It’s not the packaging, it’s what’s inside. Here it’s anti-gravity from Brooklyn Superhero Supply.

A few weeks ago I published a list post about the 10 most common content strategy mistakes most businesses make. I promised back then to go deeper and to write a post on each item in that list. Here we go. Let’s start with one, the definition of content.

What is content? Everybody seems to know it. Most people seem to agree that it’s the monarch. Large corporations and their CEOs have spread the “content is king” mantra for decades, even before the Internet really started out.

Most people in business seem to prefer the broadest definition there is: Anything that is “contained” by or on a website is its content.

Following this logic an online shop showing only small product images and short descriptions along with prices and shipping methods is a content rich site no doubt. In short most decision makers assume that they already have content on their site, it’s their sales copy.

I guess the issue here is that a website can be quite abstract.

Just try to compare it to real life products like magazines, books or even groceries. Can the description of a magazine, the cover text, maybe even a table of contents be the actual content of magazine? No,

1. the articles
2. the photos
3. the reports
4. the interviews
5. the opinion pieces

are – to some extent even the classifieds are.

The same applies to a book. The actual novel is the content not the description of it on the back.

With groceries it’s even easier to visualize. The content is not the description of what’s inside once you buy it. The content or contents is the actual food you see once you buy the product and open it up. Nobody would stuff even more descriptions of the content into the package and claim that it’s the content. Would someone suggest to “Eat the paper inside.”? No. It’s obvious. The content has value by itself and is not just a description of what’s inside.

On the Web most potential clients who ask me for SEO services do not seem to understand that they need content in the first place.

Or like in real life they want their customers to pay first to get the content. On the Web they only display the descriptions of what you get once you pay. The Web is different though. It has been built by and for scientists who exchanged their papers where they described scientific phenomena.

Scientists wanted peer review. So what did they show on their sites? Did they just publish the table of contents of their papers? No. They published the whole paper. Later when the salesmen appeared on the Internet they did not study the medium but just used it as packaging. They published only the description of the content to be bought. They still try but that’s like displaying books on TV sets. You have to adapt to the medium, the medium doesn’t adapt to you.

So you have to understand that content is not packaging.

Content is what you see once you open the package. On the Web you have to display open packaging so that people can look at it and share it. You don’t sell the content like in real life. The content has to be free. You are selling products and services while the content is valuable by itself.

• Content helps to solve problems
• it makes people laugh
• it’s eye opening and intriguing.

Once the people love your content they will buy your real life products and services. Not necessarily the same people who read and spread the content but others who trust them. So please don’t consider your sales copy to be your content.

Related posts:

1. German SEO Goes International
2. 10 Fatal Content Strategy Mistakes Most Businesses Make
3. How to Spot Content Theft on Social Media and Elsewhere

1. German SEO Goes International
2. 10 Fatal Content Strategy Mistakes Most Businesses Make
3. How to Spot Content Theft on Social Media and Elsewhere

Unless you lived under a rock for the last decade you already invest time and money in

• web design
• social media
• SEO
• link building
• analytics

services. It’s 2012 though and the social media and SEO landscape is changing at an alarming pace. What can you do about it? Invest in SEO services that bring you ahead of the crowd in 2012.

This a a list of 40 Cutting Edge social media & services to invest in now and in future.

To make it easier to you I sifted through hundreds of social media and SEO services offers to find you those that are reputable, where the descriptions are in-depth and make sense.

I tried hard not just to promote my friends from the industry so that I linked out to plenty of agencies that are lesser known but nonetheless trustworthy.

1. Online Reputation Management (ORM)
2. Mobile SEO
3. mobile web design
4. mobile analytics
5. Siri optimization
6. citation building
7. Google Places SEO
8. Google profile optimization
9. social media optimization
10. social media participation
11. social media monitoring
12. social media analytics
13. blogger outreach
14. influencer marketing
15. social media press releases
16. word of mouth marketing
17. viral marketing
18. infographic creation
19. video SEO
20. YouTube channel management
21. community management
22. Facebook optimization
23. Facebook page creation
24. Google+ optimization
25. Twitter ghostwriting
26. Tumblr SEO
27. UX (user experience design)
28. load speed optimization
29. conversion rate optimization
30. a/b testing
31. landing page optimization
32. conversion tracking
33. usability testing
34. business blogging
35. content strategy
36. content creation
37. content marketing
38. ecommerce SEO
39. shopping cart optimization
40. international SEO

Of course you can’t invest in all these services at once unless you want to spend millions. You have to specialize. Choose a set of similar services and focus o them.

The services linked above are in most cases those that have explained what it’s all about in the best possible manner.

I have considered also numerous other factors before I linked each company though. I don’t know all of them but many agencies mentioned are already established household names.

As you see I haven’t linked to all services yet as I haven’t found proper offers for some of them yet. In case you offer the above mentioned but not yet linked services and have an extra page with the exact description of the service add your URL in the comment section.

* Creative Common image by urbanfeel.

Related posts:

1. 7 Services of SEO 2.0 Companies – Submit Your Site Now!
2. 3 Approaches to Reputation Management: Which One Do You Need?
3. 11 Examples of SEO 2.0

1. 7 Services of SEO 2.0 Companies – Submit Your Site Now!
2. 3 Approaches to Reputation Management: Which One Do You Need?
3. 11 Examples of SEO 2.0

Lately many influential bloggers have written about the end of the golden age of tech blogging. They say “tech” but in a way they mean blogging in general it seems. Some people were furious and asked whether “over” is the new dead. I didn’t really care.

Then over the recent weeks as I considered my own blogging “career” I realized that indeed an era is over. It’s the stone age of blogging that is over now. Also I recognized partially what replaced the Neanderthals of blogging and what’s next.

I want to summarize what really happened in the first decade of blogging.

Who am I to look back at a decade of blog history? I was quite late to blogging. I think I tried Blogger when it came out in 2001 but I was only reading blogs for two years when I finally started my first real blog in 2003. It was a private blog about art, design and activism. I had written it in German. I remember that at some point in 2004 I was even among the top 100 German blogs in two separate Technorati-like lists.

