Writing by Nick Stamoulis
When to Use a No Follow Tag
Using no follow tags on your website should always be done with caution because a no follow can often times provoke further investigation from the search engines. Keeping that in mind, you better make sure everything else on your website is 100% squeaky clean. If you are not sure how to manipulate PageRank throughout your website by the clever use of no follow tags don’t worry about it but there are some important instances you should use a no follow to either be safe or simply not waste your link power in areas it where it is clearly not needed.
Paid Advertising
If you have a paid advertising model on your website where you sell ad space those ads should always have a no follow tag on them. Since Google has come out and said paid links are bad and very frowned upon you want to make sure you don’t run the risk of receiving a penalty by selling links, because a paid advertising spot with a do follow tag on it is nothing more than a paid link in the eyes of the search engines.
Trust Badges
It is very popular for website to have a series of trust badges from the Better Business Bureau and sites like VeriSign that sometimes link out to those sites. You don’t need to pass on any link juice to those sites if you don’t have to, so put a no follow tag on that link to let the search engines know nothing is passing on to those websites.
Internal Linking
Internal linking to pages sometimes doesn’t need to be a followed link. For example, if you are linking to a contact page or maybe a testimonial page that might not need to have link power passed over to it, however, if you are linking to an important service or product page than you will want to leave the do follow status on it.
Sculpting the flow of your PageRank needs to be done very carefully and within guidelines at all times. Once the search engines catch you doing this they will monitor you like a hawk and give more weight to analyzing your moves so make sure it is important and everything else you do is by the books.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Interview with Andrew Wise of SEOLinkWheelers.com
The following is a sponsored post.
For today’s post we’re going to be talking to Andrew Wise of SEOLinkWheelers.com, for my readers who don’t know you can you tell me a little about yourself, and your background in internet marketing.
My career in Internet Marketing is still very young, having recently graduated from school in 2007. My first start was for the pre-eminent music startup Grooveshark.com in a business development role. From there, I taught myself programming and began building my own web empire. Our goal is to ensure our customers’ success and to do anything in our power to make you happy, no matter the cost.
As every SEO knows links, are a critical element for ranking, what’s your approach to building links, and what are some the types links you feel should be part of every websites backlink profile.
For every new client, we recommend they invest in some of the best directories on the web, which we use on all of our sites. Yahoo Directory ($299/year), BOTW.org ($159/year with coupons available), and Business.com ($199/year). If you look at the sites with 100s of 1st page rankings, they all have these links, and you should too.
Your company offers link advertising in the form of link wheels. For the readers who might not know what is a “link wheel”, and how is it going to help their site?
Link wheels are the evolution of the backlink. When Google first created their algorithm, the way to get top rankings was to get links. The more links, the better, no matter where the links originate.
Everyone knows this doesn’t work anymore. Spam farms, inlinking from your own site, and other forms of garbage links do nothing for your site and are a waste of time. Today, the goal of most site owners is to get High PageRank, quality links.
So how do you get these links? Article directories , web 2.0 sites, and high PageRank blogs. A link wheel is a collection of sites that interlink (randomly) passing on PageRank to each individual site, and all sites pointing to the “money site”. Take this example below:
3 total sites
Site #1
A 200 word article is written on a blog, the blog has 2 links, 1 link goes to site #3, 1 link goes to the client site (ie “money site”)
Site #2
A 200 word article is written on a press release site, 2 links, 1 link goes to site #1, 1 link to the money site
Site #3
A 200 word article on a web 2.0 site, 1 link goes to site #2, 1 link to the money site
etc. etc.
The end result is you have 3 high PageRank sites, each getting random links from sites on different C-Class servers, with different IPs, and these 3 random sites are linking to the client site, creating the ultimate backlinks.
