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ReBlogging: The new pest

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Have your articles been reblogged?
Are you aware of the copyright rules here on p.com?
You know that using ads on a site makes that site ‘commercial’?

Stop automatic reblogging of your articles!

Or better: Go ahead and tell Google to stop indexing those sites.

The case

Today I was alerted that my name is showing up on some website. I checked the page and could see that my p.com feed is reblogged. Some others, like Darren Rowse are also hit.

  • The site: article words .com
  • The issue narrowed in : Google Blog Search (GBS) BlogBridge to monitor my name and links to my sites. Those search feeds show up in a guide called ‘MM Blogs’ and give me an immediate feedback. BlogBridge offers so called ‘smart searches’ which make it very easy to get those results. In other feed readers you will have to set up those searches by copying & pasting the appropriate RSS sources.

    It is no big deal to set up such an automatic monitoring to search for good or bad usage of your content!

    My reaction

    I simply sent the above GBS address and search term to make them aware of the website. A stronger weapon would be to file an AdSense DMCA Complaint.

    This is a reminder to follow your traces, may they be good or bad…

Better writing: Pronouns are evil (NEW: Now with examples!)

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Don’t use pronouns – Use nouns

Better writing by avoiding pronouns.

1. The part of speech that substitutes for nouns or noun phrases and designates persons or things asked for, previously specified, or understood from the context.
2. Any of the words within this part of speech, such as he or whom.

Source: pronouns

Cryptic rule

1. Wherever natural, eliminate pronouns and replace with descriptive nouns.

The idea with this tip is to help the search engines identify the semantics of your article. Nouns help specify your article and also reduce the noise-to-signal ratio. For the most part, think of pronouns in the same way as clunky, excessive HTML code -> they keep your article from reaching it’s highest potential.

Source: 7 Easy Tips To Maximize Your Blog Posts

You ask for examples? Here they come:

Examples

It was a sunny day.
The last day in October was a sunny day.

As I said before he is a great guy.
As I said before Markus Merz is a great guy. Read his (oops?) articles and sometimes he (oops!) is doing it (oops!) right. Catchy example, isn’t it (oops?)?

I tested it and it is a really useful product.
I tested that toaster and it is a really useful product.

Got it?
Got the semantic argument?

How-To successfully monetize repeating content

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Did you already build up an article stack?
Are you writing new articles all the time?

I bet you have subjects which come up frequently

Yesterday I had about 3,800 search visitors on one single article (and 600 related on a 2nd) because of one event which happens two or three times a year (a very heavy storm followed by local flooding). It is very important to identify those articles and stay on the subject.

A bloggers normal reaction would be to create a new article everytime the event occurs. I advise you to bring those articles (read: URLs) up to the front again. Use the old article, rewrite it, enhance and republish it.

The key is to use the existing search engine love for that URL!

Let me simply call it long-term brand building for ONE article. My philosophy is to write articles like they are a whole website on a subject. This has proved to be very successful and much less time consuming than always creating a new article. Ahmed points to the truth – And I expand the statement on ONE old and successful article compared to a new article:

… a page on a highly-trusted website would rank higher than a page on a newer, less-trusted website. Call it trust and authority, call it Google’s bias towards old sites, the bottom line is that well-established websites and blogs find it easier to rank high for 3-4 keyword search terms.

Source: Pt. 12 – Predictive SEO

Use existing SE authority – Identify repeating content

[Ryan Caldwell commenting on the same article:] I must say that the fundamental operating principle for all link building should be in terms of long-term brand building.

I would add that accumulating links on ONE article is better then having some links for every new article on the same subject.

How do I do it?

It’s nothing new, maybe a new recipe.

The basics

  • Analyse incoming search engine traffic with 103bees.com. There I look at the landing pages and their specific traffic, search phrases and search keywords. I concentrate on the successful pages and not so much on the long tail.
  • I doublecheck the successful pages with my analytics package. For long term number crunching I still use Google Analytics. Repeating traffic spikes can easily be spotted. More important is the fact that you can identify how much in advance the traffic is building up. This way you can schedule the right time for an update!
  • Of course I am also using a calendar to remind me on upcoming events. My tool of choice is airset.com. The feature list is impressive. I simply sync my good old Palm Desktop software with airset. Alarm items are send via email, daily schedules.

