One of the wonderful things about the web is that most of the world’s information is accessible online. Better still, a large portion of the world has access to all of that information. Search engines play a huge role in making it easy to sift through that information and find the stuff you are looking for. Problems arise, however, when people who are less scrupulous decide to publish content and decide that the best way to do that is to steal it. Unfortunately, the web makes stealing of your content quite easy, and enforcement of your rights somewhat difficult.

Assessing the Consequences

One of the first things you need to is to assess the level of damages to you. Getting your stolen content removed from someone else’s web site requires a fair amount of work, and you should only pursue it if you are likely to be impacted at some level.

In general, the search engines are pretty good at recognizing the original author of a piece of content. However, the search engines can make mistakes. For example, if you just launched a new blog that has little visibility on the web, and your article it stolen by the New York Times. However, this is pretty unlikely to occur. And, if a prominent site steals your content it is usually quite easy to address, as we will explain below.

The first thing I would do when worrying about content theft is take several different unique strings from the content and search on it within double quotes. For example, if your content included the phrase: “The slow gray fox tripped over the startled dog”, you can search on “slow gray fox tripped over” (including the quotes) in Google and Bing. If your article comes up first, that is a good sign that the search engines know that you are the authoritative source for that content.

Try this with several phrases to make sure that you are OK. One key tip – avoid picking phrases that include punctuation, such as commas, hyphens, and quote characters. These seem to work less well for these types of searches. Once your testing is done, if you show up first for everything you need to consider whether you are suffering any damages.

Another component to consider is whether or not the stolen article contains links back to your site. If it does, the search engines are pretty good at unravelling this type of theft, and knowing that you are the original author. Chances are that you passed the quoted strings test above if this is the case.

Making Content Harder to Steal

There are some things that you can do to make your content harder to effectively steal, or to lower the consequences of the damage if it is stolen. The two major ways to do that are:

1. Use relative links for images. I.e. something that looks like “/images/yourimage.gif”, instead of “http://www.yourdomain.com/images/yourimage.gif”. The reason for doing this is that it will force the thief to copy all of the images in your content over to their web servers, or to modify the links to absolute links.
2. For the same reasons, use relative links when referring to your CSS files, or any Javascript you have on the site. Note that if you use third party tools such as Google Analytics, you will need to use absolute links to refer to that. Just make sure you use relative links for any Javascript you have developed for the site and which is hosted on your web server.
3. Use absolute links when linking to other pages on your site. I.e., “http://www.yourdomain.com/page1.html” instead of “/page1.html”. The reason for doing this is that it ensures that you get links back to your site, unless the thief goes through all the content and modifies those links to make them relative links.
4. For fun, you can also create a custom piece of Javascript that recgonizes what domain it is on, and if it runs and finds it is not on your web servers, it publishes a big bold image that says “STOLEN CONTENT” on the stolen pages.

The general idea here is to make your content more work to steal than someone else’s content. Few publishers will take all the steps outlined above, and therefore those other people will represent easier targets for thieves than you.

Taking Action

Of course, there are times when it is worth taking action. I recommend a three step process when doing this:

1. Contact the site owner. Use whatever means they provide for doing so, tell them where the offending content is, and tell them they need to take it down, or you will take action. Even though you are angry, there is no need to be nasty about it. Focus on your goal, which is to get it taken down. However, do be very clear that you intend to pursue this further.
2. If that does not work, the next step is to contact the hosting company for the web site. You can often get this information from their WhoIs records at the registrar, but if it is not there, try using a third party service such as Who is Hosting This. The reason for contacting the hosting company is that they can be held liability for the content theft if you have notified them and they do not act on it. They may be more motivated to avoid the liability than your thief.
3. The third step is to file a DMCA request with the search engines. Here is the Google DMCA form and the Bing DMCA instructions. The beauty of this is that the search engines also have an obligation to respond. Do not do this lightly! Do it only if you are in fact the original author. If you used a contractor to write that article, do some due diligence to make sure that they did give you original content.

This three step process should address most issues. Since it will take a lot of time and effort, do make sure you evaluate whether or not it is worth it. If there are no real damages to you, then it probably is not taking action, unless someone is copying your whole site, or otherwise extensively stealing from you.

I received a request on Twitter (I am @stonetemple) from @nsandlin for an article on how to balance on page content between enticing content for users and keyword rich content for search engines. It’s a great question, and I am going to run with that, but expand it a bit to include my philosophy on how search engines evaluate on page tags. My short answer on how to set this balance is to default to users first, but as you might expect, there are some subtleties to this!

