Site Content… Is it Crap?

Heres a great article I found written By Enzo F. Cesario. This really spells out the difference between good site content and crappy content to your readers

People are a notoriously self-interested lot. They avoid activities that don’t benefit them, skip events that bore them, and reject Site Content that doesn’t interest them in some way. They aren’t going to go out of their way to read up on an article simply because it has all the information the author thinks is vital and important if they personally feel that article site content  is a waste of their time. Indeed, nothing is a surer waste of someone’s time than a crappy, poorly assembled article site content. A piece of copy could have the very recipe for successful nuclear fusion buried on page 14, but if it bored readers away on page 9, no one will ever dig deep enough to find it and society will continue to churn out dirty coal and uranium waste.

This raises the natural question: What exactly is “crappy” site content? The short and almost tautological answer is “Site Content that people don’t like,” but simply saying that doesn’t get a writer anywhere. There are many kinds of crappy site content, each with its own unique reasons for being a dull and uninteresting lump rather than a well-polished gem of online commentary.

Type 1 – SEO Smash site content

First, let it be said that there are few techniques as important to online brand marketing at this time as Search Engine Optimization. Google rightly can claim to rule the web by means of its indexing power. A recent merger between Microsoft’s software and the Yahoo! search engine was described in terms of its ability to challenge the reigning king, Google, not on its own merits. So, the ability to get site content noticed by search engines through the use of keywords, meta tags, and proper formatting is all a vital portion of the site content process.

However, any site content article first approached from the angle of creating an SEO-perfect piece, rather than with a focus on presenting an existing idea through the lens of an SEO effort, is going to get called out as crap. SEO-centric writing leads to articles and site content that are little more than keyword phrases badly hashed together with poor grammar and unusual contortions of the English language, and people notice this kind of site content. They might pop by for a look, but they won’t stick around. First have something to say, then learn the best way to say it.

Type 2 – Site Content Humor Bludgeon

There’s a trend on the web for articles and site content to be entertaining, funny and even to an extent snarky or sarcastic. This trend can be seen in the success of biting commentary sites such as Something Awful or the new Rifftrax DVDs (a series dedicated entirely to making fun of poorly-made movies).

Everybody wants to imagine they’re a clever, witty genius who can turn a fairly dull piece of site content writing into biting social commentary and satire. Most of these people are not such paragons of humor, however. Instead, their site content writing comes across as forced and scraping for obvious jokes that seem tired and strained. As a rule of thumb, if a funny turn of phrase comes to mind on its own, a site content writer should feel free to give it a try. If the site content writer has to consciously think about how to make something sound funny, it probably doesn’t need to sound funny – and doesn’t belong in the article or site content.

Type 3 – The Site Content Meme Beam

A variation on the topic of humor and witty banter above, memetics is a theory of social information transmission. Memes are ideas that are passed and replicated between people, and on the web they tend to take the form of popular sayings or pictures that catch on and go viral. Caturday is a meme, being the tendency of people to post funny pictures about cats on Saturdays. Other memes reference an imagined rivalry between pirates and ninjas, zombie apocalypses and other esoteric topics of web discussion and site content.

A well-referenced meme can make an article or site content more entertaining. A forced meme gets nothing more than rolled eyes and a disparaging snort in most cases, and quickly-spread criticism in the worst instances. Unless there’s a compelling reason to include a meme – such as a particular target audience, or the fact that your brand focuses on a specific meme – don’t try.

Type 4 – Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing In Your Site Content

Few things are more irritating than wasting someone’s time. The above examples are bad, and each one can lead to an article or site content being dismissed, but they are also forgivable and won’t produce as virulent a reaction as presenting someone a piece of site content that does them no good at all. Avoid this trap with all possible effort and ingenuity, because the moment it gets out that a brand has nothing to contribute, that brand is finished.

Instead, make sure every piece of site content put up as part of a brand contributes something to the lives of the readers or viewers absorbing the site content in question. Provide a tip about acquiring the product, a handy maintenance routine for keeping it running or even a story explaining how the brand has learned from its mistakes in its latest ad campaign and that it’s listening to the audience. Do something to contribute to the conversation. If the brainstorming meeting can’t say in less than 2 minutes why a particular piece of site content is going up, don’t put it up.

Bottom line, don’t write crappy site content.

SEO Using A PDF

For a couple of years now, Google has been able to crawl PDF documents, and as certain businesses were launching new products — I began to notice they were taking a non-traditional approach to Search Engine Ranking and Internet Marketing: These companies would slap together a PDF with a couple of pages of text content about the product, upload it to their web site, link to it from their home page, and in no time flat that PDF file would have the No. 1 ranking in both Google and Yahoo! for the relevant keywords. They were doing search engine optimization using a pdf and they weren’t the only company doing so.

One of these companies main competitors was also launching a similar product, sourced from the same manufacturer. One thing that benefitted both companies was that the product they were launching didn’t have much search history, so neither company had much competition for the relevant keywords on the internet.

More interesting still is the fact that this second company didn’t know about the use search engine optimization using a pdf in their Search Engine Optimization. They took a more traditional approach to SEO with their new product: They built out a web site with some good descriptive content, did their backlinking as you normally would, created some Press Releases, and submitted the site to the Search Engines.  The problem was, they had a heck of a time getting their traditional website with the great content they developed to outrank the search engine optimization using a pdf technique from the first company. Ultimately, the second company followed the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” scenario and produced their own search engine optimization using a pdf which immediately started battling the competitor’s PDF for search engine supremacy.

