Evergreen Content - Zombie Content that Never Dies

"SEO Marketers never truly die. Their souls live forever through keywords in the crappy articles they have written on the internet." - Ancient SEO Proverb

Evergreen content is content that is always relevant. If I'm googling how to change the oil in my car or how to paint a living room, there's no expiration date on the quality of the article. The content those people wrote will live on forever like a zombie increasing traffic to their site and their SEO ranking and slowly eating your brain through eternity.

When I was young I had an odd fascination with Mont Blanc pens. I don't know, maybe it was the fact that it was something so ostentatious that it had no other point than to be extravagant. My dad gave me my first pen and I was so excited. but it turned out to be a fake.

I was inspired to never have this happen again that I spent a good amount of time researching and compiling tips and information on how to spot a fake and wrote an article about it on Ebay in 2008.

Even though my fascination with Mont Blanc has died, to this day I still get emails from people with pictures of their pens asking me to help them identify if it's a fake. If you Google "How to spot a fake Mont Blanc pen" my article is the first one that pops up.

This article actually gave me huge credibility on Ebay and helped draw people to my listings at the time and still does.

Everyone always says you need to write fresh articles and that the content has to be trending for it to get any traffic. While this is true, don't neglect evergreen content. Think about questions your customers will always be asking for years to come and answer them fully in well written articles.

Sit and think about what questions you would ask yourself about your business and actually Google those questions. Spend some time reading the top articles about your questions and then write about it in your own words using your experiences and expertise. Throw in a couple pictures and you've got yourself some great evergreen content.

Sly Strategy:

STEP 1: Try to write a few evergreen articles and add them to your website by first asking yourself a few simple questions:

a) "What are the most common recurring questions about my business, product, or industry do my customers have?"

b) "What information can I provide my readers that will make them smarter and build their loyalty and trust?"

c) "How can I help my readers with my expertise and how will my article benefit them?"

STEP 2: Once you have your topic you need to Google it and find out what other successful articles have to say about it.

STEP 3: Read through the top articles and pick out some key points you wan to highlight in your content.

STEP 4: Write your article and make it personal. Add some anecdotes to give your content personality.

STEP 5: Add either a funny picture if you can get away with it or an interesting picture. This will help the reader remember your article and break up long wordy content.

STEP 6: Make sure the title is address the question but also piques the interest of the reader.

If you've done these steps you will have some great evergreen content that people will be googling for many years.

SEO - Do Facebook Likes and Twitter Social Signals Boost Your Rankings?

Much like the KFC secret spices recipe, Google's algorithm is locked away 3 thousand miles underground guarded by laser beams and killer drones stolen and reprogrammed from Amazon that guard the rocky forbidden boulder that blocks the entrance.

But unlike KFC's recipe, Google's algorithm is constantly changing to adapt to human nature that is always trying to manipulate and bend it so we can sell Game of Thrones mugs or flashlights that you can have sex with.

Now it's been much debate if Facebook likes and Twitter follower numbers can be seduced so that Google's algorithm will make you look like a B-List celebrity.

"Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we're able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge we don't currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms." - Matt Cutts (Head of Google's Webspam Team)

Matt is pretty much saying that they don't account for followers and likes in terms of the actual hard number itself. Social profiles change constantly so it would be difficult for Google to use them in ranking since they use snapshots of the web at specific points in time for their algorithm.

A common practice some SEO marketers use is to purchase Likes and Followers from a third party that will "acquire" them for you for a price and while this doesn't affect your rankings it does make your business look more legitimate in their eyes which could lead to more eyeballs on your posts.

People should understand that having a ton of Facebook likes doesn't mean the page will rank well but if you received those likes legitimately it probably means your page is awesome and that you're offering them something that keeps them from totally blocking you as spam.

But does that mean that businesses shouldn't care about Facebook or Twitter followers? Of course they should care. While the actually number of followers and likes are not tracked anything that leaves the outside walls of Facebook and Twitter definitely matters. This means the quality of content you post on social media is more important than ever.

"There was an SEO that said "OK, we see a lot of links on Facebook and those are the pages that rank well," but that's correlation, that's not causation. Instead it's probably that there's something really awesome and because there is something awesome then it gets a lot of likes on Facebook and a lot of people decide the link to it. That's the sort of thing where the better content you make, the more people are to like it not only in Google but in Twitter and Facebook as well." 

How will Google treat social media in the future?

"..I think over 10 years, we're more likely to understand identity and to understand the social connections between people, but at least for the time being, we have to deal with the web as it is and what we are allowed to crawl and what we can easily extract from that and count on being able to access that in the future."

Whether Google takes social signals or not doesn't really matter in the end. What it really boils down to is traffic and engagement. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are built on engagement and will always bring the masses to buy your flashlight sex toys.

SEO Best Practices Checklist

Here is a basic checklist of what your page needs to be optimized for Search Engines. All your pages should follow these rules if you want good SEO.