How search engines look at a page

I believe we need to look past artificial perceptions about how search engines look at a given page. For example, whether you use an <h1> tag or a <h2>, <h3>, or whatever on a page does not matter. What does matter is the relative nature of what you do. For example, if you have lots of basic text on a page, then headers such as these will stand out:

<p><strong>Your Section Header Here<strong><p>

This will stand out just as much as an <h1> tag on that same page. So in my view, you don’t need to use heading tags at all. In contrast, imagine if the <h1> was evaluated as the defining element of your page, then it might be a good idea to put all of the content on your page inside an <h1>, wouldn’t it? Of course that does not make sense.

The better way to think about it is that the HTML markup elements you use on your page are a way to communicate to users what your page is about, and as long as you use basic HML markup the search engines will see those signals and weight the words/phrases in their accordingly.

If you have multiple types of heading tags, or use my <strong> tag type heading above with other more traditional heading tags, then the search engines will consider the relative weight of these. These tags will cause extra weight to be allocated to the words embedded in them.

Ultimately, think of this as your page has a score, we can call it a certain amount of equity points, that is defined by its link profile and other external signals. These equity points can be allocated to the content of a page, and your use of heading tags of various types, and other HTML tags helps the search engine see how you weight the various aspects of the page. Note that I am making this up and I have no proof as to exactly how the search engines look at this, but I believe that the basic concept I am about to outline is 100% correct. Bottom line is that how you use heading tags does not add equity points to the page, it simply allocates the points yo ualready have. I.e, it’s all relative, so spend your points wisely!

Balance of Keyword Rich and End User Enticing Headings

There are many scenarios where this does not need to be a choice. The great thing about keyword tools is that they provide real insight into the user mindset for many common web interactions. For example, if you use the Adwords Keyword Tool, and you search on digital cameras using exact match mode, and then you sort on search volume, you will see that “Olympus” comes out on top with 368,000 searches per month, with “canon cameras” second at 246,000.

This type of data tells you something about how people search when they are looking for a digital camera – there is a strong tendency for people to search on brand names first, rather than entering a generic search query like “digital cameras” (which still comes in at a healthy 165,000 searches per month). This is an example of the type of insight you can get from these tools. This also maps into what users will look for when they look at your web page.

Clearly if they search on a phrase like “Olympus camera” they will respond well to that phrase being present on the page. But what if they come from another website via a link, or as direct traffic? It turns out that the keyword mindset may still work out well for you for that type of visitor.

My examples so far keyed on the search for a digital camera, but what if you are writing a news article of some sort? That can be a different story, particularly if your site is a news or blog site with lots of subscribers. The person’s mind may not be on a product. Instead, they may just be browsing looking for things that interest them. What will catch their attention may be something like: “16 ways that green tea can save your life”.

The distinction is that in the digital camera scenario we were dealing with people who are shoppers. They are looking to acquire something, either now, or in the near future. In the news scenario we are dealing with browsers. Their mindset is quite different. They don’t know what they are looking for yet, so the hook to get them engaged needs to be different. In deciding how you to approach things on your site, the first step is to decide what type of user is going to be on the page in question. Are they browsers or shoppers?

For shopping oriented pages the triggers for the user are easily discovered using a keyword tool. For a news oriented page, the orientation is probably different. You need to think beyond the keyword tool to hook the user. On some sites you can have both types of pages, and you need to treat them differently. That’s perfectly OK. Notice that the way I have outlined this I am not trying to use the blog as the direct means for bringing people in for conversion purposes. Of course, you can use blogs differently, in which case you would need to adjust. However, my preference is to use blogs to attract users, links, and build relationships wit the community, and to have other pages on the site that are keyword focused.

One other factor that I want to mention, and that is the impact on potential linkers. Links, and social media sites, play a large role in driving rankings on your site. Whatever you do, don’t do things that alienate that audience. They will be your judge and jury. Give them a great experience, and they will reward you with links or positive social media mentions.

Summary

My philosophy is to lean in direction of the user the great majority of the time. As noted, keep in mind that keyword tools often provide valuable insight into the web population’s way of thinking of things. In other scenarios, such as the news or blog scenario, the mind set may be quite different, and you need to treat those pages differently. Do the search engines recognize all of these signals perfectly? No, they don’t, but they are definitely trying to get there.

Aaron Wall recently wrote a post on Search Engine Land titled How To Get New Web Sites To Rank Quickly. It’s a good post with good advice in it, and worth a read. Of course, I did not start this post just to tell you that …

I really like the ideas of going after long tail terms, and less competitive terms. It certainly makes sense when you are thinking about how to enter a competitive market space. However, let’s expand on the concept a bit.