The extras

Send update notifications to people who have referred to your page. Search for links to that existing URL and you are done. This is another advantage compared to a new article. You can use the existing link network and get traffic from already existing backlinks!

  • Send email to webmasters or
  • Simply write a new comment: XY article updated
  • For both: Add a little excerpt of the news
  • In case you commented before and only linked to your homepage use the correct deep link for your new comment even if the link was already mentioned in the article.

Remember: Timing is a very important factor! This is esp. true if you want to have good PPC conversion.

The example

Yesterday it was Sturmflut Hamburg: Webcam am Fischmarkt but I also have one article about how-to find regional flea markets which performances traffic spikes every weekend. And many other articles about recurring events. Some of them build traffic over month. Identifying this slow growing traffic wave and taking care of news early enough converted really well in PPC income because the advertisers aren’t stupid. I only had to follow.

Bonus: Aggregation?

This is a little opposite to the next point. It is aimed at bloggers who already have many small articles about one subject. Some alternatives:

  • Aggregate all the collected info into the most successful article about that subject
  • Aggregate all the collected info into a new article
  • Create an extra archive article which points in form of a link list to the short articles

Bonus: Widen your blog network

If you are successful with long-term brand building for ONE long article you will know which subjects on that page people search for. Print out the article, get/export the search phrases and start to think about an own website for that single subject. Visually cut the article in parts and create single pages on a new site around your ‘new’ niche. This way your website network grows organically from successful content.

3 SEO plugins: More traffic with custom titles and individual descriptions

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Abstract: SEO: SERP CTR optimization + three plugins for WordPress.

How-To get a nice click through rate (CTR) on search engine result pages (SERPs) and how to achieve a better listing. This article is meant for everybody who likes to optimize his website/blog for better search engine results. Additionally I will list three plugins for WordPress to achieve that goal. Senior SEO hobbyists may skip this article 🙂

I will explain those SEO basics on a more general level and not specifically for one platform only.

Individual page titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords

From my previous comment about page dependent header meta description:

The whole subject with descriptions showing up in SERPs is IMPORTANT for every single URL on a site. In my experience it is one of the biggest SEO and CTR success stories if you are able to create a strong individual description and title for every single page.

The goal is to have individual meta descriptions and page titles for all pages including tag search result pages, full text search result pages and category lists. Advanced feature: Use search variables to trigger Amazon searches (Examples: Tag video, Search Hamburg).

What the heck am I talking about?

I am talking about some SEO basics which make the difference between being found AND clicked or not. Being found is one thing but Joe Searcher still has to get the motivation to click on your link. A nice description on SERPs is the key factor for a good CTR. (Related: How do I change my site’s title and description in SERPs?)

Three items controllable by the webmaster have to be optimized:

  1. Page title (most important)
  2. Meta description (important for a good CTR)
  3. Meta keywords (Well, to be ignored but easy to integrate)

Note: I don’t talk about the clean URL scheme but in case you need advice: 11 Best Practices for URLs.

Page Title

The page title is the fat eye catcher on Google. Technically we are talking about the ... part in your HTML header. Very simple and very important is the right order and length. The title has to be as short as possible, must be descriptive (tell the whole story) and may have a short branding item at the end (i.e. your sitename). Please don’t list keywords except for homepage and list pages!

Order: Article title always first!!!

Some recommended articles on article titles and why they are so super important. Skip this if you are fine with your article titles (reused list from Header titles optimize AdSense output):

  • Killer Blog Titles
  • Blog Titles are Ads (for your blog)
  • Managing Titles and Paths For Traffic

In short: Before publishing your article double and triple check your article titles!

Meta Description

The individual meta description for every URL on your website is the 2nd killer CTR factor. Technically it is the part in your HTML header. The meta description must be descriptive and keyword rich to show up in SERPs. A short branding item at the end (i.e. your sitename) is only allowed if it adds keyword density. If not don’t add your brand.

A fitting meta description will show up in SERPs below the catchy article title and give extra information like an excerpt of the page.

