The Daily Feed Issue #7: New and unique

I'll be away until Sunday. Since I'm free at the airport, I'll advance post up some interesting sharing. Will be up whole week :D Hope it helps you in gaining the traffic you always wanted ;)

Welcome to Issue #7 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page.

Yesterday I told you the secret of getting and keeping search engine traffic. In case you're new, the secret is:

"Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them."

Feel different? You should. You're now a member of a select club who knows how to get search engine traffic. Lets break down two of the underlined sections in this sentence:

"new"

Everything else being equal, new content will rank higher than older content in search engine results. Of course everything isn't equal. But this is an important factor because you are competing against a lot of other useful and unique web pages out there, so if you can be newer, why not!

As a broad strategy this means that you need to create a constant stream of new content on your site. Write a new page every week for your wine website covering a new variety of grape. Write a new blog entry each day if you're a blogger. If you're out of ideas on what to write on, revisit older blog entries and write an updated version on the same subject.

Pretend you're Google: A friend asks you to recommend a good article on Merlot grapes. You find two of them and they're very similar so you recommend the newer one. Google does the same thing.

"unique"

Pages on your blog or website must be unique. This is glaringly obvious, but certain brain dead SEO's still copy other people's web pages on their own website and pretend they own them. Google is very good at recognizing duplicate content and if you do this you will incur the dreaded duplicate content penalty! Google will penalize you and you will drop out of the top search results. Don't do it.

Be careful of even grabbing a few paragraphs of someone else's content unless you add a lot of value to it with your own content that surrounds it.

Pretend you're Google: Would you want to send a web surfer to a bad copy of a web page or to the original?

That's all on SEO for today. Interesting blog battle I ran across today: Wired Magainze's Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff published a piece in Wired titled "The Web is Dead. Long live the Internet". BoingBoing called them on it with some interesting data of their own - and rightly so. I'm going to cover link building later this week or early next, but I bring this up because it's a classic time-tested strategy of building links to your blog or website. Wired publishes a controversial article and gets a ton of inbound links from irritated readers telling them they're full of it. And BoingBoing goes right ahead and plays the good guy calling them on it and gets a ton of inbound links and social media exposure too. Awesome! Both websites win and we're given some interesting opinion pieces to read. Learn from these guys!

Errata: Yesterday I mentioned Matt Cutts as an "employee" but didn't clarify that he works for Google and is part of their Search Quality group.

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO