SEO Advice & Commentary

By request, I have been asked to talk a little about Duplicate content and why Google doesn’t like websites with duplicate content. Recently, I wrote a post on writing good content for your site and why it is important. I briefly touched on duplicate content in that post, but it is important for any new SEO to understand why duplicate content can and will hurt you in the long run with Google.

What is duplicate content? It’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s content that a webmaster has copied (stolen or plagiarized) from another website. You often see duplicate content on sites selling items. Lazy webmasters either steal a description of an item from a competitor or they simply use the manufacturer’s description. Though a simple copy / paste from another website might get your site some easy, fast content it won’t help you at all with Google.

If you’re asking, “Why can’t I just take the manufacturer’s description?” it is important to remember one of my SEO Golden Rules – Always remember to think like Google! What does Google do? It provides high-quality web page results based on keyword searches. Let’s imagine a scenario that might make it easier for you to understand the issue with duplicate content and Google. Let’s imagine you are the owner of an online store that sells Jelly Belly Candies. Jelly Belly probably makes 500 flavors of jelly beans and you’re not interested in writing 500 unique descriptions of each flavor (understandable if not condoned by G). So, you copy / paste from a competitor and the manufacturer. Let’s also imagine that your top 10 competitors did the exact same thing so now you have 10 websites with 500 descriptions that are all exactly the same. Let’s imagine ALSO that Google has those 10 websites indexed. Now, what is likely to happen when a user searches for “Watermelon Jelly Belly”? If Google didn’t penalize for duplicate content it would have 10 websites with the exact same text listed on the first page. How is that useful to the searcher? It isn’t. Google must decide who is the “authority” on the subject of Watermelon Jelly Belly and must display only a few sites. If you leave it up to Google to decide what site is the authority on Watermelon Jelly Belly then you’re taking a big chance it won’t choose you! However, if you have content with a little bit of variety, a well written paragraph of text, and some great keyword placement you are much more likely to appear on the first page!

Here’s another example. Imagine that I was super lazy and that I decided instead of writing my own SEO tips I would just copy / paste a bunch of tips from other websites and make my own conglomeration of SEO tips. Well, would that really be anything useful to you? Let’s ignore Google and think about how it would help human users. It really wouldn’t because you can go find that exact same information already (and Google already has!). Without my own opinion and unique experiences with SEO the text is useless to human readers. Oddly enough, its useless to Google as well.

There are some that claim duplicate content is not penalized by Google. This is false, but I will entertain the thought briefly. The most common example I read on the internet is the fact that Google doesn’t penalize the HUGE news websites for using an article from an independent writer. Basically, this super-popular article is splattered all over the internet and none of the websites get dinged for duplicate content. Or do they? Initially Google doesn’t penalize anyone for the article, but after a few weeks you will notice a change in Google’s results. Google will phase out the article on many of the sites and start replacing the search results with other related articles so that users see a variety of high-quality results and not just the same article over and over. Test it and you will see!

Trust me. If you want to rank in Google and continue to rank in Google you can’t go around making your site a copy of 500 other sites. Google won’t like you. Write high-quality, unique content and you will win in the end.

One of the most important aspects of SEO is your content. In fact, I often advise people that are new to SEO that “Content is King” and I usually reiterate this at least three times. Again, if you want to do well at SEO you need to think like a search engine. Google, as you might suspect, is incapable of seeing images or graphics. All graphics and images to Google are treated the same because it doesn’t know what they are anyway. Google does not care what a website looks like nor does it know if one site “looks” better than another. In fact, the best website in the eyes of Google is a website with no graphics at all. It can only deal with text. Since Google doesn’t do well with graphics or images you need to balance your pictures with content (text) that Google is capable of reading. A lot of webmasters fail to balance graphics or flash with Google-readable text. The trick is to find a balance that allows your readers to enjoy the look of your website while also allowing Google to have a good idea what your website is about. In this post I’ll give you a few hints on writing content that Google will find valuable as well how to work in keywords that you want to rank for in the search engines.

Writing valuable content means writing unique content. Duplicate content will only get you penalized by Google. Duplicate content will be covered in another post, but just remember that copying / pasting content from another website will not help you with SEO. In the long run it will only hurt you.

There is a ton of crap information on the internet that tries to teach you how to write content based on keyword density. Keyword density is a technique that some SEO gurus swear by. In short, it is a method of counting your keywords vs other words to come up with a percentage that Google finds attractive. There is a little validity to this method. The true method of writing content with keywords is to write your content just like you would write anything else. Do not try to stuff your keyword into your paragraphs as many times as possible and don’t worry about the keyword density. The best way to write content is to completely ignore Google and write it for humans to like and understand. Again, make sure your write content that is unique. Google likes text that is fresh and new.