Our link wheels are constructed in much larger quantities: 37 sites, 74 sites, and 119 sites, package details available here
Let’s talk about the 800lb gorilla that’s now sitting in the room, paid links. Google has taken a pretty hard stance against link sellers in the past, whether or not we agree with their stance it’s something as SEO’s we have to be mindful of. Where do you feel your product falls on this issue?
Paid links are one of the most effective way to increase your sites’ ranking, there’s no doubt about that. If you look at some text link brokers, these sites are doing millions every month, but there’s a couple problems I have with this.
We run our own content sites in addition to providing SEO services, and all of our SEO services we use on our own sites, which is one of the reasons we are constantly evolving our services, so with that out of the way, here’s my take on paid link sites:
1) Google does not like directly paid links. Paid links are pretty easy to detect (ie any list of random links in a sites’ sidebar) or any sites that operate in the public marketplace are guilty, and may be punished at any time.
2) The paid links model is a rental model. Every month you are renting these links. If you stop paying, you lose all your rankings, so it’s just like PPC, so if you are looking to buy paid links, you are better off just using AdWords
– Our link building is permanent, and personally, I like knowing that every link we build for ourselves and our clients is an investment. Over time, you have to spend less and less money, which is how every business (I think) should operate.
Let’s change gears a bit, Google has always been a link based algorithm, but in recent months they have have admitted they are looking at other signals, like social media. Do you ever see links becoming less important than other factors?
Definitely.
Any SEO company who thinks what is working today is going to be working 3, 6 or 12 months from now is crazy. Google is going to evolve their algorithm, and its our job to follow their changes and make changes to our services to ensure they still work.
The main trend I believe we are seeing is a shift to quality content. The days of spammy 1990s websites ranking on the 1st pages of Google is going to fade away. As a site owner, I suggest everyone to get engaged in Facbook, Twitter, and as opposed to Google completely ignoring links, I think they are going to use social media sites to build a “trust factor” for domains, and only if you have certain “trust factors” are you going to be showing up at the top of the search engines.
It’s in Google’s best interests to display quality sites, and these “trust factors” are the best way to do that and also eliminate the spam.
If you ran a search engine what things would you be looking at in social media as signals of trust and quality? Are there places other than social media you think search engines should/might be looking now?
If I was building a new search engine, there are a couple of things I would use to determine how trustworthy a site is, how good of a source of information the site is going to be, etc.
1) RSS/subscriber count — the fact is, the more followers a site has, the more likely they are going to be to be a good source of information
2) Does the site have Facebook accounts? Twitter? GetSatisfaction? Yelp? etc.
3) How often is the site updated? This is a known piece of the Caffeine algorithm but its yet another indication of quality
4) If it’s an eCommerce site, what are the ratings of the merchant? Is it doing well on shopping.com, Google merchant center, etc.
Obviously we haven’t seen exactly what Google is doing on this front, but this is going to be the evolution of their algorithm in the future.
Since you have taken the time to answer these questions, give us your best pitch as to why someone should look at your companies services …
As I mentioned above, we use our services for our own sites. Everyday we are working on ways to improve our services and are constantly investing more money into our product. This past year, we expanded from a network of 100 blogs to more than 2,000 PR3+ blogs that we own and continue to expand in 2011.
From a customer service perspective, we are a small team, it’s just 4 of us, which means we’re selective. We want to work with people we like and who like us. The majority of our customers are referrals and we strive ourselves on making people happy and delivering them a great first class product at a business class price.
We’d love the opportunity to work with you, and we are confident we can help you increase your rankings. We’re US-based, and you can call us at 352-509-5736. If we’re on the line, just leave us a message or shoot an email to help@seolinkwheelers.com, we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today Andrew. For anyone who is interested in SEO Link Wheelers be sure to check out their link wheel packages and use the coupon code “graywolf” for 10% off your first order –
For today’s post we’re going to be talking to Andrew Wise of SEOLinkWheelers.com, for my readers who don’t know you can you tell me a little about yourself, and your background in internet marketing.