I tried to convince my very first SEO client in 2004 to establish a blog and even started one for him. In 2005 I finally started to blog professionally aka for money and clients. One of the clients back then was the largest union of the world. I created a whole blogging portal with dozens of blogs for the youth organization of the union. Ironically I worked up to 80h a week for the union or the “agency” that actually paid me. This union is known for the “35h work week” demand.

In 2006 I created my first full fledged blog for a personal client of mine. In 2007 I started this blog – SEO 2.0 and the rest is history.

I’m still one of the most well known bloggers in the SEO industry, mostly due to my contribution over at SEOptimise. From 2008 to 2011 I have written hundreds of flagship blog articles for them and made them the best SEO blog in the UK, both by the number one ranking in Google.co.uk and by winning the UK Search Awards. Sadly I wasn’t even notified or invited to the ceremony. The SEOptimise team has received the price instead of mine. I only got an email a few weeks later that they don’t need me anymore in 2012.

Meanwhile I have established and written for two flagship blogs for German clients. One of them is profitable for more than 2.5 years now. The other is the top ranking cycling blog in Germany despite me not really having the time to take care of it a lot. Additionally I have started a blog about science fiction in 2011. Last but not least I update a private Tumblr blog for two years now.

Internationally I have written for all kinds of SEO blogs and beyond like the Hubspot inbound marketing blog, Google Blogoscoped when it was in the top 30 of the most successful blogs worldwide. There many many more I can’t even remember. So indeed I know something about blogging despite being a late adopter.

So what has actually changed in the last decade, the time I consider the stone age of blogging?

The definition of a blog has changed itself

When you look at the Technorati Top 100 blogs these days and compare it to those from just a few years ago you will wonder why there are almost no blogs on the list or in other words how a blog is defined now.  A blog seems to be a popular corporate news site with a team of writers who publish items almost every hour. Real blogs like BoingBoing or Kottke are the exception. Even they have transformed or lost in popularity.

Blogging is a multimillion business not personal anymore

In the early days blogs were not much more than personal diaries. Over time they become more and more like corporate media until corporate media swallowed them or outmatched them on their own turf. The CNN Political Ticker is the #11 most popular blog these days. Some blogs were bought and sold for many millions of dollars. Others earn millions of dollars or venture capital by the millions. I rarely see personal diary-like blogs of importance now anymore. People still care for opinion but not for the person behind it.

Blogs are about topics and teams not bloggers

I was really astounded when AOL bough the seemingly anti-corporate activist site Huffington Post. When they sacked Michael Arrington, the original founder of TechCrunch I was still somehow shocked but when it happened to myself on SEOptimise I wasn’t even surprised anymore. Blog readers today don’t care anymore who writes the stuff they read on their favorite “blog”. It’s just a site or news source like any other. The unthinkable, removing the main blogger from a blog, is not an issue by now. Bloggers get hired and fired. People read blogs not bloggers. The teams are interchangeable as long as the topic stays the same.

Everybody blogs today but people do not consider it blogging

What do people on Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Twitter? They blog. When I started blogging a blog posts was the size of the typical status update of today. A short sentence with a link was a perfect usual blog posting for years. The flagship blog post aka huge well written article is a relatively new phenomenon. So in a way most people have embraced blogging but without the attitude attached to it. Today companies like Facebook or Google own your updates and they can remove them any day. They even decide what you are allowed to write about or what “profile” picture you use.

WordPress is a full fledged advanced CMS

When I first used WordPress I was late again. I think I switched to WP when it was in version 1.2. It was clumsy and ugly back then but still it was the most advanced, user friendly and popular blogging tool at the time. I didn’t like the backend code of it but I was glad that I didn’t have to code everything myself. Yes, I have coded my websites by myself! Today WordPress is a full fledged CMS you rather use for your whole site where the blog is just part of it. Many people do not use the blog “module” at all. WordPress is really advanced when it comes to features, extensibility and customization.

WordPress themes are high quality web design today

In the early years I hated all WordPress themes. I’d take a theme and styled it completely new until it looked a bit better. As I’m not a designer I just stripped most styles. Over the years the themes got better and better but most of them still looked like diaries for teenage girls and poor poets. I’ve recently been looking around again for a great clean and minimalist theme and I was overwhelmed be the sheer number of highest quality themes that look a design for a few thousands of dollars. Many of the best are premium themes but you also get outstanding free themes.

Blog writing is almost of journalistic length and depth

As noted above blogging in the early days was often like tweeting or writing Facebook updates today. Short sentences with a link were quite common. Adding images or even videos did not happen a lot at first. I remember that I rarely added images in the first months of my blog in 2003. Blogging and journalism were like two opposite sides of the same coin, they never touched each other.

Over the years not only journalists have embraced blogging but blogging itself has become more journalistic and in-depth. Some blog posts over at Search Engine Land are so long I rarely have the time to read them in their entirety. Also journalism itself has degenerated. Today most journalistic articles are just republished agency news reports from AP, Reuters or DPA. Blogs posts are often much better than actual newspaper articles.

Blogs are interfaces and hubs in a social Web environment

Without a blog a site is like a dead end. There is nothing really you can offer to make people used to social media engage with your  site unless you have at least a blog. Forums or communities are of course even better but a blog is the easiest one of them to set up and maintain. In a social Web environment people are not keen on reading your sales copy or pseudo-objective press releases and news articles. They want to know who you are and how you think. Blogs are interfaces between companies and customers. Journalists and readers. A site that doesn’t have such an interface is effectively dead. The blog is also a hub for all your media related endeavors. You cover or announce it on a blog. You get popular via your blog, the rest of the website is just the structure.

There is no such thing as a blogosphere anymore

I seldom hear the term blogosphere anymore. Do you know what it is? It was something I felt in the early days of blogging in Germany. The blogosphere was like a virtual family. Whenever you wrote a post you knew everybody else in that huge family will in some way relate to it, even by not reading or noticing it. When a post didn’t get linked by other bloggers, when it did not become part of the blogosphere everybody knew that it wasn’t really on point. When I started blogging in English around 2007 I didn’t feel really as a part of it but I felt that it was still there. Today I feel nothing. There are people who write for blogs they work for. There are many blogosphere if there are at all.