With so many businesses — especially retailers — having access to PDFs full of product information, here are some thoughts on search engine optimization using a pdf for search engine visibility.

Search Engine Optimization Using A PDF

1. All three major engines can crawl and index text-based PDFs. If you need proof, just do a search on each SE with [pdf] in the query. Google: white paper pdf … Yahoo: white paper pdf … MSN: white paper PDF

2. search engine optimization using a pdf is similar to optimization for a regular content page. Try this: good use of keywords/phrases, appropriate headlines and sub-headlines, solid content that reads well to a human eye, etc. If the PDF will include images, a caption underneath each image would be a good idea, especially if the caption includes a targeted keyword/phrase. (Of course, don’t overdo it. Remember my mom’s advice about SEO.)

Search Engine Optimization Using A PDF

Download Search Engine Optimization Using A PDF Here

Proof: Using the search above, we find this PDF ranked prominently in all three engines. On page 9 of this PDF, there’s a bold content heading (the equivalent of an H2): Awareness and Usage of the XML Button. Let’s not use the exact text, but something close: Here are the SERPs for [xml button awareness]: Yahoo, Google, and MSN. In each case, you find the PDF ranked highly in the SERPs and that exact bold content heading showing prominently in the snippet.

3. The most important thing where search engine optimization using a pdf is concerned is how the PDF is created. Don’t use Photoshop to make your PDF, because when you do that, you’re actually making a big image file, not a true PDF — and the spiders cannot crawl or “read” the text from that image file. The PDF should be created with a text-based program, like MS Word or Adobe Pagemaker, so that the final product is text-based and can be crawled.

4. Your PDF can reside anywhere on your site, but the same rule about spiders not being likely to crawl content that’s too deep applies. The safest thing to do is to put it as close to the root directory as possible.

5. When publishing a PDF on your site, you should very visibly link to the PDF from the home page, or from some page that gets crawled regularly. You have to lead the crawler along so it finds the new content as quickly as possible. Don’t just post the PDF and then cross your fingers that it gets crawled. (See my old post, Training the Crawlers for more.)

6. It’s probably a good idea to use a keyword when naming the files, such as main keyword.pdf. I have done some serious investigation on what impact this has, so it would seem to be a good idea to use a keyword when naming the file — to be safe, in case there’s a little boost to be had.

So that’s my quick and dirty overview on search engine optimization using a pdf.

Selling online

Once upon a time, setting up a business meant opening up a shop somewhere where you could be sure that customers would come to see you. You needed to order stock and keep the shop tidy, well-heated or ventilated, and you needed to always be there. All of this meant that starting to sell would be preceded by weeks, even months of extremely diligent work, and with no guarantee of success anyone looking to set up a business would often decide that, on balance, the risk was too big. Now those problems are things of the past, and the potential businessperson can get things up and running very quickly.

The thing about “bricks and mortar” businesses is that they relied a lot on location and the other factors mentioned above. By going electronic, your sales room can be a small study under your stairs and your customers can be anybody. There is plenty of technology available which allows you to process payments electronically from a customer’s credit card or online banking facility. But even if you are not in a position to do this, you can set up a PayPal account and do your selling on eBay. Scarcely any initial outlay for you, and potential for the money to come flowing in with scarcely any delay. And now you can do business in your pajamas at 1.30am. so many of the obstacles to someone hoping to make a way in the business world have been removed, and it is all thanks to the Internet.

Promotion Sites

Promoting your business is something that will generally be important if you want to bring in customers and make a success of it. There are numerous ways of doing this, some of which are expensive and others which, as a matter of relief to the person looking to get a business up and running quickly and on a budget, are free of charge. Free promotion of a business has its drawbacks compared to when paying for it – it is less direct and will not be as prominent. On the other hand however, there are clear upsides to free advertising. For one, well, it is free, and for another it is really quite simple.

Getting free advertising is something that need only take half an hour – and that is allowing for writing the advertising copy and ensuring that it looks good. There are sites devoted to free advertising – two of the most famous being Gumtree and Craigslist. Both of these sites simply require you to write a short description of your business, prices and some contact details so that interested parties can get details from you and arrange a deal.

These sites make their money by placing advertisements on the site from companies who will pay for exposure in a setting where people are looking to conduct business. You make your money by placing an attractive advertisement that will make potential customers want to know more. After that it is a matter of handling enquiries and arranging deals. All of that for zero outlay, too. Isn’t it amazing?

Promotion is Important

There have been people – many people – who have set up a website for their business and sat back expecting it to become lucrative immediately. While the Internet has made business a lot easier for the individual with the intellectual capital to make it happen, there is little scope for making money without investing time and effort. However, compared to setting up a High Street business, the Internet can deliver results for a relatively small outlay on your behalf. An advertising budget makes things easier – no-one would ever deny that – but it is certainly not essential. A bit of time and awareness will also bear results.

The Internet is crawling with forums and message boards. For just about any topic of conversation you can imagine, there will be at least a few message boards on the Internet, each slightly different in the way they look at the subject. Certainly, there will be a message board that discusses things that have a connection with your business. By registering on these forums, you can make your business known to a receptive audience. Many forums have anti-spam measures that prevent you from posting irrelevant content or linking without context, but there are no reasons why you cannot link to your business in the signature box that most allow beneath posts.

Depending on the nature of your business, the possibilities for promotion on the Internet are many and varied, and they make for a real opportunity to drive your business forward, usually at no extra cost to yourself.