Let’s assume a couple of things:

1. You want to play to win the big bucks
2. You are willing to be patient

Assuming both of those things are true, then you can take Aaron’s advice, but not give up on the big terms either. I refer to the concept as “spreading the field”. Yes you implement a long tail strategy, and you implement some less competitive terms as well. But, you should also go after the big terms.

Think of it as a continuum, ranging from head terms (very difficult to compete for) to long tail terms (easy to compete for). You want to have a strategy that addresses all parts of the continuum. You should implement:

1. Content that will address lots of long tail terms
2. Content for not so long tail terms
3. Pages to get medium tail terms
4. ….
5. Pages and content for hard to win on “head” terms

Use the long tail terms to fund your site in the short term. Then the not so long tail terms to fund the next stage, and so forth. The idea is to play to win the big boys game, but make some money in the short term to keep cash coming in so you can keep investing in and growing your site. It’s the best of both worlds.

This is the second in our series about building multi-million dollar web sites. In the first article we provided a general overview of the major elements of the process. In this article, we are going to take one of the concepts discussed, and expand upon it. Today, we talk about content.

Content for Users

Good content is at the heart of any commercially successful web site, even small ones. You need it to convince your visitors to do whatever it is you want them to do. Sometimes, this is a long process, where the user becomes used to coming to your site to get expert information on a topic, and after many visits, finally decides to buy something.

Effectively speaking, it’s brand building. They come to your site, they like the content, they leave. They come back another time, and still like the content (this time they read some different articles). Then they may come back again. By now, in their eyes you are a recognized authority on the topic. So who are they going to go to when they are ready to buy? You, of course.

Content for SEO

But if you are planning to build a brand new web site from scratch, and you want to make it worth millions of dollars, content means a lot more to you than this. Content will help you do two major things:

1. Provide spider food for search engine crawlers. When a search engine responds to a search query, it attempts to match up the words in the search query with the content on your site. If the query is “rectangular blue widgets” and the word “rectangular” does not show up on your page, your chances for showing up for that query are smaller.For each popular search term, there are hundreds of additional modifiers (such as rectangular in our example) that get included in various search terms that people use. You can’t put them all in your title tag, or a couple of sentences at the top of the page. To go after them, you need content – ideally several paragraphs or more of it.

   In addition, search engines attempt to evaluate the quality and depth of content on a site. Lots of pages with not much text does not communicate value to the search engine, and such pages may be seen as low quality pages. This is also something that can really hurt your rankings.

2. Give people a reason to link to you. Buying links comes with risks, and even if it’s done really, really well, you will have difficulty in buying authoritative links. In addition, swapping links to advance search engine rankings is fundamentally a waste of time.So you need to get people to give you a link, without having to give anything in return. Does this sound like getting something for nothing? It does, but in fact you are giving the linker something in return – a good experience for the visitors they send to your site. There are people out there that care a lot about the quality of their user’s web experience, and who will link to great content or tools. In fact, the high quality authoritative sites (the ones whose links help you the most) are more often than not run by people like this.

   This also includes the related notion of writing great articles and then publishing them on other (high authority) sites, in return for a link back to your site. Having great content makes this possible.

How Much Content?

In all probability, lots of it. If your strategy relies on winning on really competitive terms, you will need to persuade hordes of people with related sites to link to your site. Even if you use a brilliant social media strategy, and get Dugg on a regular basis, you will still need lots of content. Also, link baiting for social media sites is a powerful tool, but it’s not a cure all. In addition, many of the sites you want to target won’t be on those sites.

Either way, you need to be thinking about hundreds, or thousands, of quality articles. Remember, we are building a multi-million dollar web site here. There are few major ways we have seen for doing this:

1. Leverage User Generated Content – If you can come up with a way to build a site that becomes a hot spot for people to provide you with content, you are in great shape.
2. Write Them by Hand – This obviously requires a substantial investment of time and resources, but it works. You need to have a really clear content plan in mind if you are going to develop a large body of articles to ensure that you understand how to make each article unique and valuable.
3. Create content by cross referencing large data bases – Simply publishing public domain databases of information would be a risky strategy, but taking a variety of databases and creating new content through analysis and cross referencing is cool stuff.

All three of these strategies can result in a large number of pages about a wide variety of topics. You may want to combine more than one of these strategies in your plan. Of course, they are all hard work. But, if you are an entrepreneur looking to make millions by building a web site, it can still be done.

