Content - Suzannah Porter on Diigo

14 Oct 08

Article | Eight Examples of Profitable Headlines Every Web Professional Must Memorize Today!

Tried, true, and tested headlines

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Articles Headlines Writing Blogging Content

Rethink these classic, for-profit headline examples for a nonprofit enviornment and apply to your fundraising letters, blog, and website. - suzannah on 2008-10-14

- Neitlich, Andrew. 2004. Eight Examples of Profitable Headlines Every Web Professional Must Memorize Today! Blog. SitePoint. August 5. http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2004/08/05/eight-examples-of-profitable-headlines-every-web-professional-must-memorize-today/.
  > - on 2008-10-14
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One: A top 5 or top 10 list with a must-read adjective like “Fatal” (Top Five Fatal Mistakes Lawyers Make Drive Prospects to Competitive Web Sites)
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- Two: A secret that everyone must know (The Secret to Doubling Traffic on Your Web Site that Will Drive Your Competitors Crazy)
- Three: A warning (Warning: Your Web Site is Ruining Your Professional Image)
- Four: A compelling question and answer (Q: Who knows how to increase traffic on your Web site by 800%? A: Steve Smith does!)
- Five: An irresistible story (”They laughed when I told them I developed my own web site….until they visited my site”) — This one is based on one of the most successful direct marketing campaigns of all time (”They laughed when I sat down to play the piano…”)
- Six: A comparison or one successful and one unsuccessful person (”A Tale of Two Auto Mechanics….Both Competent, Both Smart, Both Good People, But Only One Hired XYZ Web Design….”) — this one is based on a classic Wall Street Journal ad comparing the financial success of a successful and unsuccessful businessperson (the punch line being that both are the same but only one subscribed to the WSJ).
- Seven: An irresistible benefit (”Here’s how to double your online sales at half the price”)
- Eight: A headline that creates urgency via a deadline or other means (”This is the last day that one of you will win a free web site today — and then this offer will expire forever”)

Article | Source Ordered Content: SEO Benefits (and Drawbacks?)

How to order your CSS so that your content is seen first to the spiders.

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Articles SEO Content Web Design CSS

- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Source Ordered Content: SEO Benefits (and Drawbacks?). Blog. Search Engine Journal. July 28. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/source-ordered-content-seo-beneits-and-drawbacks/7334/.
  > - on 2008-10-14
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Sometimes it’s very useful to return to basics and refine good old SEO techniques you might forget. SOC (”source ordered content” or “front-loading”) is one such technique that basically incorporates placing content as close to the beginning of the page as possible and using CSS to display page elements where they “belong”.
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- Here is a very simple example: that’s what you see at the top of a very popular blog: (1) head (+ (2) navigation) => (3) left column => (4) content => (5) right column - that’s the way it is displayed:
- So we expect to see content block going after the left column in the page source…. but instead we see content much closer to the top, right after the head navigation (you can also check that with SEO browser):
- Source ordered content is especially useful for SEO because:
  
  it allows to give prominence to keyword-optimized sections of your site (e.g. content above the navigation);
  it allows to show spiders unique page elements first - before sitewide elements (e.g. article before sitewide navigation);
  it allows to place search crawlable elements above blocks that are ignored by search bots (e.g. content above flash or javascript elements).
- The benefits of this technique include:
  
  no “undesired” elements (e.g. navigation, paging, etc) being shown as a snippet in the search results;
  important and informative content loads first (lower bounce rate from slow page loads);
  better rankings (priority is given to that content that resides directly after the <body> element).
- The only downside (I never felt myself but heard other webmasters report) includes some cross-browser compatibility issues. Can you think of any more method drawbacks? I would be eager to learn about them.
- Once again thanks for your post. It is really very informative.
  
  I am not sure about the disadvantages.
  
  Even I have a site in which the navigation bar has many links(its a drop down menu) because of this the content gets pushed down to the bottom of the html page. Even i was thinking the same solution for it. Except home page in other pages placing the navigation menu after the content (using CSS) really am not sure if it is possible or not, lets see.