My career in Internet Marketing is still very young, having recently graduated from school in 2007. My first start was for the pre-eminent music startup Grooveshark.com in a business development role. From there, I taught myself programming and began building my own web empire. Our goal is to ensure our customers’ success and to do anything in our power to make you happy, no matter the cost.
As every SEO knows links, are a critical element for ranking, what’s your approach to building links, and what are some the types links you feel should be part of every websites backlink profile.
For every new client, we recommend they invest in some of the best directories on the web, which we use on all of our sites. Yahoo Directory ($299/year), BOTW.org ($159/year with coupons available), and Business.com ($199/year). If you look at the sites with 100s of 1st page rankings, they all have these links, and you should too.
Your company offers link advertising in the form of link wheels. For the readers who might not know what is a “link wheel”, and how is it going to help their site?
Link wheels are the evolution of the backlink. When Google first created their algorithm, the way to get top rankings was to get links. The more links, the better, no matter where the links originate.
Everyone knows this doesn’t work anymore. Spam farms, inlinking from your own site, and other forms of garbage links do nothing for your site and are a waste of time. Today, the goal of most site owners is to get High PageRank, quality links.
So how do you get these links? Article directories , web 2.0 sites, and high PageRank blogs. A link wheel is a collection of sites that interlink (randomly) passing on PageRank to each individual site, and all sites pointing to the “money site”. Take this example below:
3 total sites
Site #1
A 200 word article is written on a blog, the blog has 2 links, 1 link goes to site #3, 1 link goes to the client site (ie “money site”)
Site #2
A 200 word article is written on a press release site, 2 links, 1 link goes to site #1, 1 link to the money site
Site #3
A 200 word article on a web 2.0 site, 1 link goes to site #2, 1 link to the money site
etc. etc.
The end result is you have 3 high PageRank sites, each getting random links from sites on different C-Class servers, with different IPs, and these 3 random sites are linking to the client site, creating the ultimate backlinks.
Our link wheels are constructed in much larger quantities: 37 sites, 74 sites, and 119 sites, package details available here
Let’s talk about the 800lb gorilla that’s now sitting in the room, paid links. Google has taken a pretty hard stance against link sellers in the past, whether or not we agree with their stance it’s something as SEO’s we have to be mindful of. Where do you feel your product falls on this issue?
Paid links are one of the most effective way to increase your sites’ ranking, there’s no doubt about that. If you look at some text link brokers, these sites are doing millions every month, but there’s a couple problems I have with this.
We run our own content sites in addition to providing SEO services, and all of our SEO services we use on our own sites, which is one of the reasons we are constantly evolving our services, so with that out of the way, here’s my take on paid link sites:
1) Google does not like directly paid links. Paid links are pretty easy to detect (ie any list of random links in a sites’ sidebar) or any sites that operate in the public marketplace are guilty, and may be punished at any time.
2) The paid links model is a rental model. Every month you are renting these links. If you stop paying, you lose all your rankings, so it’s just like PPC, so if you are looking to buy paid links, you are better off just using AdWords
– Our link building is permanent, and personally, I like knowing that every link we build for ourselves and our clients is an investment. Over time, you have to spend less and less money, which is how every business (I think) should operate.
Let’s change gears a bit, Google has always been a link based algorithm, but in recent months they have have admitted they are looking at other signals, like social media. Do you ever see links becoming less important than other factors?
Definitely.
Any SEO company who thinks what is working today is going to be working 3, 6 or 12 months from now is crazy. Google is going to evolve their algorithm, and its our job to follow their changes and make changes to our services to ensure they still work.
The main trend I believe we are seeing is a shift to quality content. The days of spammy 1990s websites ranking on the 1st pages of Google is going to fade away. As a site owner, I suggest everyone to get engaged in Facbook, Twitter, and as opposed to Google completely ignoring links, I think they are going to use social media sites to build a “trust factor” for domains, and only if you have certain “trust factors” are you going to be showing up at the top of the search engines.
