Ask Yourself – What is the Internet for?

Easy answer… the Internet is for porn. Don’t believe me, check out this YouTube video. But in all seriousness, most people online use the medium for entertainment and free information. At the time of this blog post, Alexa and Quantcast listed the following websites as the top visited by users (excluding search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing)

• Facebook (social networking)
• YouTube (free videos)
• Wikipedia (online reference source)
• Blogger (free blogging application)
• Baidu (music search)
• MySpace (social networking)
• Twitter (social networking)
• Amazon (online retailer)
• WordPress (free blogging application)
• eBay (online auction side and retailer)
• Walmart (online and brick and mortar retailer)

Delving further down the list, one will find…

• The Huffington Post (news source)
• IGN (video game and entertainment hub)
• Examiner (news source)
• CNN (mews source)

The picture should be starting to clear – people spend most of their time looking for and sharing information, videos, and music. The rest of the time they spend buying stuff. Not a huge surprise in our free speaking consumerist society that hosts the entertainment hub of the world. You should also note that outside the retailers, people get to access all of these venues absolutely free! People love free stuff!

How Does Knowing The Dominance of Entertainment and Information Online Help My Business?

Well, unless your market fits into the free publication or entertainment sectors or you already sell your products through one of the major online retailers, it helps you very little, directly. But it does allow you to see how you might need to begin rethinking your marketing strategy to fit into these venues and indirectly get the Internet to work for you.

Your Macro Internet Marketing Plan Should Target…

Search Engines

Search engines serve as the gateway to all other websites. Getting anything significant you write or offer online into Google, Yahoo!, and Bing should be your number one priority. To do this, you will need to optimize your pages for search engine listings, find the best targeted keywords for your market, and weed out any initial competition. Fortunately, you can start your journey by reading “How to Find Your Best Keywords”.

Social Networks

A majority of people now spend their time online interacting on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and to an extent, YouTube. All of these sites offer ways for you to connect with potential clients and customers by participating or creating groups in your market, creating specific business pages for the interested to follow, and sending out informative and entertaining updates to your social connections. Before you jump into the social networking scene, please read some friendly advice on growing your connections and followers.

Free Information through Online Publications

Not everyone considers themselves to be a great writer, but you need some skills in this area. You plan to do business on the Internet after all, the INFORMATION super highway (allegedly invented by Al Gore), and most people use the medium to find tips, guides, advice, etc. Share some of your expertise, your skills, your knowledge, and later on hope that people will consider you reliable enough to someday give you a little money as well.

eMail

Do not forget, most people still use email to communicate with each other and it serves as an intermediary between social networks as well. Consider starting about a free newsletter or ezine people can subscribe to from your website or social network to receive ongoing updates and information from you. The ones that join and stay on the list will be more likely to pay for your services and products.

Think FREE!

Let freedom ring! Land of the free and home of the brave! You need to start realizing that once online, people want free stuff, otherwise they know where to go to pay for something (Amazon for instance!). Your job should be to gain credibility for your business, expand your visibility, and earn people’s trust. Once they know they can rely on you, they will be more willing to pay for your services and products. You need to soft sell, be indirect, and steer clear from spamming and marketing people’s eyeballs out. Online, people choose what to look at, what to read, what to listen to, and what to pay for. If you scare people, insult people, or market to them too hard, they will leave you in their cyber dust, or forever block you from the many online venues available.

Before you click away from my perceived insanity, remember that most of this journey will be free on your side too! Learn how to best setup your pages and keywords, to interact with people on social networks, and write a few informative pieces here and there, and internet marketing will not cost you more than time. If you do not possess the desire or hours to do it on your own, you can always find a trustworthy marketer out there to help you.

The Fork in the Road – Local or ?

Getting back to your business… you need to evaluate the online environment in your market before you really decide to gear up for internet marketing. The big question you need to ask yourself – where is your target audience? Do you offer your services and sell your products locally, say only in the Miami area? If so, your keywords and your groups need to reflect your geographic location. You need to seek out people living in your area and not waste time and money on everyone in the world.

However, if you can offer your services/products statewide, nationally, or even globally – if you can offer them to anyone who speaks English or any other language you can successfully communicate in – then you need to target a much broader audience. Before you write a single piece of copy or start doing any significant research, you must figure out whether your target audience lies on a local or bigger scale.