The smart way to write content is to base the content around the keywords for which you want to rank. I have tested several methods over nearly four years and I’ve found one method to work the best – create a new paragraph for each keyword you want to rank for! Let’s do an example. I own an iphone accessory store and I want to rank for several keywords: iPhone Accessories, iPhone Cases, iPhone Skins, etc. Here’s how I would write my content for the page I want to rank:

“iPhone Accessories are a necessity when it comes to protecting your iPhone…. (Blab on for 100 words or so – make sure you use the keywords at least once more in a natural manner that sounds nice to HUMANS)”

(next pagraph)
“iPhone Skins make your iphone customized to you! We have the best prices on iPhone skins online. If you’re looking for a high-quality skin that will last for years then our website is the perfect place to buy!”

Notice how I put my keyword first or close to first on each paragraph. I can’t tell you why this works, but it does!

A few more tips:
1. Don’t try to rank for 15 keywords all on one page. Break it up and try to limit ranking to 2-3 keywords per page.
2. Keep your keywords similar on each page.
3. Make sure you write content that might also pick up long-tailed searches. For instance, in the iphone Accessories paragraph above it might be smart to put something like, “We have the best prices on iPhone Accessories online as well as fast shipping!” You could get lucky and somehow rank for “best Prices on IPhone Accessories” or “iPhone Accessories Online” or “iPhone accessories with fast shipping”. Believe it or not – people search for all kinds of wild stuff. Use your imagination and try to pick out as much of the possibilities as you can. Trying to rank for only the high volume keywords can hurt you. If you can pick up good rankings for the long-tailed keyword searches you can pick up a lot of high-quality traffic!

A lot of people talk about Bounce Rate and what it has to do with SEO, if anything. Bounce rate is one of the most questioned aspects of Google’s algorithm. In this little article I’ll explain exactly what a “bounce” is, how to make your site get less “bounces”, and how the bounce rate of a site affects its rankings in Google.

A “Bounce” is defined by Wikipedia as:
“A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.”

For example, let’s imagine you have a website that sells Red Mouse Pads. You used awesome title tags on your products and you’re starting to get some Google traffic. Joe User searches on Google for “Red Mouse” and your website comes up and he clicks on your site. What are the chances you get a bounce? Your chances are probably pretty high because Joe User was looking for a Red Mouse and your site is displaying a Red Mouse Pad – (a related, but very different product). You have a hit from google, but it’s not a high quality hit. Joe User is likely to see instantly that you’re offering a Red Mouse Pad and not a Red Mouse and, because this isn’t what he is looking for, he will probably hit the back button and click on another result in the Google search. This is a perfect example of a “Bounce” and Google is watching. The higher your bounce rate, the lower your site will ultimately rank!

One might ask, “Why are bounces bad? It’s not my fault Google returned my page in error!” Well, it is and it isn’t. Its true that having a 0% bounce rate is impossible, but you need to strive for as few false positives (according to Google) as possible. To answer the question as to why bounces are bad you have to think like Google. Google is dedicated to providing high quality search results for keywords. Never forget this because if you want to succeed with SEO you need to get into the mind of the Google Engineers. To address the issue of your site being erroneously returned in a Google result is exactly why Google takes bounce rate into consideration! Google didn’t return a good result and Joe User isn’t happy with what he saw and immediately left. Google takes this into consideration and knows that your site shouldn’t be displayed as high as it was and Google will make the necessary adjustments for future users. It makes perfect sense.

Because Bounces are generally bad, you might want to work on getting as few bounces as possible. The scenario described above is quite common and it could be one of the reasons your site was, at some point, ranking well and now doesn’t. It’s important to keep users that hit your page for a keyword ON your landing page for that keyword. So, if you are competing for the keyword “Red Mouse Pad” you want to make sure you have a page that is dedicated to red mouse pads so that Joe User finds what he is looking for when he clicks on your site from a Google keyword search. If we use the example above of Joe User searching for a Red Mouse and finding your Red Mouse Pad, another smart thing to do is to list possible close matches on your Red Mouse Pad page that might even list a Red Mouse. This converts a likely bounce to a potential buyer! There are also other things you can do like CTA (Call to Action) buttons that flash and grab a searcher’s attention. This might cause the Joe User to click on your “Specials” button or “10% discount” button. This also converts a possible bounce to at least a solid “hit” from google.

There is really no sense in worrying about bounce rate until almost every other aspect of SEO has been addressed. However, if you’re seeing yourself stuck in a ranking on the FIRST page of Google and you have exhausted most other possibilities, it could be that your bounce rate is simply too high. Another good clue that your bounce rate might be too high is if you are ranking in the top 3 (in Google) for a keyword and you keep dropping down to 8-9 then going back up to 3-4. This is a sign that you’re having a problem with keeping visitors on your website for keyword searches. For sites that don’t already rank well in Google, there are tons of other SEO ideas that need to be addressed before bounce rate.