Keyword Research

Keyword Research is a difficult task. Anyone who has tried to drive eyeballs to their website can vouch for this fact. It’s also well known that increasing traffic is not necessarily going to benefit your site, but increasing well-targeted traffic - people who are qualified to be interested in your product or service - will almost certainly benefit the bottom line. With this in mind there is little point in adding content to a site without making sure that you have defined your keywords clearly and are working to include them in your content, internal and external linking, and PPC campaigns. To fail to do this would simply dilute the effectiveness of this type of business development.

 

Local Words - Fresh Traffic

One of the essential components to good keyword development is knowing the local parlance and phrasing that surrounds your topic. For those immersed in their subject matter, it can be difficult to see their subject from different angles, but to develop a great keyword campaign, tapping into markets other than the market that you’re familiar with can be a big help. People in different countries use different word patterning and their languages exhibit specific linguistic nuances. This can present an opportunity to unlock traffic from new parts of the world as your keyword understanding expands. In the same way that much of the fun of traveling can center around experiencing cultural differences, engaging a multi-cultural business model will inevitably illuminate differences. One favorite example of local languages conveying the same meaning with different words include the greeting equivalents, “How you going?” for Australians and, “How you doing?” for Canadians and Americans. Another example can be seen in the the grand ‘biscuits‘ vs ‘cookies‘ confusion. This suggests that to pick one or the other is to err; incorporating multiple voices into your keyword strategy will allow your campaign to include potential clients from other locations.

Online marketers know that this difference in language can mean the difference between catching the eye of your target market and missing it. People often search the internet using spoken English, so understanding the way that a product is spoken about across a broad spectrum will allow for a larger and still well-targeted sales campaign. Finding how keywords are used in common vernacular in other regions or languages is difficult, but it is possible to get help.

 

Listening for Keywords

To help us develop more sophisticated methods for creating keyword lists, Gab Goldenberg of SEO ROI Services, spoke to the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle about embracing some new techniques. One main thrust of his presentation was the idea that listening can be used as a form of keyword discovery. Rather than simply letting Google/Wordtracker/Fill-in-your-keyword-discovery-tool-here recommend keywords based on your understanding of a topic, he recommended visiting places that people gather to talk about your subject - forums, blogs and Twitter - to “put an ear to the ground” and learn the language of people in your subject. Sifting through these conversations, you can learn the words people are using to describe the products and services that you provide from their own mouths and start to build keyword phrases that highlight the local vernacular of people already active in the subject area. This technique expands beyond just gaining a better understanding for the search terms in a field that you’re not familiar with. A great first step to building a keyword list to focus on in a new niche is to find out what the experts and influencers are calling your products and services. Find the experts and influential publishers in your niche and consider their publications as fertile ground for finding relevant keywords for topics in your niche. This will give you access to a nicely refined set of keyword phrases to focus on. As Gab made clear, with highly targeted keyword phrases, the competition decreases, and whether you’re doing PPC or organic search marketing, less competition is good.

With over a billion people on the Internet there’s a whole lot of searching going on. Sometimes it’s easy to think that we’re all searching for the same things using the same words. We’re not. We’ve all got our own brands of English and our own ways of describing things that might be unique to us, our town, our country, our group of friends. It’s both mind boggling and exciting.

Wow, SMX Advanced has been awesome so far. Great speakers and great information. The schedule is set up so that there are back-to-back presentations more or less through the whole day. I can only say that it is going to take a few weeks to digest all this information.

So what are the takeaways for webmasters, after listening to Matt Cutts‘ talk? One message that came through pretty clearly: after you’ve got the basics of good site concept and its architecture down, having some really fantastic content, videos or tools on your site should be the next focus. While there are still some search engine ranking gains to be had by applying yourself to the technical side of the optimizing your site, the message indicates that every webmaster needs to start looking long and hard at creating fantastic stuff for their site that users will find valuable and interesting.

To recap: having the technical side of things in order is certainly important, but if you want to realize high search engine rankings, it is essential to spend the time, effort and money to publish information on your site that is timely and helpful for the user.

