Efficiency is a beautiful thing. Squeezing the most traffic out of an article that you purchase through Constant-Content is of interest to all our publishers.  But when it comes to search rankings, one page can only do so much. Here are a few tips that we want to share from some experts on SEO. Hopefully they will help you eek the most out of your content purchases.  This is part #1 of our Plan and Publish series, stay tuned for the next installment!

 

One Page, One Keyword Idea

Though perhaps a little basic, try this: Decide that your goal for each page is to gain a ranking for one keyword idea, which boils down to 2 or 3 tightly focused keyword phrases. When you are building links to a page, both internal and external links,  and know exactly which phrases you’re targeting for the page, the result is an clear vision that makes it easier to complete the necessary work. This focus makes creating a bookmark for the page in Delicious, or fashioning a tweet to get the news about your new page into the Internet’s collective consciousness, intuitive. By no means is this a call to stuff repeated keywords into each page, but having the target keyword phrase (or phrases) in mind can help keep the desired outcome of the page more clearly defined – and search engines appreciate clarity.

Some people argue that one keyword phrase is a good place to start. Others argue that restricting yourself to a single keyword phrase will lead to unnatural writing (see the comments at the other end of this link), and because that writing isn’t enjoyable to read, it will cause prospective customers to bounce from the site. As is often the case, the best policy is to find a compromise between the two ideas. Keep each page tightly focused around one particular keyword idea while you maintain a natural and easily readable content-writing style.

 

Tight Focus Simplifies Promoting and Optimizing Content

When your pages are tightly focused in their goals, the actions required to promote and optimize the page become less daunting.  If you can create a site map that outlines every page that your site has (or you plan to add) and list the keyword idea for that page and the 2-3 keyword phrases that you’re targeting, you’ve created a firm understanding of what the goals are for each page.  While the search engines may send your visitors from any number of keyword phrases, having a solidified plan for what you’re aiming to rank for is putting the foundation in place to build your organic search marketing upon.

Looking at this from another angle: If you know what keyword phrases you hope to rank for, lining up the writing projects becomes easier. Have you been trying to rank for too many keywords on the same page? We can help with that. Log in, submit a request for custom content and purchase articles you need to start ranking for some of your keywords ideas.

Don’t Suck

The IMC Conference really brought in some great speakers this year. A couple of the talks today were really spot on. The first presentation was by Avinash Kaushik, who spoke about the topic of analytics and understanding your users. His Number 1 Rule? “Don’t Suck.” Such relevant and a happily irreverant advice set the tone for what was to follow. He exhibited pages related to High Speed Internet PPC Campaigns, which highlighted how many local high speed providers are shooting themselves in the foot by not helping people find what they need.

Hurray for Data

People who market online have a great advantage over offline marketers, who must use expensive means to gather data. Online marketers are just swimming in low-cost data. Anyone who wants to can add analytics tracking to their site and, in no time, have a wealth of data at their disposal. Unfortunately, using the data effectively is still pretty tricky.

Segmentation: Making Sense of Mountains of Data

Segmentation is the act of breaking your analytics down into groups that you can better understand. One of the segments that Avinash discussed were the loyalists (people who visit more than 3 of your pages, i.e., they are really exploring your site). Limiting your analytics results to only this group helps you to see where the interested people are going within your site. In addition to using segmentation, you can examine the top ten pages that are visited on your site and calculate at the bounce rates for those pages. The pages with the highest bounce rates are prime candidates for redesign. People are bouncing for a reason. Maybe that reason is fixable!

You’re Probably Wrong

One of the great benefits of working in the online world is the ability to find out quickly when you are wrong. Knowing where you can make improvements is great – it lets you hypothesize what problems those people who come to your site are encountering and how you might be able to fix those problems. Avinash has a great example in point five (cinco) of this behemoth blog post of just how inportant the testing part of this process is. Getting inside the human mind is no easy feat and, try though we might, our plans to divine what kind of page and content will help sites make sales seem almost sure to fail. Testing is the only way to be sure our hypotheses are correct!

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!

Illustrate your sophistication as a writer by avoiding the use of “they,” “their,” and “them” to refer to singular nouns.

When the plural pronoun is grammatically incorrect within the context of the sentence, replace with a singular pronoun, make both noun and pronoun plural, repeat the noun, use agreeing articles, or rework the sentence entirely. The pronoun must always agree in number with the noun to which it is referring.