Every niche and industry has its own blogosphere and rules

Every niche, industry or topic seems to have a blogosphere of its own these days. When I started this blog I wanted to cover many topics at once, blogging, social media, SEO but also “make money online” topics or web design. Later I added usability, freelancing, self improvement. Today there is a whole sphere of blogs for each of these topics, some of them already imploded, for instance there are just a few good and active freelancing blogs left.

On the other hand I can’t “compete” with all social media all the time blogs anymore. Web design blogs are filled to the brim with resources lists I can’t match either. Every topic requires a different kind of writing, strategy and even design it seems. Self improvement blogs are clean and sell ebooks. Architecture blogs show off building by architects all the time instead of writing about architecture. Web design blogs do now describe the practice of web design either but they list tools and resources on how to design for the Web yourself. Every niches has its own rules of blogging.

Consolidation, a few blogs dominate each niche or topic

Every blogging topic has one or a few blogs that dominate it. Search Engine Land dominates search blogging, SEOmoz does it for SEO, Mashable for social media and Social Media Examiner for social media marketing. TechCrunch still dominates tech blogging even though the founder is gone. Nobody needs him, his new blog is nowhere as popular as his old one. There are few other blogs who still try to compete but unless you have a team of dedicated bloggers you can’t really compete for attention with them.

I follow people on social media who share SEOmoz articles every day it seems. I’ve followed those who did it with Mashable. I prefer to use an RSS reader for that purpose. I don’t need people to shove the most popular blog down my throat each day. Most other people seem to like it and use Twitter instead of RSS. So even a renowned figure like Arrington can’t compete with the giants anymore.

Commercial blogs that use blog software and are full of ads abound

There are not only the huge corporate blogs you have to compete with for attention these days. There also myriads of blogs that are technically blogs, as they use WordPress or Blogger but they are just a collection of keyword driven commercial content mixed with undisclosed affiliate links to lure  search engine users and make them click. Finding a real blog with a real human behind it gets more and more difficult. Either the authors are not really associated with that particular blog or you don’t even know who the “Admin” is.

Blogging is the new normal, nothing to talk about

What I have noticed about blogging in recent years that you don’t have to talk and write about it that much anymore. In the early years blogging was new, amazing and still unfolding. Right now blogs are the most common form of regularly updated publication on the Web. Corporations websites add blogs because people are used to read like that. Almost everything about blogging has been already said and written numerous times. That was one of the reasons why I didn’t even care for the “golden age of blogging” meme.

Blogging is about personal branding not writing anonymously

My first blog was anonymous in a way. I just didn’t mention my real name on it. It was like Tumblr today. Nobody cared for my name. Also I didn’t want people to expect certain kind of content and opinion beacuse I was a pole. Today blogging is personal branding. You are somebody if you blog. Or at least you should try to be somebody when you blog. Otherwise blogging will become frustrating quickly.

People won’t trust you as much as they trust bloggers with real names. Even Google won’t rank you as high as an author who discloses who s/he is. These seems to contradict same of my former points when I wrote that people do not care about the bloggers abnymore. They indeed don’t unless you make them. You have to highlight the fact that you write and not “Admin”.

These are the changes that came to my mind right now. I could write on for hours. What I want to stress is that as you see above some of the changes are rather positive, others can be viewed as negative, some are ambiguous. Overall they show that blogging  has evolved beyond the stone age.

We do not live in cages anymore. Indeed a new WordPress with a modern theme is like a condo compared to a cage of WP from a few years ago. I welcome this change.

On the other hand I do not consider AOL or CNN to be bloggers thus I don’t have to identify or even compete with them. It’s a bit sad that the categorization of weblog is a bit meaningless these days. It can mean anything and everything.

• So what’s next?
• Will only corporations blog?
• Will we just “blog” for corporations like Facebook or Google?

Remember that some things haven’t changed. What I have learned over the years is that bloggers care for other bloggers. Not all of them some will actually attack you just to position themselves in a better light but overall blogging connects.

I may not be a particularly gifted writer but people who like me, other bloggers, tell their friends and followers and thus my blog posts get shared. It’s as simple as that. I read and share postings by other whenever I can.

Half a year ago I wrote about what I called then “smart mob SEO“. The smart mobs of the early blogging era are still there. They might occupy public places but they also can form and support bloggers. Often when other bloggers link to me or I link to them we outrank huge corporate sites. So it’s possible. Real people are always better than mindless corporate drones or just employees who happen to blog.

I don’t want to return to my cage but I still like sitting occasionally around the virtual fireplace

and convene with other bloggers to change the world. Facebook and Google are not replacements for blogs, they just parrot them without the inherent meaning. For real bloggers Facebook and Google are only tools to promote their own blogs.

You can still or now more than ever create your audience. You won’t get as much traffic as the AOL blogs but you don’t need that much. You want a small but dedicated audience. The 1000 true fans who can feed you are not a myth.

* CC image by Roger Smith.

Related posts:

1. 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Me
2. SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design
3. Top 10 Most Awesomely Amazing Creative & Funny Reasons Why Blogging for Social Media Sucks

1. 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Me
2. SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design
3. Top 10 Most Awesomely Amazing Creative & Funny Reasons Why Blogging for Social Media Sucks

Everybody seems to agree by now that you need „great content“ to succeed on the Web. Both social media and search engines require quality content as their business model relies on others, us, to produce that content.

The problem is most businesses don’t get it.

Their execs might repeat the „content is king“ mantra and they even might realize there is a connection between SEO, SMO and content but they don’t act accordingly. Their content strategy is either non-existent or fundamentally flawed.

Today I’d like to summarize the 10 fatal content strategy mistakes most businesses make on their websites. I don’t use the ever present buzzword „content marketing“ for a few reasons. The most important one is: marketing is just part of the content strategy. Also by calling it content marketing you focus on a means not a goal.

