Content scraping is getting to be a big business, and the scrapers are getting ever more clever.

In the old days, content scrapers would copy/paste your content and slap AdSense ads on the page where your content was used and make a dollar or two before they were reported. Then those nasty bots came around and they were able to scrape your content without actually visiting your website. The bots did all the work in about 10 minutes. The “operator” simply input a list of keywords that the bot was to hone in on and when those keywords were found the content was scraped and held in the bots “memory.” Then the bot would be told where to put the content that was scraped, right alongside those pesky AdSense ads. There were called Made For AdSense sites, or MFAs. They worked and the scrapers could usually get by with making $10 or $15 per site before being taken down. You do that a couple of hundred times in one month and you’ve got a pretty decent income. Do a thousand times each month and you’ll be a rich man before you know it.

Well, Google seems to have cracked down on the MFA sites because I don’t see as many of them as I used to. But there is another kind of content scraper that is starting to become more popular now. These content scrapers try to appear as if they’re not really scraping your content. They actually give you a link back - unless those old MFA guys who just stole your content with a lack of conscience.

The new scrapers take your content and put a link at the top of it out of the goodness of their hearts. At the bottom of your content (on their web pages, mind you), they link to another site that they own in hopes of selling services and products related to the keywords they are targeting with your hard work. Pretty clever, eh?

You can see a sample of this kind of content scraping on several of my past blog posts, but I’ll just link to this one and you can take a look at that first comment.

I love how Saskatoon Web Design just took my entire blog post. Sure, they gave attribution. I got the link back. They even included the internal links that were a part of my original post. All except the affiliate links (they must have scraped my content before I went back in and added those). But at the bottom of the blog post with the words that I wrote, you’ll see a link to the index page of the website on which the Rawk Media blog sits. Clever. These guys are trying to sell their services using content that I wrote, based on the keyword research that I’ve done. I suppose that works if you can’t write. But it does violate existing copyright laws. If they’re not careful, someone may report them to their ISP.

If you are new to webmastering you may have heard of a bounce rate. But what is it? There really are two ways to define bounce rate.

1. Percentage of Visitors Who See One Page - Some analytics software define bounce rate as the percentage of people who only view one page on your website. They may stay on that one page for a couple of minutes, but they don’t go any further. They read a little bit and move on. You don’t have enough mojo to keep them around longer, therefore they “bounce” off to somewhere else.
2. Percentage Of Visitors Who Leave Your Site After A Short Period Of Time - Another way to measure bounce rate is by the length of time visitors spend on your site. Most analytics software define this amount of time as five seconds or less. Some use a minute. But whatever the length of time is, it isn’t long enough to say that the visitor has a real interest in your content.

Ideally, you want your site visitors to stick around long enough to order something. If you run a retail site, you want them to checkout. If you sell services, you want them to purchase, or come back later and make a purchase. But you want them to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer. If your site is an affiliate site then you want your visitors to purchase from your affiliates. To do that, they’ve got to stick around long enough to be genuinely interested in your content.

The best way to ensure that people stick around is to give them what they want. Understand what your target market wants and provide it for them. That means making the absolute most out of your content. But it also means marketing your website to the search engines effectively. Your bounce rate is an important part of analytics and can tell you a great deal about your traffic and the quality of visitors you are getting.

This article on SiteProNews really says nothing new about SEO. Just look at the suggestions for the Top 10 Internet marketing tips for 2008:

1. Optimize your website’s content
2. Create a content development strategy for your website
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
4. Publicize your website through article marketing
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
6. Create a Company Blog
7. Experiment with video marketing
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
10. Create an effective email marketing strategy

This actually reads like a top 10 list for 2007. Nothing on this list is even remotely outside of the box thinking. All of these have been suggested before - like last year - and if you haven’t started doing all of these by now then you are likely behind the competition. The first four items on the list are actually from 2003 or before. The rest of the list is 2005-2007.

This article from Jaan Kanellis is actually more helpful. Just look at the difference in quality between the suggestions. This is fom Jaan’s article:

• Internal Navigation
• Tell Why You’re The Best
• Build Links
• Develop Your Content
• Use Title Tags
• Avoid Duplicate Content
• Know Your Competitors
• Consider your Finances
• Track Your Stats
• Increase Your Load Time/Decrease Your Code
• Evaluate Only One Change At A Time

There is a lot of elaboration that could take place here on each of these points, but they all are important to increasing your SEO benefits. Should you take the first list to heart? Yes. All of those strategies are important. But if you don’t get down in the weeds on your website content, blogging strategy, link building methods, and other important webmaster topics then just knowing that you need to develop your content is like saying a cowboy needs a horse. Sure he does, but he also needs to learn how to ride it, put the saddle on, bridle it, shoe it, feed it, and train it to come when he calls. Can you do all of that with your website?