It’s in Google’s best interests to display quality sites, and these “trust factors” are the best way to do that and also eliminate the spam.
If you ran a search engine what things would you be looking at in social media as signals of trust and quality? Are there places other than social media you think search engines should/might be looking now?
If I was building a new search engine, there are a couple of things I would use to determine how trustworthy a site is, how good of a source of information the site is going to be, etc.
1) RSS/subscriber count — the fact is, the more followers a site has, the more likely they are going to be to be a good source of information
2) Does the site have Facebook accounts? Twitter? GetSatisfaction? Yelp? etc.
3) How often is the site updated? This is a known piece of the Caffeine algorithm but its yet another indication of quality
4) If it’s an eCommerce site, what are the ratings of the merchant? Is it doing well on shopping.com, Google merchant center, etc.
Obviously we haven’t seen exactly what Google is doing on this front, but this is going to be the evolution of their algorithm in the future.
Since you have taken the time to answer these questions, give us your best pitch as to why someone should look at your companies services …
As I mentioned above, we use our services for our own sites. Everyday we are working on ways to improve our services and are constantly investing more money into our product. This past year, we expanded from a network of 100 blogs to more than 2,000 PR3+ blogs that we own and continue to expand in 2011.
From a customer service perspective, we are a small team, it’s just 4 of us, which means we’re selective. We want to work with people we like and who like us. The majority of our customers are referrals and we strive ourselves on making people happy and delivering them a great first class product at a business class price.
We’d love the opportunity to work with you, and we are confident we can help you increase your rankings. We’re US-based, and you can call us at 352-509-5736. If we’re on the line, just leave us a message or shoot an email to help@seolinkwheelers.com, we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today Andrew. For anyone who is interested in SEO Link Wheelers be sure to check out their link wheel packages and use the coupon code “graywolf” for 10% off your first order –
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Developing Websites, Posts and Niches From the News
When you’re looking for new websites to develop or to expand existing websites into new and profitable niches, the news can be a valuable source for inspiration and research. In this post, I’ll take a look at what to be on the lookout for and how to see if it’s worth developing.
Recently I came across an article that talked about the cities with the worst teeth in the United States. According to the article, one of the worst cities is St. Louis, Missouri. We’ll start off with a search for the keyword [dentist] for the state of Missouri using Google insights.
Click to EnlargeAccording to Google Insights, “Memphis” has more volume than “St. Louis” because Tennessee is so close to Missouri. After drilling down into St. Louis, we get more data, which shows there is indeed volume for dental kwd terms in the area.
Click to EnlargeNext we want to check on how commercially viable the term is. To test, we set the location to St. Louis, Missouri and do some some keyword searches looking for adwords ads for [cosmetic dentist].
Click to EnlargeNext, we want to take a look at what the prices are for some of the keywords in adwords …
click to enlargeIt’s important to note that these prices are country-wide averages; with nationwide search volume, it’s likely that one city will be radically lower in price and volume. Additionally, you will only get a percentage of the bid price, which can vary dramatically based on the quality score of your adsense account. We want to make sure there are additional monetization opportunities besides Adsense, so start looking for Dental-related affiliate programs. There are multiple dental lead gen opportunities such as DentalPlans.com, so there is more than one monetization option (see Adding Revenue Streams Into Your Website or Blog).
Now there’s more to deciding to build a new website. In addition to this research, you need to look at competition analysis and local factors, which in this case are huge, but those are topics for another post. The takeaway here is to learn to be on the lookout for these types of stories in the news and be able to see if they are areas worth exploring.
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Interview with Andrew Wise of SEOLinkWheelers.com
The following is a sponsored post.
For today’s post we’re going to be talking to Andrew Wise of SEOLinkWheelers.com, for my readers who don’t know you can you tell me a little about yourself, and your background in internet marketing.