Beyond not having a content strategy at all these are the most common content strategy mistakes:

No Content or Pseudo Content

Not having content is an obvious problem many businesses face. It can get even worse though. Many people mistake any type of text or other media for content. They assume that sales copy or advertising is content as well. Product or service descriptions are not content. Content is something that has value by itself. Just consider the other meaning of content, does it make you content as in satisfying you? Does it answer a question, solve a problem, entertain you? Does it make you laugh or angry? Does it make you want to scream out loud „hey, look at this!“?

Low Quality Content

What is low quality content? Content of low quality contains of words without much meaning. Sometimes its repetitive for the sake of SEO or rather the SEO of 10 years ago when „keyword density“ still mattered. It’s not meant to be read by people. It has no visible author and it’s barely readable. Sometimes it tries to be content while it actually sound like an ad or sales copy.

Low quality shallow content is often devoid of any emotion. It’s matter of act and solely descriptive or it’s sheer manipulation trying to convince you without explaining its points. It uses ready made cliches and common phrases. Sentence like „content is king“ are a good example of this. They are sheer repetition.

Boring Content

Your content can be very high quality and despite of it or even because of it boring. It can be a scientific paper or a statistic with really important insights but as long as it’s boring it’s a waste of time. Do you want a handful of specialists to read your content or do you want thousands of people to spread it on the Web? As a business you need to attract crowds even if you just sell to a few people or other businesses. Why? It’s the people who you attracts that make or break your website. Without the wave of appreciation by large numbers of people sharing your content your website will stay obscure.

Text-only Content

The Internet is not a book. Even a book has a cover with an image. So don’t treat your visitors like readers of a novel. Make sure to at least add images. With the proliferation of cameras and screencasting tools it’s even by now possible to create good videos by yourself without a whole team of professionals. So why artificially limit yourself? Content creation is not copywriting. Content creation can use a plethora if tools to create content using manifold media. A text that doesn’t even use images is far less likely to be noticed, read and shared on the Web.

Offsite Content

Do you waste your best content on Facebook, Google+ or Quora? Are your best ideas, questions and even problems User Generated Content for services who make their money via the content of others? Are you active on social media and social networking sites on a daily basis while your own site or blog rarely gets updates? This is what offsite content is about. It might be useful to some extent as in guest blogging on important blogs but your Facebook page is not the place to dump your best pieces of content.

Facebook like other social sites is only a way to spread the awareness about you and your business. Working for Facebook doesn’t make sense. Spending half of the day on Quora and „blogging“ on Google+ doesn’t pay bills either. Don’t put your best content and spend most of the time on third party sites. Invest time and effort into your site first to then use them to gather attention elsewhere for yourself.

Irregular Content

Musicians who publish a new album after five years have to explain why they have been away for so long. The press is talking about a comeback. Nobody even notices that you haven’t been blogging for a year. I mean they notice that your blog is dead or your site hasn’t been updated in ages but nobody will come up and ask you what happened. Unless of course you have a very dedicated fan base. Most businesses don’t have it. So what you actually need to do is to publish content regularly.

It may be once a week or even once a month but the visitor has to know that the content is not a one time event. The reader has to have a reason to come back for more. When there is no more there is no reason to return. There are weeklies and monthly publications on paper as well. You will lose your most ardent readers when they have no way of knowing when to expect the next piece of work. They will simply forget about you.

Separated Content

Many business sites have added a blog in the recent years. That’s wonderful. On the other hand it seems that many decision makers were glad that the content problem has been relegated to the „blog reservation“. The bloggers are responsible for it and thus everybody else can take care of „real business“. The only existing content ends up separated on a blog that often is not even visually part of the whole site.

Some business use third party tools so that the blog appears to be a different site than the rest. They blog may even thrive but it doesn’t help the site a lot if there is no real connection. Also giving up content creation for the actual site beacuse of the blog is a huge mistake. What about a glossary, an FAQ, white papers, infographics, educational videos? The blog can’t be an excuse for not creating anything else. Also a blog is just a casual medium in many cases. The types of content mentioned above are much more substantial.

Duplicated Content

Some content by major publications or websites ends up being „reprinted“ on some many websites that in the end there is barely a way to locate the original source. I don’t even refer to content theft. Just think about so called journalism today. Most stories get produced by the whole sale journalistic factories, Reuters, AP or DPA. Then they end up on dozens of other sites with small changes but generally they just get copied. In large organization or companies you will also see press releases redistributed all over the place.

Heck, even Google who allegedly hates „duplicate content“ republishes some blog postings on other blogs. I don’t even want elaborate on duplicate content when it comes to SEO. It has been covered numerous times by others. Just don’t publish the same content using more than one URL. Strategically speaking ensure that you have unique sources of content and that you publish it just in one place. Don’t solely rely on third parties producing content for more than one website.

Wrong Audience

Before you even start creating content you have to ask yourself who you are writing, drawing or filming for. This may vary for each piece of content but generally a publication or site has preferred audience, I don’t like the common term „target market“ as we don’t shoot people here and don’t solely market to them. Imagine being on stage and looking into the audience. Imagine the people you want to see down there. Are they female or male? Are they young and wild? Or are they older and more respectable? Do they have to pay an entrance fee or are you playing at free spontaneous open air festival?

Some businesses create content with no audience at all beyond themselves. They write as if they are the only people they talk to. They focus on themselves, only saying „we are doing this and that“. They use terminology no one else understands. They write impersonal monologues. Who is your audience? Your industry peers? Your potential social media fans? Are your customers your audience? Is it the general public? I can’t tell you. You have to find out for yourself first.

Just Content

As content creators what they do and they rarely will tell you that they are actually content creators. They will be writers, photographers, filmmakers. Do you get the difference? It’s not the focus on the medium, it’s the focus on the outcome. They don’t wake up in the morning and think „today I will create a piece of great content“. When they get inspired the write a poem, a manifesto, they photograph beautiful women or places. For you, the business person, it might be just „content“ at the end of the day. You can’t start the day with the wish to create content because it ends up just fluff. Content is not the goal, it’s the byproduct of creativity and self-expression. Additionally content is just the starting point. It’s like a king in chess. You can’t win the game with just the king. So just creating content won’t suffice.

These mistakes are indeed fatal for your website. Just make one of them and nobody will actually read or share your content. Even if they do they might not even know that you are the author or that your company website is connected to it.