Wikipedia is explaining it pretty nice:

The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a web page’s content. This allows the webpage authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was to automatically create its own description based on the page content. The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can impact click-through rates. Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages. W3C doesn’t specify the size of this description meta tag, but almost all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 200 characters of plain text

Order is important. Content is more important. Keyword density decides if the meta description is shown on SERPs.

I am using the “title, keywords, brand” order. Experiments have shown on my site that using automatic excerpts result in free fall incoming SERP traffic horror (>50%). If you have the chance to fill your meta descriptions from variables instead of using auto excerpts I can only recommend to do so!

Repeating the title does not hurt because the font format is different. Using a keyword list is fine because the found keywords are highlighted and signal strong relevance. Again: If your brand does not add keyword density then don’t use it.

A sample How-To for Textpattern lovers:
Trick: Textpattern with page dependent header meta description

Example: Google search for Fischmarkt Webcam. Even if not #1 the fat keywords make “Sturmflut Hamburg: Webcam am Fischmarkt © Hamburg St. Georg …” a pretty impressive #4 supported by the tag page on #5 (on my German SERP).

Meta Keywords

The meta keywords are no CTR or SEO factor at all. But having that tag in the header of your HTML doesn’t hurt. Wikipedia again very nice:

By late 1997, however, search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keyword attribute, was often unreliable and misleading, and at worst, used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw people to their site.)

Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements, and in July 2002 AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them.

No consensus exist whether or not the keywords attribute has any impact on ranking at any of the major search engine today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. 37 leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none.

Nothing to add! But as it is so easy to add the keywords from your articles to the page HTML header why not do it anyway?

Three WordPress plugins

I have found three plugins for WordPress which can do those on page optimizations. No order intended!

  • SEO Title Tag 2.n – A WordPress Plugin for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
  • All in One SEO Pack – Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …
  • wpSEO verleiht WordPress Flügel. “Wer es gleich richtig machen will, greift zu wpSEO.” (Dr. Web Magazin)

SEO Title Tag is specialized to create customized page titles. This is done by hand. From the SEO point of view this is the best possibility but, well, it takes some time. It looks like a beautiful tool to tweak more corporate content. The screenshots show good examples. The support of ‘mass editing of meta descriptions’ is on the To-Do list (with a question mark).

All in One SEO Pack is the most mentioned plugin for automatic search engine optimization (SEO) with WordPattern. In general this is the #1 Volkswagen Beatle for WP SEO.

wpSEO is from Germany and offers a huge load of fine SEO tuning possibilities for a WP installation. The page and the whole documentation on the website is in German (Try Google: +wpSEO english documentation. From a look at the wpSEO feature list this plugin seems to offer most of the functions I would love to have for advanced SEO settings.

At the moment wpSEO doesn’t provide a documentation in English (…). However, you can be sure that you won’t really need a step-by-step-tutorial. wpSEO is free, simple and self-explanatory.

Compared to Optimal Title and Head META Description, wpSEO is a simple and more comprehensive solution you can use to take care of SEO optimization.

Source: wpSEO: More SEO for WordPress pretty fresh from smashingmagazine.com.

Advanced HTML: Use the mentioned variables in HTML comments to structure your source code and do some ‘below the hood’ SEO for your on page keyword density.

Example: Check the source code of this article to find nice individual meta descriptions and keywords (Example Texas Legislation Video).

And the winner is?

Well, I am using Textpattern, I am German and I would use wpSEO if I would use WordPress. The reason (again): “If you have the chance to fill your meta descriptions from variables instead of using auto excerpts I can only recommend to do so!”

The world is still waiting for a WordPatternPal (WordPress plugins + Textpattern CMS + Drupal community). I hope this article is useful for all people tweaking their blog.

What do you think?

How-To Write E-Mails That Build Your Professional Network

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You want to build a personal network and you are doing this via the different social services like Facebook or StumbleUpon. You try to make people your friends and you are writing personal introductions.

Don’t hesitate to contact people but do it right!

The following example was in my Facebook inbox this morning. The mail is nice but it will not work as expected even if this guy is a friend of mine on Facebook already:

Hi Markus,

I am actively looking to meet new people at the moment. My business is my passion and I am now ready for market.