My career in Internet Marketing is still very young, having recently graduated from school in 2007. My first start was for the pre-eminent music startup Grooveshark.com in a business development role. From there, I taught myself programming and began building my own web empire. Our goal is to ensure our customers’ success and to do anything in our power to make you happy, no matter the cost.
As every SEO knows links, are a critical element for ranking, what’s your approach to building links, and what are some the types links you feel should be part of every websites backlink profile.
For every new client, we recommend they invest in some of the best directories on the web, which we use on all of our sites. Yahoo Directory ($299/year), BOTW.org ($159/year with coupons available), and Business.com ($199/year). If you look at the sites with 100s of 1st page rankings, they all have these links, and you should too.
Your company offers link advertising in the form of link wheels. For the readers who might not know what is a “link wheel”, and how is it going to help their site?
Link wheels are the evolution of the backlink. When Google first created their algorithm, the way to get top rankings was to get links. The more links, the better, no matter where the links originate.
Everyone knows this doesn’t work anymore. Spam farms, inlinking from your own site, and other forms of garbage links do nothing for your site and are a waste of time. Today, the goal of most site owners is to get High PageRank, quality links.
So how do you get these links? Article directories , web 2.0 sites, and high PageRank blogs. A link wheel is a collection of sites that interlink (randomly) passing on PageRank to each individual site, and all sites pointing to the “money site”. Take this example below:
3 total sites
Site #1
A 200 word article is written on a blog, the blog has 2 links, 1 link goes to site #3, 1 link goes to the client site (ie “money site”)
Site #2
A 200 word article is written on a press release site, 2 links, 1 link goes to site #1, 1 link to the money site
Site #3
A 200 word article on a web 2.0 site, 1 link goes to site #2, 1 link to the money site
etc. etc.
The end result is you have 3 high PageRank sites, each getting random links from sites on different C-Class servers, with different IPs, and these 3 random sites are linking to the client site, creating the ultimate backlinks.
Our link wheels are constructed in much larger quantities: 37 sites, 74 sites, and 119 sites, package details available here
Let’s talk about the 800lb gorilla that’s now sitting in the room, paid links. Google has taken a pretty hard stance against link sellers in the past, whether or not we agree with their stance it’s something as SEO’s we have to be mindful of. Where do you feel your product falls on this issue?
Paid links are one of the most effective way to increase your sites’ ranking, there’s no doubt about that. If you look at some text link brokers, these sites are doing millions every month, but there’s a couple problems I have with this.
We run our own content sites in addition to providing SEO services, and all of our SEO services we use on our own sites, which is one of the reasons we are constantly evolving our services, so with that out of the way, here’s my take on paid link sites:
1) Google does not like directly paid links. Paid links are pretty easy to detect (ie any list of random links in a sites’ sidebar) or any sites that operate in the public marketplace are guilty, and may be punished at any time.
2) The paid links model is a rental model. Every month you are renting these links. If you stop paying, you lose all your rankings, so it’s just like PPC, so if you are looking to buy paid links, you are better off just using AdWords
– Our link building is permanent, and personally, I like knowing that every link we build for ourselves and our clients is an investment. Over time, you have to spend less and less money, which is how every business (I think) should operate.
Let’s change gears a bit, Google has always been a link based algorithm, but in recent months they have have admitted they are looking at other signals, like social media. Do you ever see links becoming less important than other factors?
Definitely.
Any SEO company who thinks what is working today is going to be working 3, 6 or 12 months from now is crazy. Google is going to evolve their algorithm, and its our job to follow their changes and make changes to our services to ensure they still work.
The main trend I believe we are seeing is a shift to quality content. The days of spammy 1990s websites ranking on the 1st pages of Google is going to fade away. As a site owner, I suggest everyone to get engaged in Facbook, Twitter, and as opposed to Google completely ignoring links, I think they are going to use social media sites to build a “trust factor” for domains, and only if you have certain “trust factors” are you going to be showing up at the top of the search engines.