Example

Incorrect:

The relationship between a healthcare professional and their patient

Correct Alternatives:

Additional Help and Commentary

• Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement Basic Lesson By Margaret L. Benner
• Language Debates: Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement by Diana Hacker

“What am I going to write about today?”  This is one question that surfaces for many Constant Content writers.  Constant Content is about connecting freelance writers with publishers looking for material.  But who are these publishers and what are they looking for?  What topics are they interested in?  How can you best spend your writing time so that you’ll be likely to make a sale?

To help guide your writing efforts we did a little bit of digging to determine which topics/categories have had the greatest number of articles sold.  This listing goes all the way back to 4 years ago (2004) when the site was started so it is the best long term trend information that we have. This list is by no means that ONLY places where articles have been selling, so please don’t read this list as the only place where an article will sell.  This is really here just to give you an idea of SOME of the categories that TEND to be popular.

Without further ado, in order they are:

1. Computers
2. Gardening
3. Tutorials
4. Trivia and Facts
5. Home Decor
6. Home Improvement
7. Real Estate

For many of you it will come as no surprise that Computers is the top of this list.  Whether the articles are basic introductions to new programs, specific guides on how to do some easy or complex task or comparisons of popular programs, computers continues to be the topic of choice for many of our publishers.  If you’re a regular hacker, consider writing about your latest exploits.  If you’re a luddite, like the rest of us, perhaps your position on the learning curve could be your asset, set out to learn something interesting that you’ve been meaning to learn for a while (some ideas that come to my mind are: What is Phishing? or Top 7 Tips for Avoiding Viruses).  Educate yourself about the topic and then write an “Introduction to …” style article.

The home related topics are also popular choices.  Gardening, Home Decor, Home Improvement and Real Estate, all these topics relate to where we live and how we can make the house a nice place to be are something that we can all engage with.  Keeping up with the Jones is a popular pass-time and by the sales in these categories it looks like it will continue to be for some time.

Finally, there is the learning related categories: tutorials and trivia and facts.  The Internet has become our go-to resource for finding out how to do new things.  If we don’t know how to do something, for better or worse, we’ll probably look it up on the internet before we canvas our friends.  Consequently, there is a demand for great how-to articles.  An article that is well written, informs the reader, and walks them through some difficult process is going to be an article that gets saved for later or shared with friends.

As mentioned early these aren’t theseven only popular categories, just the top seven.  We fully encourage people to follow their interests and write about things that excite them.  After all, when your interested in a topic you’re going to do a great job of research and a great job writing the article.  However, for those who just don’t know where to begin, these are some good places to start.

One of the thing that constant-content.com offers publishers who are looking for freelance writing is unique content.  There is a great post about unique text versus unique content that I think is really worth discussing.

The basic idea is that unique text is what you get when you visit a few internet resources on a topic and rewrite the content that is found there.  While the text is unique, its not really what we (or search engines) would call unique content.  For unique content there needs to be some great thinking, synthesis and understandability in the content.  Hopefully, there will be a few “A ha” moments and after a real live person has read the article they’ll feel smarter, entertained, perhaps even enlightened.

In some cases, unique text is produced by just taking an existing article and applying a thesaurus to the words and doing some minor sentence structure reorganization.  While this is unique text, it is tantamount to plagiarism.  The article may not be identified as duplicate content by search engines, but from a readers perspective there is no value that has been added to the article.  In cases where we get submissions that are just rewrites of previously published articles we consider this a form of plagiarism, with all the associated consequences (see Professionalism and Plagiarism in the Writer Guidelines).

The internet is really great when it provides you with just the answer you were looking for.  When you want to to convert your old  your 1985 mix tapes to digital you want to find out How to convert tapes to MP3’s and you want that article to be spot on, so you don’t have to search again or go anywhere else. And from a search engines point of view, that’s what they want to give you.  It’s unlikely that an article is a rehash of some one else’s work will ever be as popular as the original.  But an article that draws together a number of scattered sources and adds great style and some original thinking to the mix is going to be a great article.  And as previously mentioned, quality sells.

This metaphor from SugarRae.com really hits the idea of unique content on the head

“Think of content like movie plots. When a movie is predictable or the basic plot has been done ten times before, you want to see something new – a new spin from the director, a better level of special effects or an unexpected twist to the plotline to name a few. If a movie is a repeat of five others you’ve seen before – and it doesn’t give you anything new aside from different actors, how likely are you to see it again or recommend it to others?”

And in the end, having unique content, is not just so that a search engine can spider it and pick up a few keywords, it’s about providing something that is interesting for people to read.  Something that will help them on their way. Linkable Content.

