A famous quote by copywriter  Paul Butterworth, aimed at copywriting critics.  ”What the heck has this got to do with SEO Tips?” you ask. Everything.  Because good effective SEO is increasingly about creating a valuable, useful resource for people online and that is largely copywriting. Original copywriting, not spun articles from other writers.

Google's Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer & Head Of Spam Prevention wants Original content in Google Rankings

Recent Google Algorithm updates were aimed at reducing spammy, copied content – which is exactly what people searching for information on the web don’t want. This change affected approximately 12% of Google searches.

According to Matt Cutts: “we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.”

Matt went on to say: ”We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.”

For search engine optimization it means that original, useful content is becoming more and more valuable, so if you can’t write, go get yourself somebody who can.

And to those who just take other’s content and “spin” it, “Where the heck were you when the page was blank anyway?“

These ancient Chinese texts contain lessons for anybody wanting to create effective search engine optimization

Perhaps the most applicable passage I’ve read in the translations from Sun Tzu’s  texts on the ‘Art of War’ is the following:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

How does that apply to SEO Tips? Well, obviously your enemy is your competitors and you need to know something about their strategy and their capabilities to effectively compete with them and you need to know your own capabilities and weaknesses – hence you can bring in expertise to help you in areas you are weak in.

But in SEO, there is another party that you have to know, the judge and adjudicator, Google. Completely impartial until you make a move, Google can be your friend or your enemy and as an enemy, it can take you out of the battle completely. It always amazes me the number of SEO experts around who do not know the Google Webmaster’s Guidelines.

Do you know specifically what techniques are going to make Google your enemy and get your site penalized? Find out. Seek out an alliance with Google and you will prosper.  Sun Tzu says: “We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors.”

Make it your business to become acquainted with the designs of Google now.

Somebody asked me last week if we could combine WordPress with Business Catalyst – integrate a WordPress blog into the Business Catalyst interface.  Nice Idea, but not possible without a large development team and a couple years up your sleeve.

But what if somebody was doing that? Making a flexible system that was focused on Internet Marketing and SEO, which had a CRM and store etc. tightly integrated. Now that would be a Kick-ass system. Certainly both WordPress and Business Catalyst have their limitations and for a number of reasons, the BC model is proving to be troublesome. Particularly:

1. Having all sites on a central system means updates are applied across the whole system without exception. It’s generally great to have updates, but what if you had used a whole lot of custom code? What if upgrades conflicted with your code and as a result your site came down or didn’t function properly.
2. BC has no staging area, so when sites are effected by updates, you have to try and fix them on a live site. This is particularly stressful when your client is testing it before your QA team can look at it and often one change affects something elsewhere on the site.

There is also the limitation of having a software company develop, vs having an online community develop. The Internet is changing rapidly and what yesterday was considered “out there” is today considered a standard feature – and the pace is rapidly accelerating.

Will the Adobe software  development style of working be quick enough to keep up with change?

I had an interesting discussion a couple of days ago with a gentleman by the name of Lawrence E. Hughes, an evangelist of IPv6 who runs one of the only IPv6 testing centres in the world, right here in Cebu, Philippines. It is Mr. Lawrence’s view that most of the world will switch to this new Internet protocol by the end of the year with or without the US, probably without.

It seems extraordinary that the country that drove the Internet could be dragging it’s heels on something so seemingly important, but there is a good reason for it. We have to switch, because we will probably run out of IPv4 IP addresses by the end of the year – that is except the US which has around 4 IP addresses for every citizen  (They allocated them), while the rest of the world has .2 of an IP for every citizen.

And the US has resisted change in the past to it’s detriment – remember Deming, the statistician who, shunned by Detroit, went on to influence Japanese industry to embark on a program which ultimately resulted in them dominating the motor car industry? And no prizes for guessing which country is at the forefront of IPv6 technology.

Anyway, according to Lawrence E. Hughes, there is a 35 year jump in technology from IPv4 to IPv6. So what does that mean to users, SEO specialists, webmasters? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing is certain – things will radically change and unless you embrace change in a big way, you are doomed to go the way of the Detroit industrialists.

IPv6 will provide secure point-to-point, direct connections between computers, without the many hops that IPv4 makes us take – so that certainly means faster connections with existing lines. It also means accessing people’s computers directly, so it probably means doing SEO on a portion of a hard drive instead of some files on an internet server.  It means masses more information becoming available and perhaps clouds being made up of individual’s computers. And it means to me, that social networking will truly become the dominant internet activity.

What about the portals? and Google? – Certainly there will still be a need for portals and Google is very much out of step with the rest of their complacent countrymen in that they are embracing IPv6.  But the big picture is that Asia is leading the way in this new chapter of internet history and they have certainly thought more about the consequences. The next Gorilla in the room may well  be Asian.

With Adobe’s launch of CS5 and it’s introduction of Business Catalyst to it’s huge database of web developers, people will begin to ask the question: “Is Adobe Business Catalyst good for SEO?” and the answer is “yes and no” – which is basically the way you would answer a question like “do guns kill people?” Business Catalyst is a tool or a platform and it is what you do with it that makes it good or bad for SEO.

Adobe Business Catalyst is a tightly integrated set of web tools, each of which is reasonable on it’s own – you will find a better CMS, or a better CRM on it’s own, but not integrated in the way they are in Business Catalyst. The CMS has all the SEO features we expect these days from a Content Management System, like the auto generated XML Google sitemap, plain English page names and and it does not fill your page with redundant source code.