Does Your Business Have an Online Market?

If you use Google’s Keyword Tool with Adwords and my Keyword Guide mentioned above, you should be able to determine if people even search for your products or services. Based on the Monthly Search Volume, you may determine that you should not spend much effort on Internet marketing because a profitable online market does not exist, at least from a cost benefit standpoint. Be sure to completely exhaust your research efforts here though before you close the curtain. Remember that the future may be able to reap new rewards, so revisit your potential at another date. With an almost non-existent market, you may want to only focus on social networking to gain more visibility and at least give current customers and clients a place to go so you can upkeep your retention.

You might also discover that hundreds or thousands of other businesses already compete to gain the attention of your potential clients. You being the newcomer must fight your way closer to the top to be successful. This could signal creating a multiple year strategy to really build up your social networks, your inbound links, and your online presence before you can expect to gain any serious online sales.

Even if your online market appears ripe for the picking, you will need a solid one-year plan before you can realistically expect positive results.

No matter what, do not hesitate to establish some business presence online, even if that just means submitting your information to online Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local, or City Search. Even if you just create a Facebook page or setup a single webpage with some basic information about your business and services. 74% of people search for businesses online and you want to be sure they can find yours.

The More You Follow, The Less You Connect

Above all else, social networking is about, well… socializing and networking online. It’s about making connections with other people who share common interests, goals, and mutually benefit from communicating with you.

The more people you follow, the less people you can effectively connect with. A huge list of “followed” results in a wall cluttered with a bombardment of messages, most not even directed toward you. The chance that you’ll be able to read any single person’s update reduces substantially every time you follow someone new.

To make sure you get the information you need and receive messages from people you want to establish an online relationship with, whether for personal, entrepreneurial, or entertainment reasons, you need to be picky. Only follow those people worth listening to, who provide useful information, and who create value in your life. Avoid the hacks with tens of thousands of followers, who follow tens of thousands of others, and just spew out a bunch of marketing garbage every 30 seconds. They do not care about you, they just care about getting your money and wasting your time.

If you seek to mechanically follow thousands yourself, you show you do not care about the many individuals who follow you because you most likely you will never see their messages. As an example, a client of mine posts frequently to market herself. When I first built my Twitter list, I too randomly followed people to push my numbers up. The several months I used Twitter, I saw merely one post from my client, one out of many that went up every day. Imagine all the posts I never saw from people who casually post, people who I am missing the chance to establish a viable relationship with.

I want to hear what my clients have to say because the more I know about their business, passions, and needs, the better I can help them with their goals.

The More They Follow, The More You’re Ignored

The fad keeps preaching “you follow me, I’ll follow you” and many automated services exist to increase numbers by building lists based on reciprocated follows. However, the more people others follow, the less updates of yours they will read, if any. How does that help you? It doesn’t…

Think about it, if JoeShmoe follows 34,318 people, that’s 34,318 possible messages a day that scrolls through his wall. If he’s following many of the people who build their lists this way, you can multiply that number by 24, 48, even 100, because most of those guys use their twitter account as a marketing ticker. You’re messages will just get buried in cyberspace, never read, never connecting, never helping you grow your business or make more money. Just wasting your time, your cash, and your effort.

What’s the Real Twitter Gold Standard?

Just look at the really successful people on Twitter – the celebs, the industry gurus, the information and communication super stars. Millions follow these people, but many of them follow less than 100 others. That’s because they value their time and want to spend it reading meaningful posts. People follow them not because they reciprocated the follow, but because they actually earned their followers by attraction.

Your goal should not be to follow as many people so that many people follow you, your goal on twitter should be to follow people you want to listen to and connect with, and gain followers who want to listen and connect with you. Your goal should be to earn MORE followers than people you follow, to earn followers simply because people DESIRE to follow you. That’s really what twitter is all about.

How to Start Fixing Your Twitter List

Wipe it out and clean it up.

Awhile ago a colleague of mine completely cleaned out her client’s twitter list, along with Facebook’s, because she found it full of meaningless connections and people not really interested in her client’s business. She rebuilt it from the ground up using a basic Internet marketing principle… stay within your market or niche.

The client’s business focuses on MMA training, so she sought out similar minded people in the industry, people who would be interested in establishing joint ventures and other people just enthusiastic about martial arts. After building the list up, she saw her client’s bounce rate from twitter referrals fall from the 90% range to the 20% range. That’s huge! The number of referrals also shot up. Quality over quantity counts big time.