My business is media production – our company’s first project is centered on music and built around the artist Xyz. It is an incredibly exciting time to be in this business!

I am looking for introductions to people who do business in this area, particularly Europeans.

I would be delighted to reciprocate,

With very best wishes

N.
—————-
Now playing on iTunes:…

Let’s do a little text analysis and strip that mail down:

1st pararaph: I am, My business, my passion, I am
2nd paragraph: My business, our company, incredibly exciting
3rd paragraph: I am, particularly Europeans
4th paragraph: I would

What am I supposed to do? I am confused.

Is this guy talking to me???

How-To contact people you never met

A contact mail has to have an attractive story telling title. In this example the title was “N. Introduction…”. Make it personal and appeal to my curiosity.

  • Hi Markus, now that we are friends on Facebook…

Start with a personal message or a question which might be answered by the recipient with ‘Yes’. Repeat the title and give more information aimed at the recipient.

  • Hi Markus, being friends on Facebook now (Thanks for your confirmation!) I would like to give you some informations which you won’t find on my Facebook profile. Please tell me if this useful for you (or not!). Maybe you can help me in the future?

The 2nd paragraph should give some short (!) personal background info like age, family status, link to personal website and other network links (i.e. p.com blog). Always remember that you are talking to a stranger!

The 3rd paragraph can introduce your business activity. BUT you must explain why you think that your business activity is interesting for the recipient. If you can’t explain it then only add a link to your business site to make it easier for the recipient (!) to get more info about your business. Don’t be pushy! Better be patient and wait for future chances to introduce you business.

At the end it is a must to be personal. “I would be delighted to reciprocate, “. For what? To ‘reciprocate’ for what?

  • It was a great help for me to read your p.com article about building a nice Facebook profile. Let’s have some fun and exchange ideas. What do you think?

If you use a signature it is allowed to contain business information. Like a ‘PS:’ a signature can have very strong impact. Some direct marketing people say that the ‘PS:’ is the strongest signal at all. Don’t give that chance away!

A last tip: Using the internal messaging system is fine but if you have a personal email address use standard email and not the internal messaging system! Most recipients will have a personal workflow for their mail inbox but not for the different internal messaging services.

PS: Don’t emphasize on facts which can be seen on a first glance at your profile page.

How-To Be A Collaborative Blogger

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Reflecting on the whole How-To build a Facebook profile issue and also about my engagement here on p.com I came to the clue that being a friendly guy helps to build your personal network.

Nothing new you say?

I am pretty sure that you read a lot of different sources and I am also pretty sure that you never blog about 95% to 99% of the things you are reading about. I propose that if you share a little bit you will get back something.

Create a list of bloggers and send them found ‘items’ by mail.

It is the same thinking pattern like with the old gatekeeper media but with a back channel. You know that ‘this is something the newspaper should know about’ thing. Do the same for bloggers.

Lets talk about collaboration.

Collaboration is a key factor for your network reputation

A little definition which comes in two flavors:

  1. To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort.
  2. To cooperate reasonably, as with an enemy occupation force in one’s country.

Source: “Collaboration.” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language

Both definitions are helpful even if the 2nd one sounds negative but you only have to replace “enemy occupation force” with “your niche occupation force” and then you have the old link building scheme 🙂

Are you reading in subject niches about which you don’t blog?

How big would be the effort to send hints and tips to bloggers from whom you know that they are writing about that stuff? You don’t have to blog it 1st and then ask for a backlink. Just a plain simple email with a good subject and a short body is all it needs to gain reputation.

To do

Make a list of bloggers for certain subjects and if you stumble over an interesting item send a short summary and a link to one (!) of these bloggers. It is up to you if you prefer to network with the big guys or if build your reputation in the long tail.

Items can be: Articles, book titles, movies, travel destinations, a photo, a sng, … you name it.

As it is so easy to be too offensive I think a mistake list is important.