It’s in Google’s best interests to display quality sites, and these “trust factors” are the best way to do that and also eliminate the spam.
If you ran a search engine what things would you be looking at in social media as signals of trust and quality? Are there places other than social media you think search engines should/might be looking now?
If I was building a new search engine, there are a couple of things I would use to determine how trustworthy a site is, how good of a source of information the site is going to be, etc.
1) RSS/subscriber count — the fact is, the more followers a site has, the more likely they are going to be to be a good source of information
2) Does the site have Facebook accounts? Twitter? GetSatisfaction? Yelp? etc.
3) How often is the site updated? This is a known piece of the Caffeine algorithm but its yet another indication of quality
4) If it’s an eCommerce site, what are the ratings of the merchant? Is it doing well on shopping.com, Google merchant center, etc.
Obviously we haven’t seen exactly what Google is doing on this front, but this is going to be the evolution of their algorithm in the future.
Since you have taken the time to answer these questions, give us your best pitch as to why someone should look at your companies services …
As I mentioned above, we use our services for our own sites. Everyday we are working on ways to improve our services and are constantly investing more money into our product. This past year, we expanded from a network of 100 blogs to more than 2,000 PR3+ blogs that we own and continue to expand in 2011.
From a customer service perspective, we are a small team, it’s just 4 of us, which means we’re selective. We want to work with people we like and who like us. The majority of our customers are referrals and we strive ourselves on making people happy and delivering them a great first class product at a business class price.
We’d love the opportunity to work with you, and we are confident we can help you increase your rankings. We’re US-based, and you can call us at 352-509-5736. If we’re on the line, just leave us a message or shoot an email to help@seolinkwheelers.com, we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today Andrew. For anyone who is interested in SEO Link Wheelers be sure to check out their link wheel packages and use the coupon code “graywolf” for 10% off your first order –
The preceding has been a sponsored post. Find out more information about sponsored posts.
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What is Evergreen Content
Evergreen Content is a subject I talk about quite frequently on this blog, but it’s not something I’ve ever devoted a post to explaining. Hopefully this post will solve that problem.
Evergreen content is content written with the goal of driving traffic to a website for a long period of time. In some cases, such as when the content is historical and will never change (something like the presidency of Zachary Taylor), the content can live for the life of the website with little or no updating. In other cases, the content may have a long lifespan but must be updated every few years. An example of this would be something like “year end tax strategies for seniors”, which changes every few years as the tax laws change.
When planning/writing evergreen content, do your keyword research first and make sure your page/post/url’s are very keyword centric (see Keep Your Articles Narrowly Focused and Keyword Centric). You want to avoid catchy, cute, and witty titles as they will almost always drive less traffic. Your evergreen content generally will fall into two categories: high level reference/resource/research oriented pieces or flagship content. It is possible for them to be both. Some examples of evergreen content are as follows:
One of the subtleties of evergreen content is that it requires little if any updating. However, that’s not to say that evergreen content has to be about “old things”. For example, once the 2011 Ford Mustang goes on sale, it won’t change much and falls into the category of evergreen content.