I’ve begun to do the same thing, removing all the people…

• following more than 10,000
• who follow the same amount of people that follow them
• who post every couple minutes, or every hour
• who repeatedly post the same marketing tag lines
• who only post about their products and business

You know these people, they’re called spammers. We all hate them and we would all like to get rid of them. Well on twitter, you can! Sure, you’ll see your followed numbers go down initially, because most of these people won’t continue to follow you unless you follow them. But guess what, you don’t need to follow everyone that follows you. You need to focus on who brings you value and insight and follow them. If you like the info ProBlogger posts every day, follow him. Seek out your interests when looking for people to follow.

And if people don’t want to follow you then your problem really falls into the category of not creating enough benefit. That’s something you need to fix on your own.

Note: As an alternative now to cleaning out all your following duds, you can add everyone you want to follow to organized lists. However, this could be just as time consuming.

Creating Benefit and Value for Your Followers

This is not necessarily a marketing piece, so I will be brief on this topic. Communication goes both ways, you need to listen as much or more than you tell. People can spot a dedicated marketer when they see one and it turns people away, big time. Focus on building relationships on twitter, getting to know people, creating relationships and trust. Give people useful, quality induced information and they will thank you for it. Keep pitching them products and up-selling them, and you deserve to get dropped.

Apply This Philosophy to Other Social Networks

Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter…. You can use the principles here on any social network.

• Concentrate on the relationships, not the numbers.
• Search for your people in your field, not just any random person that will befriend you because they need a few more on their list.
• Participate in groups and discussions related to your interests.
• Listen instead of preach.
• Inform instead of sell.

Stick by these rules and quality will beat out quantity. You will see a better response and bigger rewards for your efforts. You will be one step closer to twitter success. Sure, it’s more difficult and more of a struggle than just randomly clicking away for new followers, but it’s more fun too! Social interaction brings lasting enjoyment and business. It’s the real key unlocking the secrets to using this medium for business endeavors.

As for the twitter twits out there with their follower building scams, drop’em and block’em!

Taking statistics found in a multi-study search engine interaction report and another report on search engine usage provides a useful portrait of how search engine users behave. Considering 74% of people use search engines to find businesses and view the top ranked businesses in search results as the most reliable, you definitely need to start building a genuine and effective online presence.

The Importance of the First Page

No matter the search engine, over half (62%) of users click a link within the first page of results for a keyword phrase and 90% within the first three pages. If you cannot get ranked on the first page for a search term, you will automatically lose over half of your potential visitors!

Bottom line: Get on the first page for your keywords!

The Importance of Relevance and Clarity

Almost half (42%) of people will rephrase their search if they do not find a useful link on the first page and 88% within the first three pages. If your content and title do not fit in well with the keywords you use, you will miss almost half of your potential visitors!

Bottom line: Use very specific, highly targeted, and relevant keywords that match your content.

The Importance of the Top Three Spots

In a study of the AOL search engine, which I am liberally applying to the other engines, the very first page listed in the results receives 42% of all click thrus, with the second almost 12%, the third 8%, and the fourth 6%. If you do not rank within the first three spots in the results, you miss well over half of your potential visitors! On top of that, if you rank below the first four spots, you only have a 5% chance of someone still clicking on your page. So even though 90% still “might” browse the first 3 pages, the chance that someone will click your page after the user moves half way down the first page of results is almost zero. People also trust the websites in the top positions the most.

Bottom line: You need to rank within the top four spots for a keyword and aim for the first spot.

The Importance of Getting on Google

By the end of May 2009, almost 74% of all users used Google to search for websites, 15% used Yahoo!, and 6% used Bing (formally Live, formally MSN). This means that Google is definitely the most important search engine to be listed in volume-wise. It also means that Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool provides the most representative statistics on keywords and user searches.

Bottom line: You need to get ranked on Google and optimize your keywords for Google.

Taking into account how people use search engines, definitely aim for keywords where you can rank for the number one spot for the term in Google, period. Otherwise, you’ll just be stuck in the 5% club, a very lonesome place indeed, and a death trap for your business.