A reader at SEOBook asked a good question, “We were thinking of mirroring our website by giving affiliates subdomains with our content like xyz.oursite.com. Is this a good idea or a duplicate content nightmare?”

Aaron Wall gave a good response and it was the same thing I’d have said. Rather than tell you what he said, I’m just going to answer it the way I would.

Duplicate Content For Affiliates Is Bad
If you present your affiliates with the same information you have on your website and in your marketing communications then you are setting them up with duplicate content, which isn’t going to help them and if it doesn’t help your affiliates, it won’t help you. That’s why you should provide your affiliates with marketing tools, but leave the creative content up to them. In other words, banners and code for a variety of marketing icons are good (give them plenty of choices, styles, sizes, colors, etc.). But when it comes to the actual content, allow them to create their own.

What If Affiliates Misrepresent Me?
The obvious follow up question to that is, “What if they misrepresent me or don’t present my product or service in the right way?”

That’s a good question. The answer is they will likely not make a sale, and you won’t either. But people online know that your affiliates are separate from you. You likely do not want the sale if someone was looking for what the affiliate was actually promoting. An illustration would make this point better, I think:

You sell yellow widgets. One of your affiliates markets it as a gold widget. A searcher Googles “gold widgets” and finds your affiliate’s website. It looks pretty, does a good job of preselling, and drives traffic to your website. Ah, but when visitors get to your site they find that those widgets aren’t gold after all - they’re yellow. Now they’ve lost interest. Have you lost anything? No because those visitors weren’t really interested in yellow widgets anyway.

Now let’s say one of your affiliates does a real good job of preselling your yellow widgets. You rank on Page 2 of Google and your affiliate ranks on Page 1 for the key term “yellow widget.” He’s driving traffic to your website like crazy and you are making sales. Every third sale on your website, let’s say, is driven to your site by your affiliate. Are you happy about that? You should be, and your affiliate is likely smiling ear to ear. But the really important thing is that your customers are happy because they’re getting just what they wanted - the best of the best of the yellow widgets.

Affiliate marketing is really just a form of independent preselling. Your affiliates don’t work for you. The work for themselves. But they do sell your product. If they can’t market what you have effectively then they won’t make any money, but you’ll likely still get some recognition from their efforts. You may not make as many sales from their poor marketing, but their poor marketing likely won’t hurt you either. Ditch the duplicate content.

This graph showing the Google search and Alexa traffic rankings of this year’s political candidates says a lot. What it doesn’t say is how this information will affect the outcome of the campaigns. Based on the outcome of the Iowa Caucuses, one could conclude that Huckabee didn’t benefit at all from Internet marketing or organic SEO efforts while Obama may have. But the best we can say about the Democratic front runner is that SEO may have helped.

The fact that Ron Paul was the most effective Internet marketer (mostly social marketing) of all the Republican candidates and still did as poorly as he did only shows that the Internet is not a major force in political turnouts. But I believe it will be.

Most people turn to the Internet now as their first source for information. According to the latest figures, about 57%. But what will that look like two years from now? Four years from now? At some point, that number is going to reach 80%. When that happens, political candidates who cannot rank well in the search engines for important key terms aside from their own names will not do well in elections. When that will be exactly, I’m not sure, but I’m banking that it will be before the 2012 presidential election.

If that’s the case, and I believe it is, then how much more important will it be for businesses to do well in search engines if they expect to reach their target markets? It will be extremely important. It is now, but it will be even more important as the competition gets stiffer. And SEO will still be king of content - even in elections.

You’ve seen ‘em. The scraper sites that are stealing your content. They’re a big pain in the you-know-what. You know it, I know it, they know it. But does it matter?

It might.

Scraper sites exist to make money. But how do they make money off of your content? It depends.

Some scraper sites will steal your content and place AdSense ads on those pages to gain the revenue from people clicking on those ads. Other scraper sites will sell advertising. But how do they get your content?