Sometimes evergreen content only has a limited lifespan, such as “how to format a hard drive for windows 95“. When you are developing content like this, you need to factor that information into your page/post/URL structure. For example this would be a sub optimal choice:
How to Format A Hard Drive
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive/
When operating systems update to windows 98, windows xp, windows vista, and windows 7, you’ll have a problem. I suggest going with this arrangement:
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows 95
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-95/
If you follow that format, when new operating systems come out you can create new content like:
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows 98
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-98/
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows XP
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-xp/
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows Vista
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-vista/
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows 7
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-7/
What I would then do is have create a head piece entitled “How to Format Your Hard Drive” with links to each of the individual articles mentioned above (see Creating Head & Tail Content for more on this approach). Another issue to be aware of is that sometimes it’s better to use a Living URL’s and Predictive SEO approach with evergreen content. Above I mentioned how the 2010 Ford Mustang would be considered evergreen content. What I would do is put that content on two URL’s
example.com/ford/mustang/
example.com/ford/mustang/2010/
Now, generally speaking, an SEO will advise you against creating duplicate content, but this is a special case. If you’ve done your internal linking properly, the (example.com/ford/mustang/) will have more link equity and be considered the ordinal URL for the duplicate content (please don’t try to do this with 301's and the canonical tag because you will do more damage than good). Once the 2011 model comes out you will update the content on (example.com/ford/mustang/) and place the same content on (example.com/ford/mustang/2011/). The search engines will no longer see (example.com/ford/mustang/2010/) as dupe content and, with proper linking and anchor text from (example.com/ford/mustang/), you’ll be fine. One final aspect of this process is to link to (example.com/ford/mustang/) when you refer to the Ford Mustang in general but link to (example.com/ford/mustang/2010/) when referring to that model. You should make sure the model/year page does have some internal links.
So what are the takeaways here:Research your topic and keywords to determine your evergreen contentKeep the evergreen articles narrowly focusedDetermine if the evergreen content will be short term or long term and how you will do address updates if requiredLook for ways to link new evergreen content via head & tail, living URL, and predictive SEO tactics
photo credit: Nicholas_T
Creating Head & Tail Content Although I have mentioned head & tail content on this...Content Ideas – Creating an Ongoing Series One of the problems that website owners and bloggers encounter...How to Silo Your Website: The Content The following is part of the series How To Silo...How to Do A Content
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Evergreen content is content written with the goal of driving traffic to a website for a long period of time. In some cases, such as when the content is historical and will never change (something like the presidency of Zachary Taylor), the content can live for the life of the website with little or no updating. In other cases, the content may have a long lifespan but must be updated every few years. An example of this would be something like “year end tax strategies for seniors”, which changes every few years as the tax laws change.
When planning/writing evergreen content, do your keyword research first and make sure your page/post/url’s are very keyword centric (see Keep Your Articles Narrowly Focused and Keyword Centric). You want to avoid catchy, cute, and witty titles as they will almost always drive less traffic. Your evergreen content generally will fall into two categories: high level reference/resource/research oriented pieces or flagship content. It is possible for them to be both. Some examples of evergreen content are as follows:
One of the subtleties of evergreen content is that it requires little if any updating. However, that’s not to say that evergreen content has to be about “old things”. For example, once the 2011 Ford Mustang goes on sale, it won’t change much and falls into the category of evergreen content.
Sometimes evergreen content only has a limited lifespan, such as “how to format a hard drive for windows 95“. When you are developing content like this, you need to factor that information into your page/post/URL structure. For example this would be a sub optimal choice:
How to Format A Hard Drive
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive/
When operating systems update to windows 98, windows xp, windows vista, and windows 7, you’ll have a problem. I suggest going with this arrangement:
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows 95
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-95/
If you follow that format, when new operating systems come out you can create new content like:
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows 98
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-98/
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows XP
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-xp/
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows Vista
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-vista/
How to Format a Hard Drive – Windows 7
example.com/how-to-format-hard-drive-windows-7/
What I would then do is have create a head piece entitled “How to Format Your Hard Drive” with links to each of the individual articles mentioned above (see Creating Head & Tail Content for more on this approach). Another issue to be aware of is that sometimes it’s better to use a Living URL’s and Predictive SEO approach with evergreen content. Above I mentioned how the 2010 Ford Mustang would be considered evergreen content. What I would do is put that content on two URL’s
example.com/ford/mustang/
example.com/ford/mustang/2010/
Now, generally speaking, an SEO will advise you against creating duplicate content, but this is a special case. If you’ve done your internal linking properly, the (example.com/ford/mustang/) will have more link equity and be considered the ordinal URL for the duplicate content (please don’t try to do this with 301's and the canonical tag because you will do more damage than good). Once the 2011 model comes out you will update the content on (example.com/ford/mustang/) and place the same content on (example.com/ford/mustang/2011/). The search engines will no longer see (example.com/ford/mustang/2010/) as dupe content and, with proper linking and anchor text from (example.com/ford/mustang/), you’ll be fine. One final aspect of this process is to link to (example.com/ford/mustang/) when you refer to the Ford Mustang in general but link to (example.com/ford/mustang/2010/) when referring to that model. You should make sure the model/year page does have some internal links.
