miercuri, 25 mai 2011

Foreign Languages As A Competitive Differentiator Graywolf's SEO Blog

Foreign Languages As A Competitive Differentiator Graywolf's SEO Blog


Foreign Languages As A Competitive Differentiator

Posted: 24 May 2011 10:27 PM PDT

Post image for Foreign Languages As A Competitive Differentiator

A common issue online marketers have is coming up with unique differentiators. SEOs have this problem – it takes virtually no effort for an intermediate or advanced SEO to understand a competitors’ main link acquisition strategies in an hour or less. That allows new entrants into the field to easily duplicate your hard, pioneering efforts. Affiliates have this problem – there are so many people vying to sell the same thing that it’s hard to stand out. User friendliness and pricing no longer help – price comparisons, coupons, deals and reviews are now commodified. So let’s define the problem: Differentiating your site in a lasting way is difficult, because competitors can copy you without much trouble.

But what about throwing up a language barrier?

Suppose you’re an SEO
blogger and you start reaching out to Russian SEOs. Suddenly, it’s a lot harder for your competitors to build the same links. Even if they see where you’re getting the links, they can’t immediately figure out how you earned them. Google Translate may help, but it’s not great. Besides, it doesn’t even begin to allow them to get in touch and solicit the links. And if your competitors try to outsource Russian language link solicitation, they have to initially put blind faith into the outsourcing company that they’re not spamming and that they’re doing what they promised, and doing it well. They sure as hell aren’t going to start checking the Russian outsourcing company’s grammar.

Suppose you’re an affiliate who starts producing content in French. The same problem applies to competitors – how are they going to source French language content? How will they proofread it? This simple tactical idea applies advanced SEOs’ 7 curiously obvious rules. For example, it questions the assumption that you need to do business in the same language as your competitors. Why not mix it up? And whoever moves first, will likely have a big advantage.

Another example of applying the principles, is that this idea was inspired from experience. I’m currently planning a new SEO plugin, and my friend Jacob Share (who teaches folks to find jobs) asked me whether I’d want it coded in a way that enables translated versions. That seemed an excellent idea to me, as my first WP plugin – Internal Link Building (details on V3 here) – got loads of links from around the world, and was even translated into Russian and ported to other CMSes.

If you liked this, get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO. The text is done, and we’re finalizing the cover for printing :D .
photo credit: Photospin

tla starter kit

Related posts:

  1. Using Google Sitemaps for Competitive Intelligence I’m a big fan of the Google Webmaster Central Program...
  2. Who’s Afraid Of The Big Gray Wolf? 1 in 7 SEOs I’ve been promoting my advanced SEO book‘s free chapter for...
  3. Outsourcing Content Creation Vs. Hiring in House One of the first considerations for a web site owner...
  4. You’re All Wrong! Paid Links From Offtopic Sites Do Count “Paid links from off topic sites get devalued and flagged.”...
  5. No More Link Begging: 4 Engagement Methods for Content-Based Link Building Link begging is the practice of identifying link prospects, usually...

Advertisers:

  1. Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
  2. BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
  3. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
  4. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
  5. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
  6. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
  7. Link Building- Backlink Build offers 45 PR5+ Backlinks for $295
  8. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
  9. Links From PR9 Sites - - Get In Top 3 Google ASAP
  10. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
  11. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
  12. What Motivates You - what makes you want to get up and be successful

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Foreign Languages As A Competitive Differentiator

Article Marketing in a Post Panda World

Posted: 24 May 2011 11:30 AM PDT

Post image for Article Marketing in a Post Panda World

Article marketing has been one of the foundations of link building ever since I got started in SEO. However, since sites like Ezinearticles and Suite 101 have taken a huge loss in ranking and traffic as a result of the panda update, should article marketing still be a part of your overall strategy? We need to take a step back and look at the big picture to find the answer …

While many people will debate this, I don’t believe sites like Ezinearticles were passing much link equity for quite some time. The links acted more like pointers and helped with discovery. The pages themselves could accumulate trust/authority/pagerank, but they weren’t transferring much of that value to the website linked to in the bio paragraph.

Secondly, if the article was republished somewhere else, it was most likely treated as duplicate content. Ezinearticles had more trust than the almost any other site republishing the article, so they were given credit as the original content “owner”. The real value from Ezinearticles was finding people who were interested in taking your content and publishing it in exchange for a link, then tracking the competition in the space to see what other link building sources/methods they were using.

So should article marketing still be a part of your strategy? Yes–just a much less important one. First, you need to be honest about the quality of the articles you submitted. Chances are good that the $3 articles with 250 words that read like it was written by an ESL student working the night shift at an all night convenience store while his boss wasn’t around isn’t worth spending time/money on anymore. Most article directories have raised the bar for quality while trying to get back in Google’s good graces. So, if you are going to use article directories, you will need to send them higher quality content. Unless you are a brand new website, I wouldn’t create more than 15-20 articles a year: the ROI just isn’t there anymore. Keep in mind that you will have to point links at your articles from a variety of sources if you want them to have maximum effect.

If you are doing any ORM work, article marketing is still viable. Get the person/company name in the title, point a few links, and, unless you are competing against major sources, you should be good to go.

Your link building activities should never be dominated by just one tactic.You need to have a blend/mixture for maximum effectiveness. If you focus on just one technique, you run the ris:k of losing all your rankings if that tactic gets devalued.

So what are the takeaways from this post

  • Article marketing should still be part of your overall marketing strategy–just a less important one.
  • Bring the quality of your articles up to good or better.
  • Submit to 3-4 article directories, not just one.
  • Submit 15-20 articles per year.
  • Point links directly at your articles from your website and other sources.
  • Don’t expect a huge transfer of link equity. Think of it as a “fresh pointer”.
  • For ORM, article marketing can be used much more aggressively.
tla starter kit

Related posts:

  1. Getting More Out of Article Distribution Websites At this stage of the game syndicating your content with...
  2. How Do You Archive Pages on a High Post Volume Website Today’s post is an answer to a question I took...
  3. Andrew Wise of SEOLinkWheelers Talks About the Panda Update The following is a sponsored post. For today’s post we’re...
  4. Forbes Article I’m mentioned in a Forbes article about Google along with...
  5. What is a Compilation Post I came across a post today that was actually pretty...

Advertisers:

  1. Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
  2. BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
  3. Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
  4. Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
  5. Glass Whiteboards - For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
  6. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
  7. Link Building- Backlink Build offers 45 PR5+ Backlinks for $295
  8. KnowEm - Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
  9. Links From PR9 Sites - - Get In Top 3 Google ASAP
  10. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
  11. TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
  12. What Motivates You - what makes you want to get up and be successful

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Article Marketing in a Post Panda World

Niciun comentariu:

Trimiteți un comentariu