How Content Scrapers Operate
There are bots that will crawl your site looking for specific keywords. When they find them they scrape that content and place it on the blog or website of the person who programmed the bot. This is called content theft and it’s a big, big problem. Just visit some forums and you’ll see webmasters cursing up a storm about this stolen content. But what can you do about it?

Some of those scraper sites are banking on bloggers clicking through from their admin areas to see who is linking to them. They may not have any PR or clout at all and exist only to get the traffic from the people whose sites they are scraping from. These scrapers aren’t really the problem. They’re a nuisance, but if you don’t click their ads then they likely aren’t making any money.

Identifying The Real Problem Scrapers
The problem sites are the scrapers who have a high PR. A high PageRank indicates credibility. Therefore, it’s possible that the search engines will crawl those sites before they crawl yours and they’ll be credited with original content even though they stole it from you. If that is the case then you have something to worry about.

You’ll have to download the Google toolbar in order to see what the PR of those sites are. I recommend that you visit every content scraper site you find that has your content on it without your approval. Send them a letter asking them to remove your content. If they do not do so then find out who their ISP is and report them. You should also report to the search engines that someone is scraping your content and give them an URL.

How To Fix The Scraping Problem
Those high PR sites scraping your content may have other content that you can’t see. They could have a blog or article directory in a folder on that site that isn’t linked to the scraped content. It’s invisible to human eyes, but the search engines can see it. That content could cause their site to be crawled more often than yours, in which case, if they get crawled before you do, they’ll get credited for original content and you’ll be dinged for duplicate content. That’s your real problem. And to fix that you have to communicate with the search engines to let them know that your site is the originator of the content. Be patient, though. You can rectify the situation with the search engines, but it doesn’t happen in two hours.

I can’t say that ghostwriters are all bad. I can’t say they’re all good either. But if you’re going to use a ghostwriter then I’d suggest that you do three things before you let your ghostwriter start writing your blog or website content for you:

1. Interview your potential ghostwriter extensively. Don’t let any ghostwriter touch your stuff until you are absolutely sure that your ghostwriter understands the basic principles of ghostwriting - he or she should be in the background while you are in the front (otherwise, why hire a ghostwriter?) - and make sure that your potential ghostwriter understands your business.
2. Make your any ghostwriter you hire to write online content for you understands SEO. If they don’t understand SEO better than you do then they probably don’t understand it enough. This might not be true if you are an SEO, but most of you aren’t so make sure your ghostwriter knows SEO at least as much as you do.
3. Thirdly, don’t just make sure that your ghostwriters knows your business, but your industry. And make sure that your ghostwriter and you agree, at the very least, on the central philosophy of your business. In other words, he or she has to be able to write from your perspective. If you’ve been writing your own content for awhile then you’ve established your own voice and your readers will know it. They will know your prejudices, your fears, your hopes, your dreams, your fourth child’s name. Does your ghostwriter? He’d better, because he’s pretending to be you.

If you do find yourself hiring a ghostwriter and you didn’t conduct a proper interview first, understand one thing: There’s no vast right wing conspiracy. There’s no cabal of ghostwriters out there trying to bring you down. Many, many ghostwriters are darn good at what they do. I have no problem recommending a ghostwriter in many cases, especially since Brick Marketing provides ghostwriting services for some of our products. But, you can get into trouble with a ghostwriter if you are not careful and that’s why you need to conduct a proper interview.

Keywords in your content is one of the most important parts of Search engine optimization. Knowing what keywords to use is only part of the battle. To reach number one you have to use them correctly to make they appearance count the best.

It takes a lot of words to convince a search engine that you are a subject matter expert. Also, most sites use images to relay their message to humans, but are now discovering that search engines are blind and do not see images. Or the site content comes from a data base and the data base has little unique content. Or the site accepts feeds from other expert sites but this makes all of their content someone else’s, and they either get no credit for it or are penalized for duplicate content. In any case, the design and content on your web site may very well need to be restructured and expanded. [If this is not you, buy yourself a drink — you have earned it!] Avoid mistakes, use clean optimized graphics and do it right, minimize the use of flash, avoid pop-up windows, restrict the scope of forms except where really needed, make javascript and css files external to the source code, always use a site map, solve obvious problems first, and by all means keep it simple. Web page layout problems really hurt SEO projects.