Another take-away for the day came out of the Search Ranking Factors for 2009 talk, during which Rand Fishkin spent time unpacking the idea that search engines like to include freshly published content in their search engine rankings. Lots of times people are searching for news about a particular subject, and consequently the search engines will rank newly published information highly in order to satisfy the searchers’ (possible) need for recently published articles. This brings home the fact that there is a need to keep adding content to your site, and it shows that opportunities are available for sites that are regularly adding new content.

Lot’s of other great info is coming that I’m looking forward to sharing!

I’m making the trip to SMX Advanced in Seattle. This is a great opportunity to introduce Constant-Content to some of the movers and shakers in the search marketing world! SMX Advanced looks like it will be a great conference with many of the in-house and agency SEO’s attending so it will be great to introduce them to the site and get their feedback. I’m looking forward to seeing how we can tailor the way that we market our articles to these companies.

If you’re interested in following the events in Seattle, check out the #smx tag on twitter!

If you’re coming to SMX Advanced and are interested in getting together to talk about content, organizing content projects or anything else for that matter, you can get in touch via http://twitter.com/constantcontent or through the support@constant-content.com email address and we can arrange a time to get together! I would love to meet as many people who use the site as possible and get feedback about your experiences with purchasing content through us.

Constant-Content has tons and tons of articles. Sometimes the biggest challenge that we face is helping people find the articles that they need for their projects. Consequently, we’ve introduced News Feeds to make things simpler for publishers to find what they are looking for and to keep up to date on the latest articles in their niche.

Introducing Search and Author News Feeds

For the uninitiated, News Feeds are a technology that allows you to subscribe to a stream of information. With a News Feed you subscribe to the stream of information once and you will receive an automatic update in your news reader every time there is new content posted on Constant-Content. This video does a great job of explaining RSS News Feeds.

How does this work on Constant-Content? For the past few months we’ve had news feeds for each of our categories. This made it possible for you to tune into the latest submissions in each category and keep abreast with the latest articles submitted in that category. Now, in addition to the category news feeds, we’ve introduced two new options, the Search Results News Feed and the Author News Feed.

Search Results News Feed

Now you can create a search query that will turn up articles that meet your topic, license type and price requirements and then subscribe to that news feed and automatically keep up-to-date with any new articles that match your criteria. This is great because you no longer have to come back to Constant-Content and repeatedly do your search on the site to see if there are any new articles that meet your needs. To set up a Search Result News Feed, just head over to the Search section enter your keywords (and other criteria if you’re using the Advanced Search) and search. Once you find a search that is bringing up articles that are appropriate, hit the subscribe link and copy and paste the url into your favorite News Reader Application.

Author News Feed

The author news feed is a stream of the title, summary and price for each and every author on the site. If you have an author that produces dynamite articles in your field, now you can tune in directly to all the articles that they make available for sale.

With a news feed, prospective articles come to you instead of you having to repeatedly go searching for them! It’s a great way find and purchase relevant content for your site or publication!

In the life of every website there comes a time where the old design starts to show its age and look, well, dated.  And since we wanted to tune up the site and see its success last long into the future, we’ve spent a significant amount of time developing a new look for the site.

For Customers

In terms of how the site functions you’ll find that things are very similar to the previous version.  For customers, you can still make requests for unique content, search or browse through the archives of articles, communicate with authors and buy the content that you need to develop a health flow of visitors to your site.  From the customers side these changes are almost entirely cosmetic. One thing that customers who have been using the site for some time will notice is that the category system has changed significantly.  Previously we had all the articles separated first by writing style and then secondly by topic.  We’ve changed that so articles are simply separated by topic.  This should make it easier to see all the content that we have available in the topical areas that interest you.  In doing this we have had to pair down the number of categories.  Consequently, some of the more specific topics are no longer on the site.  Among the categories that got the ax was Articles >> Middle Ages >> Dragons and Travel >> Canada >> Yukon.  Not that they aren’t worthy categories, but they didn’t see a particularly large amount of action.  We’re hoping that using the search function will allow you to find the specific articles that match your purposes.