Brian Clark at Copyblogger recently put up a post about how to write for Google. In his post, Brian quotes the Google guidelines, including the well known: “Always focus on the users and not on search engines when developing your optimization strategy”.

Brian also promises to offer more on this exact topic within the next year. I will look forward to see what he has to say about it. But in the meantime, being an impatient sort, here are my thoughts:

1. Make sure the person who is writing for you is, or becomes, an expert in the topic area you are covering. Without it, link-worthy, keyword rich content will not be appearing on your site any time soon.
2. Build a strong list of potential sub-topics within your topic area to write about before you write a word
3. Build a keyword map of your topic area. Figure out what the high volume keywords are.
4. Match up high volume keywords with the potential sub-topics for your articles, and decide on a set of articles to be written.
5. Let your writer know the topic for each individual article that they are working on. Don’t bury them with a long list of keywords to use, or SEO guidelines. Just give them the topic of the article, the main keyword you want them to use in the title, and let them write.
6. When reviewing the article, minimize and SEO input until they are done.
7. Once they are done, you can put a minimal amount of SEO gloss on top. This might be a simple tweak of the use of one keyword or another. Do not rewrite the article unless it really is not well written, or it’s inaccurate.

That’s really all there is to it. There really are two major themes here:

1. Make sure you have something to add to the conversation (i.e. the overall body of material on the Internet about the topic). This is why you need to have an expert on the topic writing for you. Without this, it will be difficult to get the high quality links you need to succeed.

2. Make sure you minimize the SEO imprint on the articles themselves. Sure, the up front research to decide the article topics is important. But if you want the writer to write good (linkable) stuff, you can’t load them down with all types of SEO rules. In addition, this basic approach gives you the best chance of connecting on important long tail terms that you might otherwise miss if you didn’t let them do their thing.

Content Development

Finally we get back to our series on building multi-million dollar web sites from scratch. We will continue to weave in regular postings about the Google Custom Search Engine developments, but we will begin to write about this topic regularly as well. Basically, this series is a high level blueprint about how to pursue high end results. For that reason we need a high end strategy. See below for a list of the prior posts on this topic.

This post is going to talk about content development. Let’s start talking about the roles it plays in the process. You are going to need lots of it if you are planning to build a mutli-million dollar web site. If you ability to generate reams of content is limited, you may well have to settle for a web site that generates a bit less in revenue, but the underlying principles still apply. Here are the major benefits of having significant quantities of quality site content:

1. Listed number 1 for a reason: Makes your site more valuable to the visitors you receive
2. Helps focus the spiders on keywords for each page
3. Provides fodder for ranking on long tail terms
4. Makes your site more attractive for other sites to link to

So now that we know some of the ways that content is important, how do we get it? This article will discuss a few ideas for how to do this. We use a few methods for getting content, so let’s look at the four most important ones:

1. Government data is wonderful. There are reams and reams of it, on almost any topic imaginable. While remembering that you tax dollars pay for this may be stressful, it’s a wonderful thing from a web site development perspective. Much of this data is accessible to you to use, free of charge. Please check any government web site you plan to use data from for their particular policies on reuse of their content.

One major thing you need to be concerned with when you use government data is that is leaves you with 4 problems to solve:

1. Obtaining it in a form that you can process
2. Processing it so that you have it in your own database (or equivalent)
3. Presenting it in manner so that it becomes unique content
4. Rendering it onto web pages in a reasonably attractive and useful manner

Solving problems 1, 2, and 4 requires that you have programming capability. We use Perl to do our work here. It’s a very powerful string processing language, and you can develop programs that solve problems 1, 2, and 4 pretty easily. This is a critical issue, and we will talk about this more in our next post in this series.

As for the third issue, if you take the government data and throw it up an a web site, you will join a list of others who have already done it – and they probable did it years ago and have a head start on you. Not likely to work. So you need to do something different. But the good news is that there is a lot of head room here.

Try analyzing the data. Tons of people do this, including very large companies such as the Brookings Institution do a tremendous amount of work that leverages public government data (while combining it with other research). But you can produce new, unique data, by analyzing the reams and reams of publicly available data.

2. Another thing you can do it license the content. There is a lot of content out there that has been assembled by others that is available for purchase at very low cost. In some cases, this is in fact government data that has been processed. You can find lots of this stuff, and it can give you real content for your site. The great stuff about this content is that since it is not as readily available to the public, and you may not need to change it so much to publish it (because it may already be unique)

3. Look to other publicly available data that is available for reuse. There are libraries of this content that are available via free public license models (such as Wikipedia, which is available under the GNU Free Documentation License). These usually require that you allow people to take and create derivatives of your version of the content. And, of course, before you publish it, you will need to change it yourself before you publish it.

