EzSEO Newsletter # 27
Andy Williams ez SEO
ezseonews.com
Hi again
First off I would like to thank everyone who sent me feedback on the Poll from last week. I'll mention the results of that Poll in a moment. Also this week we start part 2 of the mini-course on articles. I highly recommend that you keep the entire course and print it off as it will become a valuable resource in your efforts to gain top rankings in the search engines. We will take a look at a real example that was sent to me this week by someone who has used content to good effect on her website - and increased sales.
This week:
1. Poll Results from last week
2. How to get the maximum value from articles
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1. Poll Results from last week
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OK, in case you missed last week, I asked what your results have been like with the following products/techniques: Smart Pages, Ranking Power & Traffic Equalizer. I had stated that I did not recommend any of these techniques for long-term search engine success.
Smart Pages - I did not get any feedback at all on Smart Pages - maybe that means none of you are using them (I hope so). I should maybe mention my own experience with them. I used them a long time ago when Stephen Pierce first introduced them in his ebook "The Whole Truth". Some pages ranked well, others did not. The ones that did well were the ones that had low competition (and low PR of competing sites). In other words, the smart pages that did well were the ones that I could have ranked well with anyway, just using solid SEO techniques described in this newsletter. Smart Pages for me did not produce miracles. On top of that, my smart pages disappeared from Google a while back (penalized or banned?). To be fair to Mr. Pierce, he has released updates and new forms of the Smart Page which may still get accepted by Google, but with fairly unimpressive results from my own testing, I saw no point in trying the new techniques - I'd rather concentrate on building pages that don't make me nervous ;-) and I know will rank well and be around for years to come.
Traffic Equalizer & Ranking Power - the feedback on this was interesting. A lot of you stated that the pages were ugly and did not provide much in the way of value to visitors (they create pages with search engine listings on your page). I have to agree that the pages I have seen built with these tools have been awful. I also really do hate searching for something at Google only to go to a page that seemed a good match for my search term and find it is nothing more than a list of search engine listings! I hit the back button fast (and I am sure many visitors do the same). The sooner Google dumps pages like this the better.
A few of you have stated that you like these products and that they have increased Adsense revenue for you. The main point you made about these tools is that they are just that - tools. If you use them properly and spend time working your templates, they can help build pages that rank well and increase your revenue. If on the other hand you abuse these tools and flood the Internet with pages built with the default settings (which many will do) your pages deserve to get banned.
Let's finish with some comments I received about both of these tools:
First I received this from an "occasional TE user"
"I bought Traffic Equalizer several months ago. I was a bit dubious but also very curious. There is a very useful add-on ebook by a man named William Shi, which I recommend. Once my TE pages were indexed in Google, my affiliate income (including Adsense) has seen a pleasing increase, well worth my time and money.
I build content-rich websites, and I will continue to do so, but I think TE is a good adjunct. I chose it over Ranking Power because TE has an outstanding users-only forum, where people help each other in many ways. There has been a lot of discussion there about the place of TE and such things in SEO, with some people making the point that this kind of software is here to stay.
As for your comment that the search engines can spot websites made with this software, actually if a person using the software is careful, there are no real signs.
So at the end of the day, it's just another tool. There are a lot of TE pages out there that add nothing to the Internet. AND there are a lot of pages that help readers find what they want while helping the webmasters promote their products."
And in the Ranking Power corner, we have Keith Baxter:
"Being that I'm the marketing behind Ranking Power, I felt I should enlightened you a little ;-)
Ranking Power is fully customizable using templates and generates it's results using Alta Vista search engine results as well as RSS feeds. While I agree anyone using the default template with just search engine results will eventually be banned, there is no way the engines will ban a site with valid content (the purpose of the definable templates) and the RSS feeds. Being that most blogs change weekly, the content on the Ranking Power pages changes as well, thus creating new and unique content each time the spiders visit."
Thanks for the comments Keith. The addition of RSS feeds to Ranking Power is certainly a big bonus and it may make me look at this product again if only for this feature.
If you are interested in either of these products, just search Google for them. I wont provide an affiliate link to them as I really do not recommend them myself - they are just too easy to use ;-)
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2. How can articles help you?
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Last week we started to look at the ways in which content can help your web site rankings. Here is an e-mail I received this week from one subscriber highlighting the value of articles:
"I greatly concur with your comments on content, and thought you might like to know about my experience with one of my websites. My husband and I used to raise llamas, and I wrote a couple of books about llamas. One of them is now quite dated, and neither of them sells tremendously anymore. So about 8 months ago, I put their entire text up on our website www.llamas-information.com, where we sell them and a series of videos my husband produced on llamas. I spread the text out over a lot of pages -- the site went from about 25 pages to over 150. It took a while for Google
to find all the new pages, but when it did, our average number of
visitors a day went up about 50% and the sales of our llama videos went up too. We sell about the same number of books. Rosana"
Rosana added in a second e-mail:
"I remember poking around and trying some odd llama-related phrases on Google once the books had been indexed, and I was near the top for a bunch of them"
What Rosana did here was turn some unique content that she owned, into content on her web site. Each page of her web site was essentially an article related to the main theme of her site. By doing this she:
1. increased the exposure of her site on the Internet so that it was found for more keywords (which rank well)
2. makes her website more valuable to visitors by providing real, interesting information
3. shows that she is an expert on llamas, and in doing so:
4. increased the sales of her llama-related products.
If you read her e-mail you will see that her traffic went up 50%. Now, her site went from 25 pages to 150 pages. That's a 600% increase in pages, yet traffic only went up by 50%. Does that seem unfair?
Well, I have not asked Rosanna, but I suspect she put the pages of her book up as they were and did not edit them too much. Remember these pages were written to read well as a book, not to rank well in the search engines. What she could do to increase traffic even more is to:
1. Carry out keyword research on Wordtracker (or your favourite keyword research tool) for terms related to llamas.
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Note that if you are unsure how to carry out keyword research, you can download my free guide to Keyword research at:
If you downloaded it in the past it may be worth downloading it again as it has been updated.
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2. Choose the best keywords and try to re-write (optimize) every single page on her site to include these keyword phrases (one main keyword plus 2 or 3 secondary keywords per page).
3. Wait for Google to pick up the pages and sit back and relax while traffic increases a whole lot more.
The point of highlighting this example is show you the value of unique content that you own (i.e. you have written or had a ghost writer write it for you) versus content you get for free (and therefore do not own).
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Note that Gary Antosh wrote an eBook on how to buy articles for as little as $5, written to include your keywords in the frequencies you want. Read my review here if interested:
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If you own the content: You can change the keyword frequency or prominence of the keyword phrases in the article. You can optimize the article page with SEO techniques to make them rank better for a larger number of keywords. You can increase the targeted traffic to you site and potentially make more profit.
If you do not own the content: You would not be able to change anything in the article, and you would have to be happy with your 50% increase in traffic.
It really is a balancing act between work involved and results obtained. As with anything online, the more you put into something, the greater your potential gain.
Well, that's it for this week. I hope you found some of this information useful. In the last two weeks we have only just scratched the surface of this topic. In the coming weeks, the mini-course will build up to include information on how to write articles (even if you think you can't) and then how to use them to improve your rankings, link reputation and PR. If you are too lazy to write articles, don't worry. We will cover topics like how best to use free articles as well.
If you have any comments, please feel free to e-mail me at:
[REMOVED - USE CONTACT US LINK]
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If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at [REMOVED - USE CONTACT US LINK]. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That's extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.
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