For Authors

You will notice a number of changes, although the basic process of submitting articles, responding to requests, accepting of refusing offers is effectively the same.  That said they will also notice some that we’ve consolidated a number of the pages in the authors account to simplify the process of being active and involved in the Constant-Content community.  There are some small changes here and there which authors who have been writing with us for some time will notice, but like any good design project we’re hoping that in fact you don’t “notice” that many changes and that the improvements that we’ve made will feel natural and easy to use.

As always if you have any suggestions for improvements or get stuck somewhere by all means let us know.  The best way to get in touch is to send an email to support@constant-content.com. We’ll be rolling out regular blog posts highlighting new features of the site in the coming days to help you get acquainted with the new look and feel.

Why Use Constant-Content’s Custom System….

When developing content to help your website stay or become a hub of activity and drive either sales, ad revenue or lead generation, it is important to remember that content doesn’t mean just having words on a page, its a little more complicated.  Content’s value rests on some particular qualities that sometimes can be difficult to see on the surface:

1. Is your content catchy and will people click it and stick around the read it? (helps your Click Through Rate)
2. is your content useful, giving others interesting ways at looking at a particular topic? (Relevant information)
3. Is your content original, adding something new to the internet? (unique content helps Quality Score)
4. Does it have a natural amount of key words that relate to a topic you would like to be known for? (Key Word Score)
5. Does it have a natural feel?

All of the above are key components in garnering recognition from search engines and helping to optimize the effect the content will have on your business.

Because we are aware of the components that lend the primary value to content we have introduced structural processes to ensure that all the content passing through our site is up to these standards.

1. We make sure that articles are readable and grammatically correct.
2. We make sure that they are original and not copied or too heavily paraphrased
3. We make sure that keyword density is not unnaturally laborious

This careful process breaks down with the authors and publishers circumvent the system, by giving out personal email information and contacting each other directly.  This is a relatively infrequent behavior as most of our customers use the service precisely because they realize the value we add to their content.  By outlining the ways in which working with us adds more value to the content, than the savings from potentially working around us, we hope to help educate our perspective publishers about SEO, content and commerce and the protection that constant-content provides.

When authors and publishers work withing our system they get the security that five years of having our eyeballs carefully trained on the industry and over a hundred thousand articles, provides.  Authors get the security of payment processing and publishers get the oversight necessary to give their content deep value.

Search Engines Love Content!

What Happens to My Article?

For the last five hundred years or so, before the invent of the internet, writing, art and other creative processes whose authorship was a concern to the value of the product, a detailed provenance would be demanded so that its authenticity could be ascertained. Provenance, french for ‘to come from’, was a document tracing a work’s history. Keeping a provenance up to date helped to prevent theft, forgery and plagiarism. The internet has made tracing the life journey of a piece of work difficult, but it hasn’t made it any less valuable or important to the worth of the work one purchases.

Article LifeCycle

We thought it would be an interesting exercise to help our publishers understand the route that their content takes through its creation, editing and publishing. This will give everyone a more thorough understanding of the route that our content takes towards its final publishing.

1. Article is requested by publishers, or author decides on a subject that they think will be interesting for publishers.
2. Article is written by author
3. Authors submit their articles to Constant-Content for review.
4. Article is reviewed for Grammatical, Structural and Topical quality by our editorial staff.
5. Article is then passed through iThenticate plagiarism checking to ensure that it is unique and original.
6. Once the article passes all of these checks and balances it is forwarded to the request for publisher’s perusal.
7. Articles are perused with an eye to the satisfaction of the Publishers needs.
8. The chosen article is then purchased with a specific license type.
9. Depending on the license type, the article is then removed from the article pool so that no one else can purchase that article.

Protect your Content’s Provenance, Protect your Business

By following this rigorous process each and every time, we will help to create a record for the lifespan of an article. All the steps will be recorded and recalled if necessary. This system is designed to protect all of our users and provide transparency in an online of world that is filled with obfuscation. This can also help set a blueprint for Publishers to follow so that they can maintain the integrity of their own work and protect their investment. This careful process will also be invaluable helping to prosecute claims of content theft or plagiarism if the situation occurs.

So create your Provenance. Keep track of your articles, starting with purchasing them through Constant-Content, and then keeping an eye, either through your own methods, or by enlisting our help, to track and protect the lineage of your content.