Additional Search Engine Ranking Research

While doing your own inqueries on search engine optimization, you will surely come across a plethora of tips, tricks, and strategies to optimize your pages. Taking into account the signifigance of the before mentioned information, I began conducting my own research examining which SEO factors actually matter to get into the top spots and which do not. Spanning from inbound links and keyword placement in titles to placing keywords in heading tags and domain age, my preliminary findings might surprise you.

Top Tips for Optimizaing Your Pages for Search Engines

Inbound Link Volume

In almost every instance, the number one website would receive the most inbound links of the the first four websites in a listing for a given keyword, and the inbound link volume for the following sites would decrease accordingly. This stayed true whether using Google or Yahoo! to test the amount of incoming links. You can get an estimate of inbound links to a page by typing “link:www.thewebsiteurl.com” into either the Google or Yahoo! search engine.

Bottom Line: Your pages must build links from other relevant websites to continue to rank well.

Placing the Targeted Keyword in Titles

72% of the top four ranked sites in listings contained the exact keyword in the page title (<title>Keyword</title>). Page titles can clearly be seen in search engine rankings as well as on the top of the browser when visiting the page.

Bottom Line: Place your keywords in your page titles, preferably in their entirety and near the front.

Code to Text Ratio

Like inbound links, code to text ratio usually decreased along with a decrease in listing rank, with the pages with higher text then code ranking better. You can test a page’s code to text ratio by using SEO Chat’s Code to Text Ratio tool.

Bottom Line: Write plenty of content for your pages and try to keep your code to text ratio above 50%.

Page and Domain Age

Most pages in the top 4 rested on domains 6 years or older, usually with the oldest domains ranking higher than the newer ones. You can test a domain’s age by using the WHOIS Lookup or using SEO Log’s Domain Age Check tool.

Bottom Line: Place your pages on older domains and give your domain type to build the trust of search engines. I also believe that older pages do better, so stick with current file names and try to avoid redirects.

Relevancy

A majority of pages existed on domains that could be considered an authority on the topic related to the targeted keyword and contained the keyword at least once in the body of the content.

Bottom Line: Host your pages on websites related to your content and keep your content related to your targeted keywords.

I conducted my study using random keywords from clients that ranked high for them and then using any random keyword. I only examined the top four listings. While my study still remains in the early stages and does not produce any revolutionary results so far, it can serve as a reminder of the more important elements in web page optimization and suggests that people focus less on rather insignificant SEO practices, like placing keywords in heading tags, using meta tags, focusing on Google’s PageRank, or worrying about keywords places in anchor text.

Half of the top SEO factors, depressingly, cannot really be controlled by you. While you can create some inbound links, it will be up to the greater web community to share your information. Domain and page age you just need to be patient and wait for. So make sure you do well with what you can control, create excellent content with plenty of insight and value for your targeted audience and/or possible clients, and the rest should come.

I will most likely update this article while I complete my research. Until then, good hunting, and please post any comments or questions you may have! Feel free to pass this information along to others as well so they may benefit

Domain Age Checker

The guys over at WebConfs.com host a plethora of pages to plug in info and get the data you need. Unfortunately, while domain age matters, with older websites seen as more trustworthy by search engines and more difficult to knock out of the top ten search results for a keyword, their Domain Age Tool flat out lies. So bad, in fact, that it can be as much as 6-7 years off! Given the Internet only really started booming in the 90′s, that’s a huge margin.

Lucky for us, SEOLogs.com hosts a similar program that actually reports good estimates. Of course, if you want the best information, you can always look up the domain at www.whois.com.

Traffic Rankings

For years people heralded (and man still do) Alexa as the gold standard when it came to traffic rankings. When considering the ability to rank a page for a keyword, domain strength and popularity matter, the volume of inbound traffic matters. As a webmaster for multiple clients, I can easily cross-reference actual traffic and Alexa’s rankings. I can tell you with certainty that Alexa at times gave clients who received triple the traffic a lower score and position in comparison to clients who received substantially less traffic. It’s a faulty system that sometimes works and many a time does not. People need to stop promoting it and using it. The same goes for Compete.com.

Quantcastdoes much better, but that’s because it requires a script much like Google Analytics, and then can only serve people when comparing sites within it’s own circle. So unless Google releases it’s own Alexa, it’s a crapshoot trying to sort out rankings amongst these three resources. Google’s PageRank might be the only alternative, but with a range of 0-10, it’s hardly precise enough.