So what now? Now that you know what’s wrong and how to ask the right questions you can start thinking about your content strategy.

I will help you.

I will focus on each one of the above listed points and explain in depth how to actually do it right. So stay tuned and subscribe to my SEO 2.0 blog to read about a proper content strategy in the following weeks and months.

* Creative Commons image by Jon Wiley.

Related posts:

1. 7 Social Sites Every Business and Professional Should Use
2. What is Content? It’s not Your Sales Copy
3. How Does Google+ Add to Your Social Media Strategy?

1. 7 Social Sites Every Business and Professional Should Use
2. What is Content? It’s not Your Sales Copy
3. How Does Google+ Add to Your Social Media Strategy?

robots.txt, a protocol that helps search engines to find out which part of a website should not be included in its index. According to Wikipedia

The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable.

As an SEO, you must have tried this search operator in Google: [site:example.com]. This simply returns the pages from example.com that have been crawled and included in the Google index. The Google bot does not crawl any pages that are ‘disallowed’ by the robots.txt file. Everything makes sense till now but what if your robots.txt file started to appear in Google search results?

To be honest I thought somebody is poking fun at me. It doesn’t sound logical at all. After reading a tweet by Peter Handley aka @ismepete I took it seriously though. He is one of the brightest minds in the search industry!

Shocked, amazed and I guess somewhat a mix of both, I quickly jumped over to Google to see it for myself and guess what I found?

You see, Peter is not the only one dealing with this but websites like

• Dailymail
• Webmasterworld
• Last.fm

and many others… all have their robots.txt file indexed in Google.

You see, it’s simply illogical to block ‘robots.txt’ in a robots.txt file. This didn’t make any sense to me:

Why Google actually indexes this file and how to de-index from the search engine?

Why does Google index the robots.txt?

There can be multiple reasons why Google indexes the robots.txt file but I have figured out two as the most common reasons why search engines index particular pages and later show them as results for a query.

1. Links:

Google follows links, you know it, right? From one link to another and the chain continues. When links are pointing to the robots.txt file from external sources (different websites pointing to your robots.txt file) or internally (some page of your website that points to robots.txt file), Google will probably index it.

1. Social signals:

The faster way to get Google’s attention to a page I know is to share it on social platforms like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook (Google currently can’t see private Facebook sharing activity). When for some reason you or someone share your robots.txt on social sites this can be another common reason that makes Google index the page file.

Consider Rishi Lakhani who wrote a letter to Google in his website’s robot.txt file: Check this out, it’s still there on his website. Rishi Lakhani shared his creative robots.txt on Twitter and it went viral. According to Shared Count, Rishi Lakhani’s robots.txt file got:

• Facebook Likes: 21
• Facebook Comments: 8
• Facebook Shares: 33
• Twitter: 1232

Now, you know why Google will probably going to index your robots.txt file so let’s talk about action now!

How to de-index the robots.txt?

Don’t link, don’t share:

This is not always in your control, especially not to make people link a specific page on websites like the “Webmasterworld” forum or Last.fm. Theoretically though if you don’t link it and don’t share on social platforms, Google will not show it.

URL removal request:

That’s the only idea I have found, simple yet powerful and safe way to get your robots.txt file out of the Google index. It’s great because the user’s site ownership is verified and shows even the progress for each request.

These are two of the ways I know how to deal with the above mentioned issue. In case you think you have a better solution for the robots.txt indexing problem, please share it with the community in the comment section.

Related posts:

1. Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov – When will it come to your Website?
2. Google Indexes Twitter Links
3. Review: Better Blogging with Michael Martine

1. Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov – When will it come to your Website?
2. Google Indexes Twitter Links
3. Review: Better Blogging with Michael Martine

For years I’ve been a proponent of using SEO for more than just making money. Even on the Web it’s “people before profits”. You can’t just do business as usual when the planet and humanity with it goes down the drain. Still it’s a rare occasion that you see SEO being used for activism.

Not every non-profit organization is automatically working for the greater good. There is one though that is beyond doubt in this case: Greenpeace. Also Greenpeace has used SEO for its Detox campaign in a way that inspired me to write this post.

One of the reasons I write about it is the lofty definition of SEO Greenpeace offers:

This is SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization”, and it’s one of the few fantastic activist tactics that are native to the web. It’s not the online version of something which people were doing already before the internet.

The SEO here is just a call to action to webmasters and bloggers to link back to the campaign site. This is of course the easiest and best way to do it. Also it’s quite inclusive. Not everybody can donate money or take part in actual protests on the streets. Also many people might feel that just giving money is not really activism.

Last bot not least many actions are just too far away for most people. On the Web there is no distance and attention is the currency. Links provide and channel attention. Of course I’d invite readers to share the campaign URL on social media sites as well. On the Web the people have the power to change things and to direct attention where it belongs.

The detox campaign is surely worth your attention:

Greenpeace is campaigning to stop industry poisoning waterways around the world with hazardous, persistent and hormone-disrupting chemicals. Launched in July 2011, the Detox campaign has exposed links between textile manufacturing facilities causing toxic water pollution in China, and many of the world’s top clothing brands.

I think I’m using products by at least one of the brands targeted in it:

• H&M
• Adidas
• Nike
• Puma

These are just those brands that have already reacted. Greenpeace has already forced Apple to become more environmentally friendly so I’m quite optimistic that they will be able to stop the water pollution by these and other global brands. We know they they don’t produce or even design most of their garments themselves. They are all made in

• China
• Bangladesh
• Philippines

The people in the countries suffer at least twofold, by ridiculously low wages and by environmental destruction.

These global brands do not have factories themselves. They even outsource the creative process. They only thing they have is their brand image. So in case they pollute the environment we can pollute their images with news about it. It’s that simple.

What can you learn from it?

You don’t need an expensive SEO agency to use SEO for activism.

Just ask and inspire people to link to you and spread the word on social media. Of course some advice from SEO experts is also sometimes crucial. In this case Gareth aka SEO Doctor has pointed pout that the campaign URL Greenpeace requested readers to link to has been redirected by a temporary redirect aka 302 which does not work for Google. So all the links using the short URL would have been wasted.