Contact Constant-Content at support@constant-content.com if you have any questions about how to implement this on your site.

Search Engines Love Content!

How to Make Content Work for You

As an Affiliate or Affiliate Manager one of your most important jobs is developing not only the basic infrastructure to help move your sales from one level of up to the next, but also to give your affiliate sites an edge in a highly competitive industry. One of the easiest and most effective things you can do to improve your affiliate’s sites is introduce original, high quality and informative content. We’re working on a series of articles to highlight how content can help affiliate marketers and how significant the return on investment to develop and execute a plan surrounding the content that you have on affiliate sites.

Quality Scores and Bounce Rates

Anyone running a Google AdWords campaign should know how significantly a good quality score can affect the cost of doing business. Currently the largest factor in the Quality Score seems to be Click Through Rate (CTR), develop a high click through rate your quality score goes up and you’re CPC goes down.   On-page content can have some influence on your Quality Score but perhaps from the content point of view the most interesting part of the of adding content to an affiliate page, is the opportunity to turn people who would otherwise bounce into visitors that stay a while on your site.

Being able to direct people to a page of information that is well-written, informative and on-topic can reduce your bounce rate and effectively give you a higher value for the traffic that a PPC campaign bring to a site. Relevant copy that will capture a reader’s attention and prevent them from bouncing yields a better the opportunity to gain the users trust, engage the user and convert.  A user that bounces is a waste of money, therefore, finding ways to keep visitors from bouncing gives affiliates a greater chance to build a relationship with the visitor and effectively means subsequently provides greater value out of their traffic. The value of increasing your engagement with visitors can not be underestimated!  Where trust has been built through timely, on-topic information there is a greater opportunity to turn traffic into conversions.  Investing in content is a can add significantly to the bottom line and provide a healthy return on investment.  Ask yourself this question, “Who’s more likely to convert, someone who lands on your site and sees one page, or someone who finds what the information that closely addresses their need, builds a trust through a well thought out article and provides a solution.”

Preventing Google Slaps

Thin affiliate sites have been the subject of previous Google slaps and, while it’s difficult to know for sure exactly why Google chose to slap some sites and not others, there are a few pieces of the puzzle that we can draw together.  SuperAffiliateMindset.com has a great explanation of the March 2008 Google slap that came down and  what sites tended to be most affected.  It seems that the sites that got hit hardest tended to be sites that had little content or content that was posted in a haphazard way.  Which really highlights the need for affiliates to support their most valuable sites with regular, high quality, original articles.  The last thing that an affiliate or affiliate manager wants is to be shut down by a change in the way that Google Adwords creating a genuine site that provides top quality articles, linkable articles is a great way to safeguard yourself against any changes in Google’s policy.

Content and Organic Search Results

As Google and the other search engines develop crawlers based on algorithms that attempt to replicate the process of dynamic human adjudications.  As a result there are some very basic rules to constructing content so it’s valuable to Internet marketers.  Content has now moved from the dark days of keyword stuffing and hidden content, and now allows only for a relatively small amount of keywords (2-5% being proper distribution), which reflects the search engine’s desire to approximate the amount word repetition that feels natural to readers.  It has also meant that the quality of the writing, grammar, spelling and authoritativeness of content has become an increasingly significant component of the search engines’ computer generated analysis.  But all the characteristics just listed are virtually useless if it isn’t unique and original.  That is one of the secret sauces in this SEO soup, and it means that to maximize your client’s content value-add it must be new and have not been indexed by any of the search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN place this significance on originality for two reasons,

• self-enforcing theft deterrent, and
• to encourage the relevant diverse growth of the Internet

Not only do the search engines ensure that the best sites are taking the time to create new information for the consumer, but they are helping to make content theft a useless endeavor.

One thing that we are finding is that search engines are tending towards rewarding people who not only provide great content, but provide it regularly.  Being able to regularly post new articles keeps the search engines coming around, regularly so that your content will be indexed quickly and shows that the site is active, perhaps more importantly it shows that the site is a place where people can find fresh news, people like that (and consequently, so do search engines)!