Keyword Generator

First off, do not buy a program to generate keywords for you. You know your market best, you know the lingo being used, you should build your own list and then branch out from there. Second, do not bother with Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. The tool only gives you data based on people who type words into the tool, not into search engines! You can guess that only people concerned about keywords then, not your actual market, would be feeding it information. Wordtracker does not even supply an ample list. For example, I typed in “SEO Tips” and it gave me three phrases “seo tips,” “free msn seo tips,” and “seo copywriting tips.” I don’t know which search engines they’re useful for, what my competition might be like, nothing.

Your best free option, straight from the source, would be Google’s AdWords: Keyword Tool. Originally designed for Adword campaigns, it uses search information directly from Google, directly from 67% people searching online, for it’s estimates. It tells you the monthly search volume, the current search volume, and how many competitors target the word (assuming businesses know their stuff, high competition means difficult to rank for due to high website usage of the term). It also lists many variations of the phrase, related phrases, and even slightly related phrases. It truly lets you know whether or not you’re wasting your time trying to rank for keyword phrases people rarely search for. It also lets you specify results by language and region and you can even get recommended terms pulled directly off websites. It’s awesome and the best keyword tool you’ll find!

Lastly, Don’t be a Tool Yourself!

There’s plenty of dishonesty and bad SEO practices going around. Don’t let some SEO specialist or consultant pull your chain and waste your money. If your gut starts giving you the signs and you don’t see any good results, it might be time for a second or even a third opinion! And remember, I’m always around for a bit of handholding too. Feel free to send a question my way!

Some of the alleged top Google listing tips, tricks, and services are just flat out wrong, misleading, and can be harmful to your online business. If you really want to increase targeted traffic to your website, you should ignore the following SEO advice…

What to Avoid and Ignore When Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines

1. Hiding lists of links on your page to be picked up by web crawlers.

Google looks for keywords in specific areas on the page. Mainly in the title and within the content itself. Listing a bunch of keywords somewhere outside the content, especially in a way that cannot be seen by visitors, won’t help you and might even get your website penalized. Tags being an exception.

If it doesn’t read like a decently formatted narrative, then the web crawlers probably won’t think it is either. That’s what they’re designed to do - decipher which webpages contain the information to help people typing in queries in their search engine to get to what they’re looking for.

2. Believing that filling your meta tags with keywords will help you.

Don’t be naive enough to think that you can tell the search engines what your webpage is about, which is what many meta tags do. Google and the other engines don’t even use them to determine page ranking anymore (Google never did), and so it’s already an obsolete method. Google also uses the text around keywords in the content to determine the page descriptions, so its not necessary to include. However, if you want a more standard description for search engines, you can still use the description meta tag and Google will pick it up to be displayed in listings.

3. Using link exchanges to create backlinks.

It’s true that inbound links from other webpages greatly enhance your high page rank probability, but only if they’re from related sources. Google won’t consider a link back from a website about hiking as reliable if your website is about role-playing games.

The web crawlers have gotten good at cross-referencing content and they know the difference between an apple and an orange.

People will usually only go to related links as well, so most people visiting the site giving you the link will not visit you anyway.

4. Trying to rank for keywords that are not related to the content on your page.

Just because you use the keywords, doesn’t mean you’re going to get ranked for them, especially if your page talks about something completely different. Just like the engines cross-reference between websites, they also cross-reference within topics. If you tried to place keywords for “American literature during World War II” to be picked up and the page really discusses “How YouTube became popular,” your page will probably just get buried in the depths of cyberspace.

Again, even by chance you do rank for the term, once people see your site does not match their search, they will either not click on it, or immediately leave the website once the land on the first page.

5. Falling for schemes that will submit your website to “thousands” of search engines and directories.

There are only a handful of search engines out there and anything else is most likely already controlled by Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or Ask. The first three comprise of almost 100% of the searches on the Internet. The web crawlers for these search engines are also very efficient at what they do, so as long as you’re already linked in to the Internet (have at least one inbound link) and made your pages accessible to visitors, your website will get indexed (listed) anyway. You don’t need to submit to anyone, let alone pay for it.