Does it work? Yes, Greenpeace is already at #11 for the quite competitive term [detox]. Ad some more links to your sites to push it up to the top 10.

Of course SEO is more than rankings. Personally I also doubt that people who are searching for detox are actually the right audience for this kind of topic. It would be better to optimize for the brand names of the companies that are responsible for the pollution. Once potential customers find out about the toxic pollutants their brands produce they may reconsider their purchase. This way the pressure grows.

Related posts:

1. How to Fight Big Business in Google and Beyond with Smart Mob SEO
2. 20 Ways to Get Legit Paid Links Without Getting Penalized by Google
3. Where to Buy Links? Turkey!

1. How to Fight Big Business in Google and Beyond with Smart Mob SEO
2. 20 Ways to Get Legit Paid Links Without Getting Penalized by Google
3. Where to Buy Links? Turkey!

This week I have written a post for the cognitiveSEO blog about the best link building blogs, experts and their most important postings from this year. It sounds funny in a way because I am the guy who has explained years ago that you don’t need link building anymore. In fact

according to my own SEO 2.0 theory you rather attract and get links instead of doing link building.

So how can I reconcile both? Do I contradict myself? Does SEO 2.0 not work as desired? Does link building still exist as an SEO practice in 2011?

Let me start with the bigger picture. What happened to the concept of SEO 2.0 as a whole? Is it still valid? It is. How?

Most SEO 2.0 techniques I have tried to spread since 2007 are common sense by now.

They are just called SEO nowadays. The meaning of SEO changed not the term itself.

At the same time link building has evolved and encompasses link baiting and getting links as well if you ask me. It’s the old term but it has a new meaning by now. Just consider the term “white paper”. Is it a paper at all these days? Yet people understand what it is.

Likewise link building has a new definition in 2011.

It may not be manual link building anymore. It may not even contain widely used old school techniques like

• directory submission
• article marketing
• press releases

Some of these techniques are obsolete by now others have changed as well.

There are still directories worth being included in, heck, I have one right here at SEO 2.0, article marketing has been killed off with the Panda update though and guest posting has replaced it. Press releases still get used but their SEO value is very low. They’re just good enough for getting a healthy link profile. Social Media outreach and blogger relations trump it by far though.

In my recent presentation over at Search Marketing Day I have used the term link building in the old school way. I mean the tedious, manual practice of contacting and bargaining with webmasters, trying to find link partners etc.

Even this part of link building still exists. Luckily we don’t have to rely solely on these tactics anymore in 2011 but the smaller and more conservative the niche or country you optimize for the less social media and bloggers are there to get links from. The more difficult is it to attract links naturally or to enhance the process of getting the links.

So at the end of day link building is sometimes the

• management of contacts
• overseeing the technical integrity of links
• planning campaigns that target influencers

to make them link to you.

Link building is the name of the game even though it might be an altogether different link building than just a few years ago.

It’s the same with SEO. It might be called search engine optimization but it may also cover social media and content creation. So it’s basically SEO 2.0 as I imagined it but the people prefer to use the word they are accustomed to.

This phenomenon is not just limited to search marketing. Just consider cars. We still measure “horse power” there even though we aren’t cowboys either are we?

So link building still does exist as a SEO practice but it’s not the same it was just a few years ago. Even link baiting has changed now that Digg is dead.

* Image by Darwin Bell

Related posts:

1. 7 Autopilot Link Building Methods for the Lazy Bastard
2. Commenting on Dofollow-Blogs as a Link Building Strategy
3. It’s Magic: Content Creation and Link Building While You’re Away

1. 7 Autopilot Link Building Methods for the Lazy Bastard
2. Commenting on Dofollow-Blogs as a Link Building Strategy
3. It’s Magic: Content Creation and Link Building While You’re Away

Image: This is how logged out Google users see Google +1 votes. They display only on the first result.

When Google initially introduced the Google +1 feature for search results many people in the SEO industry and beyond argued that it makes no sense to click +1 on search results. I was in fact supporting this notion of uselessness.

Now that the actual Google +1 button for websites is available as well another round of

“why would anybody click it?”

posts has appeared. This time I’m not so pessimistic though.

I’ve watched the way I use the +1 button and have seen the button appear all over the place within days. Plus, surprisingly the button counts are quite impressive in many cases. Also I have included the button on SEO 2.0 as well and in spite of not having published any new posts in weeks some +1 clicks appeared on my old postings.

Of course these insights are completely subjective and I have once again no numbers or pretty graphs to back it up but I have asked myself why the heck I am clicking +1 all the time while rarely clicking “like” or actually tweeting a post in the last few days?

I didn’t want to write another cliche “10 reasons to” click the Google +1 button on websites but there are quite a few use cases by now.

Reasons not to +1

First let me explain the most common arguments saying that nobody besides webmasters who vote themselves up (After all +1 votes count as a ranking factor according to Google.) will have the incentive to click +1. There are basically mainly three of them.

• No friends or followers to send to.
• Google Profile being obligatory.
• Questionable privacy and sharing of +1 data.

Why would anybody click +1 if thee are no friends and followers to actually share the news with? On Facebook your friends and family see it, on Twitter your followers with all kinds of backgrounds do. On Google +1 there is actually a void, nobody follows your +1 “shares” and thus they are meaningless, unless of course you search for something someone else has voted up by +1.

Then there is the notion that you can’t use +1 without a Google Profile. This point was already used to denounce Google Buzz which requires a profile as well. Why would anybody want to have a Google Profile nobody else ever visits. After all it’s not a social network, it’s just a profile in the wild.

There is of course the privacy problem like with all Google products these days. While you can opt out and make your +1 votes private many people do not trust Google with their data. Also some of them might not want to be seen recommending a site in the search results to people they either barely know or worse people they work with etc.

Also as Andrew Nattan points out he doesn’t want to see other people recommending shoes he’d never wear while he just wants to search for shoes without any bias and any interference by other people.