Keep your title concise and to the point. Keep your title relevant and make sure it has a key phrase or keywords. Stay within 40-70 characters

Be creative and interesting. Articles you write should be fun and informative to read instead of focused on keyword spamming. This will keep your readers attention and the possibility that they might share your work on social media and score you huge points. People are smart enough to know when you're trying to write an article just so you can smash as many keywords in one paragraph as possible.

Write a good Meta Description. Summarize the article and keep it under 150 or so characters. This will help Search Engines categorize and rank your page.

Optimal Keyword Density Ratio. If you pack as many keywords in as possible just so you can possibly penalize yourself in Google's algorithm. Remember, they are All Knowing and All Powerful and will send Sentinels to crush you if they find out you're trying to mess with them. Here's a handy tool to check keyword density.

Short Descriptive URL that is SEO Friendly. A short URL can help people and Search Engines to find your page easier.

Keywords in First Paragraph. After Search Engines read your title they now want to make sure the content is related to it. This is why you have your keywords in the first paragraph. 

Properly Tagged Images. My favorite thing to do is to include fun images in my articles. It breaks up the long text and lightens up the mood. If properly tagged, it can also help increase the ranking of your page on Google.

If you want to learn more about the subject here is a good article with tons of spelling errors that is a good read: www.bestseoIdeas.com

Building Backlinks with the Power to Crush Like the Hulk!

If you don't know what backlinks are check out my previous post to get caught up.

You wouldn't like me when I'm angry or when my website doesn't show up on the front page of Google. Yes, it can be a frustrating fight to the top of the rankings so you're going to need every little tip you can get for your website to climb the Mount Everest that is Google.

So in the last post we talked a little about backlinks and how they work but now we can dig deeper into some Tips and Tricks on how to get some great quality backlinks to give you some great results for Search Engine Optimization.

Backlinks and Directory Listings have been targeted by All Knowing All Powerful Google in past updates and have been filtered because people had learned to manipulate them. Strategies like link exchanges or reciprocal linking where Website A and Website B create an unholy alliance and decide to put outbound links to each other's pages to boost their rankings have also been filtered. A lot of the websites had nothing to do with each other which Google did not like.

(Outbound Link: Links from your website to another - Inbound Link: Links from other websites to yours)

Backlink Boming (from webconfs.com): "Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy. Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way; and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing."

Sly Strategy: One thing you can do to get some quality backlinks is to involve yourself in a community or forum. Forums usually have a place for your profile that you can put a link to your site on. The theory is that every time you post or comment on a thread in the forum, it will create a backlink to your website because your username will link to your profile which in turn will link to your website creating a quality backlink.

Liking other people's posts or anything that causes your username to appear on their thread can possibly give you a strong backlink as well because the forum will have relevant content that matches your website which the All Knowing All Powerful Google will appreciate.

It can be time consuming and you really have to know the subject of the website you are trying to promote but it allows you to get your link out there without overtly spamming people which would ultimately penalize you.

Here's a video on the subject:

What are Backlinks and How Effective Are They?

What are Backlinks? The short description is that they are links to your website from other websites that help your ranking on search engines. When you have a site with no backlinks it is referred to as an "orphan page" which means the site is difficult to find because the only way people can get to it is by typing the URL in the address bar.

The average person travels through the internet through one entrance, be it Facebook, Youtube, a news page, or a blog they like. Once they have visited the page something on it will catch their attention and they will click the link and move on to the next site. This is why backlinks are valuable. They allow your difficult to find site to be easily reached through backlinks on other websites.

Google understands backlinks like this: If Website A has a link to Website B on their page, it is basically saying Website A is endorsing Website B and giving them an "up vote" and adds a point to their score which will help push you to the top of search ranking.

Sounds easy to manipulate, right? It seems like you can just find a way to pay for other websites to put your link on your page and your rank will skyrocket. A common practice is to submit your website url to sites dedicated that having nothing but backlinks. They post your webiste url to their directory for free but it takes 2-3 months or you can pay between $5 to $40 to have it reviewed within 48 hours. Some directories like the Yahoo directory listing page can cost you around $299.

The all knowing, all powerful Google is much smarter than you. They have deindexing hundreds of free directories in the past because they are a low-quality. Does having your links in low-quality directories hurt you? Probably not. Google basically is now blind to these low-quality directories and if they can't see them they can't see your link so it won't hurt you.

Quality backlink directories however are still indexed and can be good for your ranking. Some people really swear by it and say that that it's a powerful way to backlinks while others think it's an out-dated form of SEO. It's really hard to tell with Googles frequent updates.

No really, how effective are backlinks? At ACU Web we employ dozens of strategies for SEO and one of the tactics we used for years was to purchase and submit URLs to directory sites to create backlinks for our clients.

What we have found lately is that the directory listings are not performing very well, or even at all so we've focused more of our energies to content creation.

Sly Strategy - Backlinks are great but only if they're from quality sites which means you have to find a way to make your website interesting without overtly trying to market so that other people will share your content on social media sites and their personal blogs. That's the only foolproof way to get quality backlinks.

If you want to learn more about some Tips & Tricks on how to get quality backlinks read my blog post here.

Feel free to share this article on your blog or website! :)