So what are the takeaways here:Research your topic and keywords to determine your evergreen contentKeep the evergreen articles narrowly focusedDetermine if the evergreen content will be short term or long term and how you will do address updates if requiredLook for ways to link new evergreen content via head & tail, living URL, and predictive SEO tactics
photo credit: Nicholas_T Creating Head & Tail Content Although I have mentioned head & tail content on this...Content Ideas – Creating an Ongoing Series One of the problems that website owners and bloggers encounter...How to Silo Your Website: The Content The following is part of the series How To Silo...How to Do A Contentsearch engine blog
improve search engine rankings
Consider Other Things Besides SEO
Writing by Nick Stamoulis 
If you have a website and you have been taking any sort of marketing approach you probably have realized that it takes much more than just having some keywords on a website to make it successful. The definition of online marketing and search engine optimization is ever changing and your approach should be robust and full of new streams and pathways coming into your website.
Marketing a website in today’s market place is more than just search engine rankings; it is the ability to communicate with your audience and listen to online chatter while providing a new and unique approach to a business that might be in a saturated market.
Here are some other areas you should be thinking about if you are already conducting monthly search engine optimization:
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay per click advertising shouldn’t scare you one bit. Many people feel that this is a very expensive route to take and it can be but it doesn’t have to if you educate yourself a little bit. There are many different strategies that can and should be taken if you are looking to cut costs. For example if you are a local business make sure your ads are only running locally. Don’t use the same ad copy throughout your campaign and keep things relevant and unique to the keyword you are targeting for that specific ad.
Social Media Marketing
What can I say? An online business with no social media presence is like driving a car with a flat tire. Social media is not a fad or a fly by night it is a reality. The reality is that if you are looking for your audience you have to be in the social media space in some way, shape or form. Social media marketing has made a very clear overlap with search engine optimization over the years. Many of the efforts that need to be taken with social media can often times generate a direct link that not only brings steady streams of traffic over to your website but also ads to your link building efforts. Not everyone is always going to find your website through search rankings.
Email Marketing
Building up your email newsletter list should also be a top priority in your online marketing strategy. Build a nice robust list of email recipients that are opt in is truly the way to go with email marketing. Is it harder than just buying a list? Sure it is but over time those emails are good quality recipients that are waiting to hear from you. Think about a variety of different ways you can acquire those email addresses like co registrations, partnerships or free website downloads. The goal is to make your email communication strategic and scheduled. Don’t just try shooting from the hip every now and then regarding your email communication but rather put a schedule together of how you can do it the right way. Consistency is key.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to spread your online message but like everything else it needs a carefully thought out plan to be executed correctly. Before you put together an affiliate campaign you really have to think about your brand. Some of the biggest affiliate marketing campaigns out there are usually backed by a business that has a strong brand following in their respective community. Have you built up your brand yet? Just launching a website and setting up an affiliate campaign won’t work like you want it to. If you take the time to build up your brand prior to executing your affiliate marketing campaign you will build a much more loyal and strong virtual sales team.
Blogging
Blogging is definitely a stem from social media marketing but a daily blog post on a company blog can bring in a great deal of traffic over time. Writing blog posts with a little bit of strategy in place as far as keywords and search engine optimization go can and will bring in some very quality traffic to your site over time.
It is important to realize that search marketing has many different angles and all those angles need to be approached if a website is really going to be successful online.
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