So where do you add keywords? It is important that your page TITLE be as descriptive as possible of what you do and that it contain your top few keywords, but generally fewer than 12 words. Listings that include the dominant search terms in the META TITLE and META description tags have a higher ranking and a higher clickthrough rate (often more than double the traffic) than those that do not! Use these keywords to make up your Search Engine Optimization targets. Also, review your content to add these keywords, especially two- and three-word phrases, into the content without losing the message. This is important for a search engine that does not reference META tags. You want to use these phrases time and again without spamming a search engine. Some search engines take site descriptions from within the page, not from the Meta description fields. Such a search engine will exclude some appropriate keywords unless you use them throughout your content. And try to keep the title and description fields as short as possible to prevent you from diluting the keyword impact.

Additionally, it is good to practice a basic rule: begin each word in your META keywords list with an initial capital letter. There has been a lot of discussion about the continued use of META tags. META tags (actually the major HEAD section tags) we consider important to Search Engine Optimization. What is not known is what is meant when it is said that search engines “ignore” a META tag. Our research is that they are not ignored and that they actually do count. It is commonly known that the title is vital, and that the description is often used as an abstract, but thought that the keyword tag is ignored. Knowing the history of spammer abuse for these tags, it would not be surprising to find them of lesser importance than before, and that perhaps words are ignored if and only if they do not appear in the content of the page — but they are used if they are in the content. Is selectively ignoring words the same as being “ignored”? And if you were a search engine wouldn’t you tell spammers not to bother?

Even if tags are ignored today, it only takes a few minutes to do it right, you would never be penalized for having them (unless you spam), and not all engines will ignore them and maybe not forever. You can never go wrong by using META tags, and only hurt yourself if you don’t use them.

You must also unconditionally, absolutely, positively have keywords throughout your body section. It is recommended that you have at least 400 words of clean, grammatically correct sentence-structure content on every page. You must also have your keywords appear as the most common (without excess) phrases on your pages. In many cases there are ways to do this that work well for whatever your page format or content, all of which is customized to the look-and-feel of the site and the nature of the content.

And you also need to link pages together using the keywords of the landing page in the anchor text of the sending page. This is a must… use text links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are related. If the topics are not related, then you should still use relative anchor text for the page you are sending the user to.

Just the other day I got an order for forty articles on an obscure topic that requires research to be done in no longer than two weeks. The topic is complicated and requires a certain amount of research, yet I have the utmost confidence in my ability to complete it. I have been in the content development game for some time now and my approach to massive jobs works, for me at least.

• If you are creating your own topics or keywords for your content, it is a little bit easier. Sure, you will need time to do a little keyword research, but you get to face the job on your own terms. If not, it doesn’t matter, but you will have your work cut out for you.

• Group your keywords by topic. Try to break the list down into five or six loosely related groups.

Plan your articles. I write ten thousand words a day and sometimes more, yet I still plan my content development. A paragraph tends to be 50-100 words long. If you have a word count that you are shooting for, plan that many paragraphs. Make sure that your key words or phrases go into each one at least once.

• key phrase, especially if it has tricky words, place names or acronyms and make use of keyboard shortcuts. If you are using windows, Control+C for copy, Control+V for paste. You are going to be typing that word quite a few times, reducing it to a simple keystroke makes sense.

• Write your articles one group at a time. If you have to research, then you may well have to look at some source content for the first few times, but after that you should have absorbed enough information to get by. The articles will start flowing faster and faster.

• Take breaks, though it seems counter productive, taking a few minutes to relax can get your thoughts flowing freely again.

SEO content not only works, it works wonders. Recently, I had the pleasure to be involved in a massive writing project for a swimming pool cleaning products company. They had been around a while and had a pretty big network marketing presence, but had never really done the Internet thing. That being said, when it did come time for them to jump into the web marketing, they did it right. It was a big budget project, they had already chosen their keywords and they chose well.

They sell enzyme based products for cleaning swimming pools. Type in “Pool Enzymes” and you get a massive field of 430,000; not as bad as some markets but still pretty crowded. I produced a total of about 30 premium articles for them and was well compensated for my efforts. The work was tough going, due to the amount of research involved and all said and done it took me just under a month for it to be completed to my satisfaction. The articles and web content were all highly optimized, but not overly so. I developed the content with the goal that it was going to be good to read. I didn’t worry about keyword density. There were very few articles that had more than one keyword per paragraph. Some did not have any.