Reasons to +1

I can very well understand all these issues but by now I’m quite convinced that they are not enough to actually stop people from using Google +1 and I do not only mean webmasters including the button but also people clicking the buttons. On the contrary. By now I believe that there are more reasons to click the +1 button than any other buttons we already have.

First let me explain why I don’t tweet or “like” most sites, even those I really appreciate. For tweets it’s by today’s standards not simple enough. I have to click on a button and then I end up on Twitter or a third party site where I actually have to click again and in many cases where I have to write something witty to entice my followers to click the link. In most cases I use my own tools anyways but even my j.mp sidebar takes quite a lot of work in a way to simply share a link.

Now isn’t that a reason to use Facebook like all the time? Well, it might be but let’s take a look at my 100 – 150 select friends on Facebook. I befriended mostly people from the search industry but also there is my mother, some people I went to school with in Germany, even my first love from Poland (I think I was 12 then) wanted to befriend me. I haven’t met or contacted her in the last 24 years.

I guess most people have more family, friends and colleagues in there. Also not everybody has friends who speak different languages. Nonetheless just imagine me “liking” several German and Polish sites or posts a day or even dozens. My search industry colleagues might unfriend me soon for flooding them with stuff they can’t even read. So of course I am very choosy what I “like” on Facebook. Additionally

I don’t want people to know that I like gay Muslim anarchists for instance unless they search for them on Google and thus are also interested in this niche topic.

So what can I do in these cases?

I can plus one everything I like, dozens of articles in a row. I can vote up German, Polish and even Spanish or French sites (as I learned those languages as well). I can vote up gay Muslim anarchists without ostracizing my search marketing friends.

Still, you would ask, why? Don’t I admit that nobody can see it? Well, sooner or later you might search for something I already clicked +1 on. Also I want to show my appreciation to the webmaster. I want other readers to see that this site, page or post has been approved by other people already.

Also I want to find this site next time I search for it. Your own Google +1 votes will not only push the resource you voted up in other people’s results it will also show up in yours and have a direct impact on the ranking. We still don’t know yet how big this will be, but a study already claims that the ranking benefit is quite considerable. Still there are more reasons to click +1:

Image: My Google Bookmarks results for the query [seo blog]. Take note that the formerly bookmarked results I have clicked +1 on recently have a new date and tend to show up on top.

A +1 updates a bookmark on Google Bookmarks.

Yes, I use Google Bookmarks for ages. I have started around 2006 I think. Today I can find every single site I bookmarked there, I can see all my starred results from former Google SearchWiki. I can see all the bookmarked sites I clicked +1 in the search results there on top with a new date and I expect them to show all +1′s from search results and websites as well sooner or later.

Last but not least I expect Google to merge Google Buzz and Google+1 in the near future. It does not make sense to have to separate social media entities like that.

So you see there are plenty of reasons to use Google +1. Especially for me. I use Delicious as well and I bookmark dozens of pages a day in some cases so I may even switch to Google Bookmarks as soon as Google implements one click bookmarking using +1.

What about the privacy? Well, privacy concerns abound when it comes To Google and Facebook and it hasn’t stopped most people from using me. Even “conspiracy theorists” like myself, Matt Cutts refers to privacy advocates as such use Facebook and Google Chrome. I use Iron, the spyware free Chrome version.

Likewise most people use one or the other Google service, be it GMail, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Analytics or whatever. So in some cases you will already have a Google Profile by way of using one of these services. Google could set them up automatically when it decides to. Until now it isn’t obligatory but for some it is and I have one since 2008 I think.

Also I assume that the CIA already knows that I like gay Muslim anarchists so why not tell everybody?

What about the people who do not want me to advise them on buying shoes? Well, some don’t but many others will be glad to have someone they know to help them out.

Do you already use Google +1 on your site? Do you click Google +1 buttons on websites or in search results? Tell me about it or at least click the +1 below.

Related posts:

1. Google +1: The New SearchWiki?
2. Mob vs Smart Mob: 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best Social Media Traffic
3. 7 SEO 2.0 Lessons: SEO for Humans Instead of Spiders is Not About Google and “Content is King”

1. Google +1: The New SearchWiki?
2. Mob vs Smart Mob: 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best Social Media Traffic
3. 7 SEO 2.0 Lessons: SEO for Humans Instead of Spiders is Not About Google and “Content is King”

Whether you’re spitting rhymes about gold chains and Adidas kicks, or shaping your web strategy, one thing is essential… “Keepin’ it fresh.”

Fresh content is unique and engaging, and Google likes that.

It seems nowadays, the Google team wants your website to keep content as fresh as organic veggies, by updating information weekly, if not daily.

It has been quite the year for search engine marketing strategy. What was a relatively stable way of doing things is now totally flip flopped. Ever since Google’s Caffeine update in 2010, it seems that marketers are constantly keeping one eye on Google, trying to understand what to do, and how to do it best. Currently, search engine optimizers must focus on restructuring their websites, producing better content, and disseminating this content on social media.

As the landscape continues to shift one thing is for certain, Google doesn’t like low quality material; and what was once a mass strategy to publish and disseminate as many pages as possible is now a systematic approach to index and push high quality material.

In April last year, Google unveiled its Caffeine update which allowed indexing in almost real time. It became blatantly apparent for search engine marketers after the Mayday update, how non-unique content is punished within their algorithms. In November 2010, Google Instant sent shockwaves through search engine land, as people proclaim, “SEO is dead.”
 
What Are The Experts Saying?

Truth is, SEO isn’t dead, it is just fragmenting as search engines find better ways to index and understand content. Here are a few of my favorite takes on our current search engine landscape:

“Maybe the problem isn’t the thin content that users detest seeing in search results. Maybe the problem is with SEO itself. The purpose of SEO is to achieve top rankings and visibility, maximum impressions and clicks in SERPs”- Adam Audette

“It’s the epic frenemy battle of SEOs vs. Search Engines that whittles the SEO techniques down to what eminently points to no other option but to have a great product. What is a great product? It’s a site that people want to go to, return to, share with their networks, email their friends, etc., (aka building natural links and “buzz”). Get it? Great content and natural links and buzz = the new SEO”- Laura Lippay

“Rules of engagement:

• Write meaningful posts.
• Help people.
• Solve problems.
• Promote these posts, socially and otherwise.”- Mark Jackson

How Prevalent are Google’s Changes?