4. Write it! People love dealing with subject matter experts. Write endlessly on a topic matter you know a lot about (make sure you are focusing on content quality). Since this is inherently a low volume activity (you can only write so fast, after all), see if you can supplement your writing with contract resources who you can get to write on related topics.

If you do use contract writing resources, make sure you know who they are, and have complete quality control over what they do. We do not use third party article services to write for us. We use people we know – people whose kids go to school with my kids for example. You can get cheap resources this way and make sure the article quality is up to our high standards. Even with several people on staff, article writing is best used as a supplement to your other content generation ideas.

Summary

So there are a few quick ideas for finding content. Three of the ideas hinge on having the ability to locate large sources of content, and then produce something unique out of it, and the other idea requires a lot of manual work. If you can’t get there to process this type of data on a large scale, then think a bit smaller in terms of your financial goals. But the same type of approach will still work on a smaller scale, just with smaller results.

Next up

1. Code architecture
2. How to get links
3. How to monitor results, and what to do about it

Already Published Articles in the Series

1. Picking a Market and Content Strategy
2. Using PPC to Enhance your Organic Traffic Strategy)
3. Site Hierarchy and Keyword Selection

del.icio.us tags: search engine optimization, seo, online marketing, content development

Picking a Market and Content Strategy

Most people in SEO have heard the constant stories about how the really good Black Hat SEOs make a million or more dollars per year. They build a site up over time, and while that site’s revenue is building, they are already launching additional sites. They have groups of sites in different stages of the traffic / revenue funnel at all times. The sense of the postings I see out there is that this is the only way to make lots of money in SEO.

Poppycock (can I use such strong language in a public blog?). We’ve done this using White Hat SEO techniques, and we are in the middle of doing it again.

This is the first of a multi-part series of blog posts that will lay out a strategy for generating multi-million dollar web properties (revenue from organic traffic) from scratch using White Hat SEO methods.

1. Picking the Target Market

Face it. You are not going to win big by going after the Frisbee market. There are merits to these types of market, as they are less competitive than other markets, but the total dollar volume is not that high. If you want to win big, you need to play in a big market. Here are some choice candidates:

• Insurance
• Mortgages
• Shoes
• Travel

If you want to look at other markets, check out the best paying AdSense keywords, but don’t forget to look at search volume too. If the keyword pays $50.00 per click, but search volume is low, it will not make you tons of money.

2. Decide on a Content Strategy

You are going to need content. Lots of it. In a later post in this series, we will talk about link acquisition strategies, but I can tell you now you are going to need content to get the links. In highly competitive markets, it’s going to be a long road to win on the major terms. With the right strategy, and patience you can. But we all want revenue soon.

So you need to take advantage of the long tail. Reams of content will do this for you. Certainly writing scores (or hundreds) of articles will do this for you, but you may not have the time and money available to do this quickly enough. Here are a couple of other ideas:

• Find publicly available source of data that you can reuse. Better still find such sources of data that you can analyze, and then publish. Your analysis represent added value.
• Strike a partnership with some entity that is willing to let you use their data (which is currently not publicly available) on your site.
• Find large data sources that are publicly available and then do mash ups of these data sources.

You also need to comfortable that you can render this into thousands of web pages containing unique content. Duplicate content will not get you any where. So figure out what your value add is going to be. In any event, have your content plan in mind before you commit to a new business.

3. Manage Your Expectations

You better be in it for the long haul. You just started a site from scratch. Think 6 months before you have meaningful search engine traffic, and 2 years before you have a mature web property (reaching 7 figure revenue levels).

There are exceptions, of course. If you have something that is hot enough that you get an article written about you by Walter Mossberg, or a write up in business week, you may be able to climb the curve more quickly.

In addition, you need to go slow on some things. You can’t dump 100,000 pages on the web at once, as you will trigger a review filter at Google. You also can’t go out and buy a bunch of links and expect anything good to come out of that.

Patience is the key here. This will be hard work, and it will take time. But don’t kid yourself, the black hat guys pulling down big money are working hard too. And, their business model is at much greater risk than the one we are laying out for you in this series of blog posts.

Next up

1. Using PPC to help your launch
2. More on building content
3. How to get links
4. How to monitor results, and what to do about it