Less than a month later and the website was in the top ten on Google for “Pool Enzymes.”

A lot of people ask me about what I believe is the best way to kick their sites off. Should they launch the site before it is officially ready for launch? Should they include pages that are under construction? I always answer, why not? The site does not need to be finished for a launch date. You need to make sure that the essential elements are in place, but other than your main pages, everything else can come later.

The core pages for your site are the following:

• Home page / Index
• Contact page
• Company information page
• Core product pages

Everything else can wait, but don’t let it wait too long. You want to start bringing in the traffic and the only way that you are going to do that is with some optimized content.

In your website copywriting, are you using emotional trigger words? This is the one thing that I see more often on website copy - copywriters not using the trigger words.

Trigger keywords are words that trigger an emotional response. You want that response to be an appropriate response for your product or service - one that inspires action. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a positive response. Trigger words could be words that provoke fear, love, greed, self-confidence, lust … and it must be appropriate to your product or service. In other words, if your website is about food then you want people to get hungry, not greedy for money.

Website copywriting is all about getting people to respond. End your website copy with a call to action with a strong trigger word. Then watch the dollars roll in.

When it comes to producing large amounts of content we know just how hard it can be. I have probably produced thousands of articles in my time about topics ranging from legal advice to swimming pool cleaning products. Over time I have developed a systematic approach to web content writing that has made the job simpler for me and I am sure can do the same for you.

1. Link your themes - Chances are that you will be producing articles on a range of similar themes. It might be boring, but I have always found it much faster to deal with similar topics and keywords in quick succession. Jumping around keeps things fresh, but it does not make things faster.
2. Original material, repetitive themes - Your material should be entirely original, but the theme of your material does not need to be. You can write the same article as many times as you want as long as you do not repeat the material. You can give each article a different spin if you want to, but it does not particularly matter.
3. As much as you can bear and not a keystroke more - Content writers suffer inordinate amounts of burnout. Don’t worry, it will happen. The good thing is that if you deal with it properly you will bounce back quickly. If the workload gets too much, take a break. It can be difficult to take a break when you have a pressing case load, but managers do often understand and might be able to pass the caseload off to give you a couple of days break.

Building your web content development skills does not take a terribly long time. As you build your experience you will get better and faster and more tolerant of heavy workloads. You can make a living from web content development, plenty of people do, but you need to be build up your skill base first. Start slow and work your way up. If you are producing web content for your own site you can always outsource what you can’t handle.

What is the most important ingredient to good website copy? Is it keywords? Is it repetition of those keywords? Links? Good meta tags?

Answer: None of the above.

The key to good website copywriting is to write copy that gets people interested. The first thing that attracts readers’ attention is the headline. Does your headline shout, “Read me?” If not then you likely won’t find many readers. Learn to write good headlines and people will read what you write.

Next, you must have a good lead-in paragraph. That first paragraph, first sentence, and first image are what will hook your readers. The headline gets them to click on your post or search engine listing. The first paragraph will determine whether they read the rest of your content.

Here are some tips to help you write better website copy:

• Write short sentences
• Write short paragraphs
• Use bullet statements
• Don’t just regurgitate what you find elsewhere - make it original!
• Use h1, h2, and h3 tags
• Enhance your copywriting with dynamite graphics

These tips should help you write better website copy. Hope it helps.

Aaron Wall had an interesting post on his blog today. In response to Matt Cutts’ blog post about paid posts, he addresses scientific research that is sponsored by big pharma companies and how the information on those “research” papers is no more accurate the blather of people paid to write about products. It’s something I haven’t thought about, but he’s right.

This made me wonder just how SEO and research go hand in hand in website content. Many clients will ask us to ghostwrite their website content and massage it to look like their competitors’ content. We always try to discourage this for a number of reasons:

• First, you don’t want to create even so much as an appearance that you are taking content off of someone else’s website; that could land you in legal trouble
• Secondly, original content is king; your content will brand your company - do you really want it to look like someone else’s?
• Most importantly, in order to succeed in the marketplace, you need to stand out; customers want to do business with a company that has a unique position in the market

If your content looks like everyone else’s content then you will not stand out. Your content needs to be unique so that potential customers can see where you fit in within the market niche that you serve, but it also needs to be unique for the search engines. SEO and content are like the right and left glove. Don’t get them mixed up.