But whether your site is good or bad for SEO is entirely up to you. It depends on you writing clean CSS, doing your homework, researching keywords and including those keywords in the right places on your website. It’s not really Adobe Business Catalyst that will be good or otherwise for SEO, it is you.

You hear some incredible numbers on long tail keywords from the SEO community, some say they account for over 90% of searches and this does sound feasible. It’s being approached with unbridled enthusiasm and spoken about as the ‘hidden treasure’ in web traffic with people are putting themselves up as experts in long tail keyword searches. A good look over the Analytics accounts of clients however, shows a more complex scenario.

It is also not as simple as a few higher level keywords bringing in X traffic and a long list of five, six or seven word phrases bringing in one or two searches each, it tapers off slowly. It also varies from site to site. If for instance, the company behind the website has good brand recognition in the market place, then quite probably 50% of searches will be variations of the company name or company name and location. For lesser known companies pulling generic keyword traffic, the top five keywords may be bringing only 20% of searches with the tail tapering down much more gradually.

But whatever the mix for your website, the same old SEO rules still hold true for long tail searches as they do for top level keywords. It is important to be credible to Google, to have quality links, a quality domain and good history without any link abuse or cloaking techniques.

Most importantly, content remains King. If you want to see how it works, but a completely unique keyword combination in a page you know will be indexed by Google. Then search that phrase once it has been indexed. You should come up in number 1 position. It’s how teachers check student papers for plagiarization and it’s how a site gets traffic from long tail keywords – that phrase or many of the words in it are in the content somewhere.

As with everything, there is no shortcut to getting traffic from long tail keywords, it is good content writing and careful, ethical SEO work.

There is a game I like to play often, using my imagination – I call it “If I were Google”, and I do this because Google has the money to buy any expertise it needs to buy and Google’s survival at the top still depends on it returning relevant results to your search queries and they are not necessarily the websites that have put the most money into SEO and link building.

SO, Google came to prominence through having this patented system of counting back-links. I like to call it ‘peer endorsement’, it’s based on the premise that if a website is an authority on a subject and therefore worth listing high in the results, there must be other sites, particularly sites related to that subject endorsing it. This system has worked for Google as it is harder to cheat, but then it has spawned this massive industry called link building who’s sole objective is to cheat it.

I would go as far as to say that ‘Link building’ probably accounts for a visible portion of the annual GDP of countries like India.

But then this link building really is different from genuine peer endorsement in that it is in ‘anchor text’ and genuine peer endorsement usually isn’t.

Anchor text linking means that the keywords themselves are linked to the website using HTML and all SEO people use Anchor text.

Have you ever seen a genuine endorsement of a website linked with anchor text? I don’t think I have and I believe that this is because

1. Most people don’t know how to do it and
2. The point of the endorsement is to tell their readers about that website, not to help it rank higher in Google.

So if I were Google, I would place very little relevance on anchor text links and instead determine the relevant keywords for the link from the nearest sub-heading and the text surrounding the link – and I’m talking about genuine http://www.relevantwebsite.com type links.

And then, I’m one man with an imagination. Google can buy a hundred like me and so they probably did everything I’m suggesting a couple years back. Meanwhile, the SEO industry barrels on like a freight train, impressing traffic hungry business with their ‘secrets’ and churning out millions of links that probably have very little relevance in Google’s algorithms.

SEO Tips - Using Web 2.0 tools or social networking sites to assist with your website rank

There has been a lot of hype lately about Web 2.0 or social networking tools and like everything else SEO, people search for the magic formula which is going to unleash the power of web 2.0 and finally give them the online success they deserve.

But really, SEO is like other forms of marketing – it’s common sense. It’s about understanding whatever beast it is you’re dealing with, what makes them tick, what their objectives are and then align your activities with those objectives.

For instance, we know that Google wants to give people the most relevant matches they can for their keyword searches – that’s why people come back and that’s why Google is the most valuable piece of online real estate on the planet.

We also know that Google likes Web 2.0 bookmarks, blogs, posts – Why? Go back to what makes Google important – relevance. So they provide relevance.  Why? Perhaps partly  because they have their own policies of policing and eliminating spammers and let’s face it, the biggest threat to Google’s existence is Spammers – People getting their site listed in keywords it is not supposed to be listed in. And that is easier to do with blogs and websites you put up yourself, than it is in a Web 2.0 environment where people are looking out for suspicious activities.

Even without Google, Web 2.0 sites have huge membership numbers and can generate loads of traffic for your website – but to use them effectively, you have to understand them and that takes time. There are no shortcuts, there is no super software – spam is spam and relevance is relevance. You have to be relevant, you have to be real and you have to be somebody that people want to deal with and then you work the numbers, just like marketing anywhere.

I was devastated yesterday when I checked the rankings of one of our websites – it had slid down a couple of places  in Google in about 20 keywords.  I rushed to the search engine to find out which one of our low-life competitors had trumped us, but what I found caught me completely by surprise.

It was we who had trumped us in Google.

How? well we had a whole lot of Web 2.0 posts on the internet that had been there a while and done nothing and we commented on them – I just had all the guys and girls put comments on these posts from our account and wham! Straight to number 1. Unbelievable.

Never, never underestimate the power of Web 2.0, but remember – it is a bit like news or current affairs – it needs to stay fresh and be freshened up – or it ends up in the bin with all the other stale leftovers.