Article | 3 Ways to Give Your Keywords Prominence

Ways to enable smart keyword density for better SEO

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Articles SEO Keywords Keyword Density Headings Content

- Smarty, Ann. 2008. 3 Ways to Give Your Keywords Prominence. Blog. Search Engine Journal. July 29. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/3-ways-to-give-your-keywords-prominence/7372/.
  > - on 2008-10-14
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- Keyword prominence can be basically achieved by:
  
  making sure the most important element goes after (or is close to) the opening <body> tag in the page source code;
  including your keyword in the SEO-sensitive elements of the page: title, anchor text, bold text, alt text, etc.
- Let’s see how we can make one element/keyword of the page prominent over others:
  
  Emphasize the most important keywords of the page with the help of basic semantic structure: make sure to take full advantage of H1, H2, H3 tags to make your page structure perfectly clear to a search bot.
  Use SOC (source ordered content) technique especially in cases when your (customer’s) designer’s desires come into conflict with on-page SEO. The technique is simple and widely used: place your keyword-rich content closer to the top of the page in the source code and use CSS to order all page elements the way it pleases the web designer’s eye.
  (A copywriting technique used in journalism) Try inverted pyramid writing - that is, use the first paragraph to give a short summary of the content below and to include your keywords there (that’s also an effective blogging technique when you let those summaries appear on the home page and the full content on the single post page - thus avoiding duplicate content issue).

Article | Stale vs Fresh Document as Defined by Google | Search Engine Journal

Determining what is fresh content from what is stale content.

www.searchenginejournal.com/...7755 - Preview

Articles SEO Content Google Web Design

An interesting article that shows from a technical standpoint what Google determines to be "Fresh Content" and what Google considers to be stale content. My first thought is nonprofit Wiki. This is why the organiic, brainstorming, and constantly evolving nature of wikis, a trait shared with a nonprofit's issues or cause, could naturally bring a a site traffic. A nonprofit constantly documenting it's watchdog efforts will constantly be considered fresh content. Just another argument as to why nonprofits should absolutely be brining their conversations online. - suzannah on 2008-10-04

- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Stale vs Fresh Document as Defined by Google. Blog. Search Engine Journal. October 8. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/stale-vs-fresh-document-as-defined-by-google/7755/.
  > - on 2008-10-14
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Bill Slawski did a great job of summarizing the patent with help of two examples:

The Constitution of the United States is an old document, but it’s not stale. A news article about the “World Series” from 1918 may not be what a baseball fan wants to see when searching for “World Series” this October.
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- Stale content refers to documents that have not been updated for a period of time and, thus, contain stale data (documents that are “no longer updated, diminished in importance, superceded by another document“).
- The staleness of a document may be based on:
  
  document creation date,
  anchor growth, traffic,
  content change,
  forward/back link growth, etc.
- Google patent explains how they can spot the stale content using 4 factors:
  
  Query-based factor;
  Link-based criteria;
  Traffic - based criteria;
  User-behavior-based criteria.
- 1. Query-based factor basically refers to analyzing which pages in SERPs are selected by users.
  
  Besides, the search engine tracks which queries one and the same document ranks for: “discordant set of queries” might mean the page is spammy.
- 2. Link-based factor analyzes the page backlinks monitoring the dates that new links appear (i.e. “indexed by Google or the date the linking page was created”) to a document and that existing links disappear. By looking into the the rate at which links appear or disappear over time and how many links appear or disappear during a given time period, the search engine is able to conclude whether there is trend toward appearance of new links versus disappearance of existing links to the document or vice versa:
  
  downward trend = > stale document (more links disappear than appear);
  decrease in links = > stale content (either sudden or significant link disappearance).
- 3. Traffic - based criteria: a large reduction in traffic may indicate that a document may be stale.
  - So if you have a great post that you want many users to get a chance to look at, consider a "top posts" category on your front page. This way, traffic will continue to go toward those posts. - on 2008-10-14
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- 4. User-behavior-based criteria: if people spend too little time on the page (compared with the similar / tightly relevant page), that might mean the document is stale.

11 Oct 08

Article | Making Sure Your Content Looks Good to Google

www.searchenginejournal.com/...6834 - Preview

Articles SEO Google Content

- Smarty, Ann. 2008. Making Sure Your Content Looks Good to Google. Blog. Search Engine Journal. May 5. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/content-looks-good-google/6834/.
  > - on 2008-10-11
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- So here a few ways you can see your pages with the search engine’s eyes:
  
  View your page in a text-mode web browser - Lynx lets you see the text-only version of the page,
  Disable JavaScript and CSS in your current browser and check that your site works correctly (make sure you can see everything you want Google to see);
  Look at the text-only version of Google’s cache of the page (all the text Google saw when it last crawled the page):
- Take advantage of the Domaintools SEO browser; with it you will see the spider’s version of the page (text, links and alt texts) and its optimization score:

Suzannah Porter's Library tagged Content → View Popular

Article | Eight Examples of Profitable Headlines Every Web Professional Must Memorize Today!

Article | Source Ordered Content: SEO Benefits (and Drawbacks?)

Article | 3 Ways to Give Your Keywords Prominence

Article | Stale vs Fresh Document as Defined by Google | Search Engine Journal

Article | Making Sure Your Content Looks Good to Google

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