I have the alexa toolbar and it just flashed this article. I really think it could benefit a lot of us, especially those who blog. Of course, they want money. But they give us wonderful facts that are truly fabulous!
Here's the article URL: http://www.wilsonweb.com/design/usbo...y-articles.htm
This was released today
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Search engines have long been the golden geese which deliver us free traffic. This why SEO is such a big thing, and has been for the last decade.
If you have a business online, nothing sounds more attractive than the prospect of receiving free traffic from Google, et al. Back in the bad old days, we had to spend serious dollars on advertising to get people to visits our places of business. Now we can get those visitors at no cost.
Well, there is a cost, of course. It takes time, expertise and money to optimize site pages. And you had better be pretty darned good at it, if you want your pages to appear on page one of the search results. The more competitive the keywords, the harder that job is.
As a result, everyone and his uncle is now optimizing pages for less competitive, long-tail keywords. Much easier to get onto page one. But, of course, by definition these pages don't attract a ton of traffic.
So what is one to do? Simple, you just create these pages in massive volumes. And what is the simplest, fastest, and cheapest kind of page to optimize for long-tail keywords? Short articles of course.
Which brings us to the first of our three reasons why writing more and more articles might not be such a great idea.
Reason #1. The web is being flooded with short, low-quality, optimized articles.
You probably know of online marketers who write dozens and then hundreds of articles, either to add to their own sites or to article directory sites. They are all playing the same game, all trying to get onto page one of Google.
How many articles have lone webmasters and online marketers uploaded to article directories? Millions of them. But these are just the small fry. Companies like Demand Media and Associated Content -- to name just two -- have taken this to a whole new level. They create and upload short articles on an industrial scale for huge clients, including Yahoo! and AOL. They are playing the same game too. But with far higher volumes.
And because they are working in high volumes, they try to keep the costs down. And that means paying their writers peanuts. Which means that even the best writers cannot afford to spend enough time to write a quality article. That is why these millions of articles are short and of low quality.
So ask yourself this question: For how much longer are you going to be able to attract a ton of traffic this way? How long before the web is totally saturated with short, optimized articles on every topic under the sun? It's getting there fast, and you'd better not have article-writing as your sole marketing strategy, or you'll find your key metrics falling fast.
Reason #2. Google is catching on, and has the algorithm to prove it.
The scale of the article-writing craze has reached a level where Google is taking notice, and taking steps to place those low-quality articles where they belong -- on page 20 of the results.
In May of this year Google introduced its Mayday update. In the words of Google spokesman Matt Cutts, "This is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn't going to be rolled back."
Put simply, Google is working to identify all those low-quality, 350-word, highly optimized articles, and dump them.
This is a significant change. In the past Google has relied almost exclusively on inbound links to determine the quality or otherwise of a page's content. Now it is using an algorithm to identify low-quality, bulk article pages. In other words, Google now has a fast, automated way to find those pages and keep them off the front page of search results.
Reason #3. Low-quality articles don't get any traction through social media.
As you may have noticed, social media is getting kind of big. Facebook has over 500 million users. That makes it the equivalent of the third largest country on the planet. Twitter has over 145 million users. MySpace, while fighting a losing battle, still has over 126 million users. And there are over 5 billion mobile devices in use worldwide.
What do these sites and devices have in common? They are all about sharing.
All parts of the social web -- from smart phones, to blogs, to Facebook and Twitter -- are all about the sharing of interesting and entertaining text, images and videos. And it's all about what's happening now.
In this environment, article-writing becomes horribly old-school. I mean, who wants to send a tweet about a rehashed, remixed, optimized article on how to clip a dog's toenails?
Not going to happen.
But if you upload and share a video clip of how to cut those toenails, that's a whole different story.
The bottom line. Google and the other major search engines have a massive job on their hands. To survive they have to deliver quality search results fast. This puts pressure on them to identify and ignore the millions of short, low-quality articles out there.
At the same time, social media is transforming the web. It is changing the demographics of web usage and changing the way people use the web. As an example, millions of people now start their day on Facebook and end their day on Facebook, without going anywhere else in between. Good luck getting your short articles in front of them. You won't.
But social media does have one thing in common with SEO. Do it right, and you can attract huge volumes of traffic to your site at no per-visitor cost. You simply have to move on from old-school thinking about the web and web content.
In short, it's time to write fewer articles and more of the kind of content that is likely to be shared through social media. And that's okay with me, because writing sharable content can be a lot more fun than writing articles -- excluding this one, of course.
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Originally Posted by sc32803
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