Do Not make these five mistakes

  • Don’t use the subject line ‘Hi’ or ‘This could be interesting for you’. Be collaborative and have a good title which tells the whole story.
  • Don’t be talkative. Who, when, where, what should be enough.
  • Don’t mention the 50 websites you have. One specific website is all it needs for a backlink. If you cover related subjects one deep link is better than a homepage.
  • Don’t make it a press release. Send the tip to one blogger and not to a whole group of people.
  • Don’t ask! Follow the blog instead. One of the most annoying things are people who send me a sample and ask several times if I will write about it. And don’t even think about a phone call!

Related

  • My recommended feed reader BlogBridge has the beautiful possibility to memorize one email address for every feed. If I am reading a good article I send a personal two line compliment.
  • Every other famous blogger has written something about the ‘How-To get my attention’ subject.

Related Links, tips and hints are welcome in the comments.

Facebook: Building a nice profile page

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The better title is: Building a nice Facebook profile page from your existing content with F8 applications. But that’s too long for a catchy title 🙂

Yesterday evening I logged into my Facebook account and stared at my Facebook profile page. It was pretty boring and I decided to tweak it. But the content should come from existing pages and services.

Use the Facebook F8 applications

First question was which services to use to pull nice content into my profile page. I can offer some valuable sources:

Remember: My aim is not to use Facebook all the time or to engage too much into all this networking. My very first aim is to create an attractive profile page! The rest may come later (or not).

Luckily I could find some working F8 applications for all my sources to pull that content nicely into my Facebook profile. The research was done on the Facebook applications page. Looking for ‘Flickr’, ‘RSS’, ‘LastFM’ and ‘StumbleUpon’ got me the Facebook F8 applications I needed.

The result can be seen here: Markus Merz on Facebook. I think it is pretty content rich, looks nice, promotes some of my existing content and is a good base for my future work on Facebook (if needed). If somebody asks for my Facebook address I can happily hand over that page as my Facebook business card and show off my web 2.0 competence. What do you think?

Additionally I did:

Strip down that mini-feed

I deleted all the mini feed events which I think are not useful for my visitors. Of course I also defined all applications not to be too verbose in the future.

Create a group on Facebook

And fill in some content mostly links to existing pages or services. Too bad that F8 applications can’t be used for groups (as far as I know): Hamburg St. Georg

What useful tips do you have for a Facebook profile page? Hints and examples welcome!

I.e.: I will add my p.com blog via RSS 🙂

SEO: Reciprocal links are NOT dead

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I just received the Search Engine Facts newsletter in my mail which comes with a very nice guest article from Stoney deGeyter (Pole Position Marketing). I have no idea what polepositionmarketing.com is good for but the guest article is a nice call for ongoing action in the link love section of SEO.

Reciprocal links are (still) not dead

Reciprocal links are not dead. Weren’t dead before. Aren’t dead now. I know it and you know it. But for just a second let’s pretend otherwise.

A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. I had a potential client once tell me that so-and-so-big-name-in-the-SEO-industry told them that reciprocal links were dead. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it here again.

There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links. It’s all about how you use/implement them that matters. No, reciprocal links are not dead and now I have the proof.

Last year I decided to run my own test so I could refute what I already knew to be true. Yeah, I know who cares about reciprocal links now, right? (…)

Source / Read the rest of the article here: Reciprocal links are (still) not dead

Just read the whole thing and go on to link back to people you like and make sure that the linked sites offer quality to your readers.

My good old three golden rules

Basically the onpage SEO is what it always was:

  1. See every single permalink article in a blog as ONE single website which has to build up link love and reputation for a very narrow subject. My tip: Use internal keyword linking if you don’t do it yet. Every single keyword will result in an internal keyword search result page (with excerpts!) pointing back to the main article.
  2. Don’t have too many links on every page (the typical sidebar) linking everywhere. Make your internal links for the article (keywords, categories) show up first followed by the article body containing valuable external links.
  3. Show link love and receive link love but make sure that the landing page content fits to the ONE single page or article.

Side Kicks (building external links)

And I still love my article 10 Tips for More Blog Traffic which is one of the best ways to create external backlinks with a high authority yourself.

The important comment backlink

Never forget when commenting on another blog that it is always worth the extra seconds to post a fitting backlink and not only a link to your homepage!