SEO really isn’t anything to freak out about. SEO best practices really haven’t changed too much since 2010. High level strategy may have changed somewhat (emphasis on different SEO tactics), but the people who cut corners are often the ones crying when Google changes an algorithm. We all know that, even though Google’s algorithm will continue to adjust, quality content and best practices will remain current.

Everybody seems to think that Google is moving towards search personalization and social integration in their search results. However, something I found rather ironic and funny is the fact that Google returns only one site that has been published in the past year for the unfiltered search term “fresh content seo” (see screen shot below):

Regardless of this irony, to stay in the safe zone, and continue ranking for search terms on Google, shift your high level strategy to incorporate daily content disseminated through social media. Focus on solving problems with your content and promoting this on multiple different mediums and will be ranking for years.

This is a guest post by Matt Krautstrunk. He is a writer based in San Diego, California, providing insight on topics ranging from social media marketing to merchant services for Resource Nation. Opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the SEO 2.0 views.

* Image source: Urb.com

Related posts:

1. You Need Better Not More
2. How to Get Content and Earn Credibility with Old News
3. The Anatomy of an SEO 2.0 Web Directory of the Highest Quality

1. You Need Better Not More
2. How to Get Content and Earn Credibility with Old News
3. The Anatomy of an SEO 2.0 Web Directory of the Highest Quality

Usually when people refer to their competitors they name a few businesses from the same industry who sell the same products or services as them. This might be true for the offline world but

on the Web there are much bigger competitors. Who are they?

This is for many search engine results the most common list:

1. Google
2. Wikipedia
3. Mainstream media
4. Amazon
5. Ebay
6. Content farms
7. Shopping search engines
8. A-list bloggers
9. Spammers
10. Your actual competitors

Your actual competitors who sell the same stuff you offer do not have to be at the end of this list, it depends on the niche, keywords and how competitive they are. Nonetheless they are by far not your most important competition. Besides, your industry peers are not necessarily just rivals. You can work together for the benefit of all parties involved. I’ll explain below.

That’s one of the main differences between SEO and SEO 2.0: In old school SEO people believed that they have to hoard PageRank and never link out at all, not to mention to competing sites. When blogs and social media finally arrived in business circles most sane people have abandoned this approach.

These days the SEO industry has a whole blogosphere of its own which is highly interlinked both by hyperlinks and real life links between humans.

Also most SEO specialists are heavy users of social media and sharing links by their peers all of the time. Twitter, LinkedIn , Facebook, Quora and all kinds of other social media outlets have been embraced by the SEO practitioner early on.

Your most dangerous competition are the big guys, as you see in the list above at least nine of these mentioned above are big guys.

Google is the elephant in the room you directly compete with. It’s not just search, it’s the attention economy. As Aaron Wall correctly points out Google is grabbing more and more real estate in the SERPs.

Many users won’t even notice your organic search results before they click a Google ad or one of the myriad of their other properties and services. You can’t compete with Google, you can try to buy your way into Google ads but when Google chooses to display their other services on top of yours you lost. You have to focus on a keyword Google hasn’t usurped completely then.

A huge competitor is also Wikipedia, the greatest content farm of all that successfully poses as a non-profit while earning money ”by donations” and not paying their contributors. Wikipedia will outrank your site in most cases even when it’s ridiculous. Search for [film] or even [films] and Google will serve you a Wikipedia entry which explains what a film is on top.

Another even more disturbing competitor is mainstream media. They do not only cover news anymore these days, they are frantically searching for SEO opportunities as well so that they will rank on top for queries like [iPad].

Amazon and Ebay are also almost everywhere and either you join them or you risk obscurity for many keywords and phrases.

Many people have written about content farms and the Google quality update aimed at curbing their prominence in Google results. Even though Demand Media’s eHow and About.com by the NYT have lost a bit after the second part of the update called ”Panda” hit them they still thrive. Demand Media, owner of eHow, has stunned experts with its recent numbers.

Shopping search engines have been hit hard by the latest update but they are still competition you have to watch closely. Price comparison sites are often at the forefront of modern SEO. You need to know what they are doing to be able to cope with changes.

A-list bloggers and industrial strength spammers seem like an unlikely couple to mention together but they are both more important than you. Try to rank in the technology sector and a-list bloggers will make you humble. You can’t compete with giants Engadget, Gizmodo out of nowhere. They have whole teams of writers frantically covering the latest gadgets.

Try the same thing in the pharmacy business online and you’ll face a huge onslaught of spam infested sites and hacked pages redirecting you do the spammer’s shops. Spammers are faster than the search engines and they’ll always find a loophole. So while they might disappear on one day they will reappear on the next with another site or hijacked blog.

Now, how can you compete with all of them? There are two ways to do so. The most common one is:

If you can’t beat them, join them: Pay for Google ads, contribute to Wikipedia, send out press releases to journalists, set up an Ebay and Amazon shop, add articles to article directories or other content farms, guest blog on a-list blogs and buy links.

There is also a new way, the SEO 2.0 way: Joining forces with other bloggers or peers, sometimes your actual competitors. You can outrank the big guys by working together with other bloggers. I have done that in the past by joining a group of bloggers determined to help each other but I always preferred the intuitive SEO 2.0 way of cooperation. It’s been called mutual aid prior to the Internet.

I link out to my peers or “competitors” and they link back to me.

Not all of them do, but some of them do and some even give back more than they get because once you give and get a few times you stop counting. You just share resources as in real life with friends and family.

Cooperation not competition is the only way bloggers and small businesses can compete with their real competitors from big business and big media, big Google included.

Related posts:

1. 7 Social Sites Every Business and Professional Should Use
2. How to Fight Big Business in Google and Beyond with Smart Mob SEO
3. Words that Damage Trust in Your Blog

1. 7 Social Sites Every Business and Professional Should Use
2. How to Fight Big Business in Google and Beyond with Smart Mob SEO
3. Words that Damage Trust in Your Blog