content’s pitfalls and how to avoid them, it’s quite possible to find syndicated content and make it work so that you reap the search engine benefits of having that content on your site.

A hosted-content service hosts the content on its site along with a copy of your Web site template so that the content appears to be on your site (unless you look in the browser’s Location or Address bar, where you see the company’s URL). The problem with these services is that search engines are unlikely to pick up the content because they see the same articles duplicated repeatedly on the same domain. Google, for instance, will probably keep one set and ignore duplicates. (Also, see the section “A Word about Duplicated Content,” later in this chapter.) And in any case, the content isn’t on your site, it’s on the host site!

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 syndicated newsletters often 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

· Universal uclick: www.universaluclick.com

· YellowBrix: www.yellowbrix.com

· The Open Directory Project list of content providers: www.dmoz.org/News/Media/Services/Syndicates

Specialty syndication services provide content for particular industries. For example, AKZO Media (www.akzomedia.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. (Google allows you to use the feed to place Google News into your site, although it also states that you can’t use the news feed “to increase traffic to your site.”)

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 probably 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 11-1.

Figure 11-1: Look for these sorts of icons and links to indicate that an RSS feed is available.

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.

In contrast to the automated syndication techniques I mention earlier in this chapter (under Content-syndication sites), which use JavaScript and other browser-side systems for inserting content, RSS aggregators for Web pages often use server-side techniques, so the content is inserted into the Web page before the search engines see it. That’s what they call in the search engine business A Good Thing. (Some also provide browser-side widgets to do the work, which isn’t so good.)

If you decide that you want to go ahead with RSS, you need an aggregator. Try searching for news aggregator, feed aggregator, or rss aggregator.

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 theopen-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.

This was an exciting concept a few years ago, though it seems to be fading. The home page of the Open Content Alliance site (www.opencontentalliance.org) hadn’t been updated for five years when I checked it recently, for instance. Still, you might want to check out these sites to see if you can find anything useful:

· Creative Commons: www.creativecommons.org

· The Open Directory Project’s open content page: http://dmoz.org/Computers/Open_Source/Open_Content

· Wikipedia List of Wikis (many contain articles with some form of open-content license): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis

Watch for competitors’ information. Some companies use open content as a way to get their links onto the Web.

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.

Make sure that the links in the search results still work and that they open the results in a new window. (You don’t want to push people away from your site.)

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

· PRLeap: www.prleap.com

· PRLog.org: www.prlog.org

· TransWorldNews.com: www.transworldnews.com

You can even subscribe to press release services so that you get relevant press releases sent to you as soon as they’re published.

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 for faq web software and you’ll find them.

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 thousands of pages with tens of 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 with free versions, that’s 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.) WordPress is probably the world’s most popular blogging system; a survey found that 24 percent of the world’s Web sites use WordPress software. Because it is so sophisticated and flexible, many sites that you wouldn’t really consider to be blogs use the software. In fact, blogging systems are really CMS — Content Management Systems, software that simplifies the process of creating and managing Web pages.

Also, some blog-hosting services 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!

If you use any tool that allows visitors to post messages on your site, you should monitor and delete inappropriate messages. Many search engine marketers use such tools to post messages (known as blog spam) with links pointing back to their sites.

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 the pages may get reindexed frequently (though there may not be much of a difference between the speed of indexing of “blog” content and other content as there used to be). 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.

Read those comments carefully and you’ll see that they are directed toward duplicate content on your own site; in days past, a common SEO trick was to create a single page of content, then make hundreds of copies, thousands even, each slightly different. So, for instance, you might have essentially the same content, but “customized” for thousands of different cities. The search engines didn’t like that kind of “duplicate content” game.

The issue of the same content appearing on multiple sites is very different, though. 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 any case, the search engine designers know that there are really good reasons for the same content to appear on different sites; press releases, for instance, are designed for wide dissemination, and why wouldn’t a range of sites want to present the same release to their various audiences?

In general, then, the dire warnings about duplicated content are wrong. The main problem using content that appears elsewhere is that the search engines can’t rank everyone #1 for the same content, so it has to make a choice.

So what can you do about duplicated content, with articles you get from syndication sites, for instance, or press releases you drop into your site? If you want to make it more likely that the content isn’t ignored, mix it up a little: Add headings within the pieces, change a few words here and there, surround it with other information that’s unique to your site, and so on. But don’t worry about a penalty, because if every site that contains duplicate content were dropped from Google’s index, the index would be empty.