Interestingly, unique content is also really linkable.  For people running their own websites, having text that people link to is like having someone on the internet vote for your site.  For people building up a website, links are an important aspect of building their reputation and rank.  Good links to your site aren’t easy to find.  However, links to interesting content are easy to share.

[Edit: to add a little more detail on the line between plagiarism and summarizing, Thanks Ed.]

I just wanted to quickly address an issue that has been popping up more frequently. Please do not submit articles that are parts of series. All submissions should act as stand-alone articles for these reasons:

• Customers who purchase one article should not have to purchase another article in order to give their readers the whole picture.
• If a customer does purchase only one article in your series, other customers who want the whole picture will be missing 500-800 words (or however long your articles are).
• As per our guidelines, all articles should have introductions and conclusions.

You may still submit articles that are tied together, just as long as they can stand alone. For example, you might write 4 articles on the subject of container gardening and wish to tie them together as a “guide” to container gardening. You can do this without making the articles rely upon each other:

• Link titles - Container Gardening: Soil; Container Gardening: Types of Plants; Container Gardening: Food and Water Schedule; Container Gardening: Seasonal Containers
• Make sure each article has an introduction and conclusion that does not refer to another article in a series. These intros and conclusions should be original, but they may still be similar in order to maintain continuity between the pieces.
• Make your keywords for each article similar for search purposes, but do limit them to the individual articles.

Hope this helps. Thanks!

Recently, Constant Content has been having problems getting request and rejection notices to authors. If your article has “disappeared,” it means it has been rejected. Typically, an email will detail the reason for rejection. We’re all having to work around this problem while it lasts.

If you aren’t getting your emails consistently . . .

DO – Ask a question in the forum (over weekends, you may have better response time than emailing Support). Editors sometimes see over 100 articles a day, so you may not get a definite answer as to why your article was rejected, but we’ll provide you with any information possible.

If you feel more comfortable emailing support, provide the following information so that we know who you are and what articles you are asking about:

• YOUR PEN NAME
• TITLE OF ARTICLE
• DATE OF SUBMISSION (you’ll have the best results if you act as soon as you recognize there is a problem)
• CLEAR DESCRIPTION OF PROBLEM

DO – Review the guidelines. Many articles are rejected because authors have failed to follow our guidelines. When in doubt, print them out and read them over carefully. The Author FAQ is also a very useful document.

DO – Proofread your article. You may have typos, grammar errors, punctuation errors, or clarity issues. This may be why your article was rejected.If you typically have a problem with a certain aspect of writing, you may want to check your article for instances of this problem first.

DO – Submit your article with a file attached in one of our accepted article formats.

On the other hand . . .

DON’T – Resubmit your article without considering why your article might have been rejected. Doing something over and over again with expectations of different results is a sign of insanity . . . Not only will you not get a different result, but you will drive your editor insane as the attempt to reject your article for the second, third, or fourth time does not thing to change the end result (same article submitted in the same manner). We’re not bonkers yet, but please be kind and refrain from helping to speed up the process!

DON’T – Suffer in silence. We have the forums for a reason. We also have many documents devoted to helping authors submit work that will be accepted by Constant Content. We have submission guidelines in order to maintain a set of standards. We also require that articles submitted be free of errors and exhibit a certain level of quality. If your articles are are generally sound, it may be that there is a problem with your submission process, a guideline has been overlooked, or your article needs one last proofread before being resubmitted. Just ask. The editors will help when possible, but your fellow writers are also a very helpful, friendly bunch.

In addition, as per our guidelines, we do not generally accept personal accounts/narratives. Because they are not considered except in the case of a buyers specifically requesting first-person accounts, please do not submit them.

Thanks!

Now that it’s been established that quality writing is the number one reason customers return to Constant Content, it’s time to discuss what characteristics quality writing exhibits.

Quality Writing:

• Is clear and concise
• Contains no punctuation errors (including commas, semicolons, quotation marks, apostrophes, or hyphens)
• Contains no grammatical errors
• Includes an introduction and conclusion
• Has not been rushed
• Has been thoroughly proofread
• Contains no problems with sentence structure
• Is organized well
• Makes supported arguments
• Offers the reader useful information
• Is engaging
• Is free of common word-use errors

Quality writing is also created in a style that is up-to-date with current standards, contains a minimum of overly used words,  does not insult the reader’s intelligence (but also does not make the reader work to understand what is being said), and generally indicates to the reader that the article was written by a professional, knowlegdeable individual with a good command of English whose goal is to provide interesting and useful information to a chosen audience.