In recognition of the importance that originality plays on the Internet, constant-content has placed considerable emphasis on ensuring that our database is protected from plagiarism and theft. Adding to the security of the archives we have developed a system of licensing to help buyers identify content that may have already been purchased and content that is completely unique.

Fullrights License

Means two things,

• it has never been purchased before and is nowhere on the Internet and has never been indexed in any way by search engines and
• you can treat it as though you wrote it, changing text or crediting its authorship to whomever you choose

Unique License

Its originality is the same as fullrights articles, the only difference lies in the author’s desire to keep their name attached to the article as well they don’t give permission for the article to be reworked.

Usage License

Usage articles are a less expensive way to gain the rights to content even though they do not guarantee the work’s originality. This is a good option for consumers in print media and those who would like to try out content purchasing and are not yet convinced of the higher license’s Price-ROI.

All of our expertise and organization come together to give you content which results in maximizing search engines results, increasing the visibility that you need to provide your clients.

Getting Your Content is Painless

Deciphering a new site and making it work for you can be annoying and a major hindrance to achieving your goals. Constant-Content has made sure that our site is as simple and straightforward as possible. If you have a specific project in mind you can pick your own budget and then make the salient details of your project available to over 18 000 writers. You can then easily manage the submissions through your request dashboard, and sift through the submitted articles till you find the one that suits your needs, while deleting the rest. You can then purchase it right from your dashboard.

To make things even easier you can switch your content requests from public to private requests. This is best done when you have found a writer whose style and voice fits with your specific needs. Utilizing private requests can help manage deadlines, improve your content’s consistency and allow you to more clearly articulate your needs, ensuring that your content is hits the mark every time.

If you are looking for something really quick, you can use our vast library of articles, organized into convenient categories so you can get to the topics that are relevant to you with minimal searching.

Payment can be made using either PayPal or credit cards.

ORIGINAL CONTENT HELPS GROW THE INTERNET

One of the most important values that a good piece of writing brings to a website is its originality. New content expands the breadth and depth of the internet, and as an incentive to encourage this growth search engines heavily weigh the presence of original content into their organic search rankings . If there wasn’t such an incentive we would be inundated with the same perfectly keyword dense, usefully linked and authoritative article on dogs, or computers or beer etc. Varying perspectives and alternative sources of information help keep sites relevant and useful to consumers, which search engines depend on to maintain their own value in a constantly changing landscape.

INTRODUCING iTHENTICATE

As a content provider we understand that valuing and rewarding uniqueness helps to guard against content theft and copyright infringement. Writers live and die by the thin edge of paraphrasing and plagiarism, thus, assiduously regulating content’s integrity must be done at the highest level, for writer’s careers are on the line and buyer’s livelihoods are dependent on it.  As a result of this commitment to excellence, we are pleased to announce that we have just finished negotiating a partnership with iThenticate, one of the largest and most comprehensive intellectual property protection services on the web. iThenticate keeps an up to date snap shot of the internet on its servers which allows for fast, aggregate and complete text analysis, not requiring the software to troll across the available website pages that are live at that precise moment. Not only will this help us more quickly keep an eye on the originality of articles being submitted to the site’s library but request submissions as well.

ADDITIONAL PROTECTION FOR YOUR SITE

Theft from our user’s sites is another deep concern of ours. To protect our written material Constant-Content.com uses sophisticated anti-scraping technology combined with publishing only portions of articles for pre-sale viewing. We will be turning iThenticate’s careful eyes on our archives as well, further boosting our site’s integrity. This means that we will have the ability to run spot checks to make sure that we catch even the most determined thieves who have gotten past our best efforts. Our consumers, often don’t have these safety measures in place, which can be laborious and in fact can mitigate the original reason for purchasing the content in the first place. Over the next couple months we will be rolling out our response to this concern. An additional service option will allow consumers to register the content they purchase from Constant-Content and run those articles though iThenticate. This will allow speedy action against any such theft or the replacement of stolen content to avoid search engine’s site-penalties for publishing duplicate content.

Please stay posted for more information and if you have any questions feel free to contact me at:

David Kool
Product & Content Manager, Web Properties
www.constant-content.com
david.kool@constant-content.com