All You Need To Know About Content And Search Engines : Internet Marketing Affiliate Programs Blog

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Saturday, October 13, 2007

All You Need To Know About Content And Search Engines




Every newbie, with small budget to start a work at home online, they need to create content to them website. Content brings traffic, and traffic brings costumers. It is a mathematical formula on business from home online.

Then, they have two problem:

  1. to create content
  2. to have their content being filtered by search engines

How to create content? It is simple! You can write articles and to publish it on articles directories.

That is ok, but I don’t use to write anything, neither articles, you say. No problem, you can use content syndication. What is that? In a nutshell, you use other people’s articles.

However, you must pay attention on duplicated content. Below is an article from Jonathan Leger. He deals about how you can use content syndication and having your own content being filtered by search engines.


Is your content being filtered by search engines?


Content syndication is nothing new–newspapers and magazines have been reusing other people's quality content for a long time.

But a few years ago somebody decided that this should be open to anybody who wanted to write, and the web made it possible. Now Article Syndication is a very popular way to establish yourself as an expert on any topic, not to mention get loads of links into your website for free.

However, the problem was that search engines would rank each copy of the article exactly the same, and so the search results started showing the same results (only on different websites) when people searched.

This did not last long. Google was the first to create what is commonly called a "duplicate content filter". This filter is responsible for recognizing two pages as being too similar and ignoring the copy while favoring the original. It worked well, and now all major search engines now employ a duplicate content filter.

This is a problem for people who are wanting to use syndicated content to generate search engine traffic to their websites. If you do nothing more than copy and paste articles from free-to-use article sites and slap them on your website, you will most surely not get any traffic from search engines because of the duplicate content filters.


But there are a few ways to beat this filter and still generate traffic from syndicated articles and other content. And there is a serious side effect of these filters that you need to be aware of. I'll tell you about that first.


The Serious Side Effect Of Duplicate Content Filters


Ok, let's say that you write a great article on your website topic, Green Widgets. It's a really good article that you are proud of, so you immediately put it up on your website and then go submit it to a number of article submission sites.

Sounds great, right? You'll get lots of links to your website for sure, and that will help you ranking. No problems then, right?

Wrong.


The truth is that the major article directories are very popular, and are crawled very, very often by the search engines because of that.


So it is quite likely, unless you have a very popular site yourself, that the search engines will find the article at the article directory BEFORE they find it at your site.


Are you seeing the problem yet? Because the search engine found the article at somebody else's site first, they will consider your website's copy the duplicate–even though you put it on your site before submitting it to those directories!


So it is very important that you make sure that your new article page is indexed in the major search engines BEFORE you submit it to the article sites.


You can verify that the page has been indexed by simply doing a search at each engine for the URL of your article. If doing a search returns your page title and a short snippet, then it's indexed. If you get a "no matches found" type of error, then it's not in there yet.

To ensure that your article gets indexed more quickly, get links to it from other sites. Also, have a link to your new article on your home page, and a short snippet about the article.


This is good anyway since your visitors will see that you're updating the site with new material, but it's also good because a search engine will hit your home page more often than any other page of your site, so having a link on the home page is a great way of getting that new article noticed and indexed.


Beating the Duplicate Content Filters


Beating the duplicate content filters really isn't very difficult, it just requires a little work on your part for each article you want to use.

You need at least 25%-30% unique content on the page in addition to the syndicated article. Now, with most syndicated articles you can't modify them, so you'll have to get that extra content from somewhere else.


There are two methods you can use to make sure the page is seen as unique:


  1. Write an introductory paragraph that summarizes the article, and place the article beneath the summary. Then write a concluding paragraph and place that paragraph below the article.

This is useful for a number of reasons, not just the duplicate content filter. The summary helps the visitor know if the article is what they're looking for before they start to read it, and the conclusion can be used to point them to other articles in the same subject area that the visitor might find useful.

  1. Use RSS feeds or other syndicated content to make the page as a whole appear unique to the search engines.

This works great if you can find a good RSS feed that is related to the topic of the article since it provides more quality information for your visitors. It's also good because RSS feeds get updated, so you are always offering fresh content to your visitors.

The problem with RSS feeds is that you are sending visitors away from your site, and that may not be what you want to do. Also, if you use RSS feeds, be sure not to use JavaScript feeds, because search engines don't see text on your page that is put there by JavaScript. You need to make sure that when you view the source code of your page that the RSS feed text is visible directly in the source code.


Either one of these two methods works well, though if you have the time to make the effort of writing your own summary and conclusion paragraphs, I recommend you use that method. It is the best way to ensure uniqueness and to keep your visitors where you want them: on your site.


Summing It All Up


Syndicated articles can be a great source of content for your site. It's beneficial because it makes your site appear "bigger"–you have multiple authors writing content for your site instead of just one.


It's great because you don't have to write the content yourself, which saves you a lot of time and energy.

But you need to be aware that search engines WILL filter that content if you just copy and paste what's available at an article directory. You need 25%-30% unique content on each page to beat the filters, and that means writing some extra text above and below the article or using related RSS feeds.


Your goal should not just be to beat the filters, though. Your goal should be to improve the quality and helpfulness of your site as it relates to your visitors. That's the best way to keep people coming back and clicking those AdSense ads.

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Jonathan Leger is a well known AdSense and Internet Marketing guru. Get $371 in free gifts by visiting his AdSense Articles blog.

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Well, I think you can see I am using this method here. It is useful and it has some logical. And, as you can see too, I was not using this method before. And it has had its consequence.


My website was not been filtered well by search engines. I am not an expert and I don’t have any problem with that. Why? It is because I consider myself as a newbie.


It is important to you know. I use to share what I learn. I believe what I learn I earn. And I believe too that if I offer content like that at my website I can help anyone, like me, that it is looking for ways to make money online.


Many Gurus online use to say content is everything. I think so, because when I am searching for something online I like to find good content to my queries. Haven’t you?


Hence it follows that there is no problem on using another people articles, since you can not just duplicate it. You can follow these steps:

1. you make a search for an article you would like to publish on your website

2. you read it.

3. write your own comments, as it was sad in the article above

1 comment:

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