6. Falling for schemes that guarantee or promise number 1 spots on search engines.

There’s much you can control to get ranked - keywords, optimizing your website for crawlers, content, and some inbound links. There’s much you cannot control as well  - inbound links of competing websites and pages, the strength and popularity of the competitor’s domain, and the age of pages to name a few. In the end, the only people who know exactly how the web crawlers operate are the web crawling programmers. There’s countless variables used to determine page rankings that we just don’t know about, so no one can guarantee or promise high rankings. At the very least, a good SEO specialist can give your pages a higher probability of being ranked on the first page, but not much more.

Start thinking organic and natural.

If you come across anything that sounds like it’s a cheat, a work-around, like it’s trying to pull one over the web crawlers and trick them into getting your page ranked, then it’s probably a bad idea. It won’t work and the search engines might even punish your page for the attempt to fool them.

You need to start thinking organically, thinking how your page would succeed naturally.

Make sure you always…

• Write content on pages that bring real value and useful information to your visitors.
• Use keywords that relate directly to your subject matter.
• Get links from websites in your own market or field and hope that others will also find your information worthy for them to share with others.
• Stay away from SEO specialists and consultants that tell you to use any of the methods to avoid mentioned here. Trust your gut on their advice and don’t be afraid to get a second opinion.

The search engines want to find your useful information and pages to share with the world. Start writing about what you know best and format it the best and most accessible way you can and you’ll already be ahead of most of the game ]]> http://warrensamu.com/google-listing-tips/feed/ 9 http://warrensamu.com/duplicate-articles-internet-marketing-suicide/ http://warrensamu.com/duplicate-articles-internet-marketing-suicide/#comments Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:40:06 +0000 Warren Samu http://www.warrensamu.com/?p=16 So you’ve decided to give article marketing a shot and you’ve already written a handful of articles in your niche market to distribute to high traffic publication sites. But then after you submitted them, you noticed many did not rank in Google and other search engines, even though you optimized them for keywords, and found the articles listed in the engine.

Now ask yourself….

How many websites did you submit each individual article to?

You’ve probably fallen victim to the duplicate articles dilemma.

Rewind to a few years ago when “Internet marketing gurus” were pushing their viral marketing strategies and encouraging people to submit the same article to every known article directory they could get their hands on. Well, guess what? They were encouraging countless people to essentially spam the search engines with their writings and trick a system big on copyrights and original content. Everybody knows how huge a taboo spam is. Eventually, Google and the other guys caught on and implemented algorithms in their web crawlers to weed out and bury the duplicates.

And who can blame them? How reliable would users consider an engine that listed the same exact information in the top ten spots for a search, just on different websites? That’s like a library only offering different editions of the same book when someone was looking for research on a particular topic. What if someone turned in a paper with a works cited for 10 sources all essentially the same piece of information? Intelligent people would find a new library and the guy who wrote a paper would probably fail the assignment.

Google wants to bring value to their users and offer a service second-to-none, that’s how they climbed to the top in the first place. So, if you’re trapped in the habit of creating duplicate content, you should ask yourself the same question - are you creating any real value for people?

The Reality of Article Submission

Most of the article databases receive very little relative traffic to begin with and return a low residual effect. Their traffic rankings cannot compete with more prominent sites like universities and news sources, or high traffic directories and blogs. If you’ve spent several hours on a top notch article, why publish it on www.most-awesome-articles.com (not really a website) where it won’t get ranked, it won’t be found by the website users, and when other sites like WordPress, HubPages, Squidoo, and EzineArticles are around? If you wanted to include a guest piece in your magazine or paper, which source would you rely on… one from a prominent editor at CNN or a random letter received from spikeymikey@nowheremail.com?

Google thinks in a similar fashion on their end. Why list an article from www.most-awesome-articles.com when they already have a version from HubPages?

You might be thinking to yourself - what about Reuters? What about authorized syndication? It’s true that Google and the other engines allow some room for syndication from common news sources, but most of us do not operate in those circles or have access to that content to freely use, so why take the chance?  Probability dictates that Google will pick up one of your articles, but the rest will get lost in the engine and with them all the time spent submitting to dozens of useless directories.

Truth betold, no one can guess why Google keeps one version of web copy over another. It could be related to the age of the page (how long it’s been live online), the reliability of the source, the code to text ratio compared to the other versions… and sometimes, the engine will list more than one copy. It’s all guess work, but you can bet that more often than not, only one version will be viable.

The Solutions That Almost Saved You

But then there came in the works a hybrid solution to try and trick the engines again! Re-write the article so the web crawlers think it’s something new, so one can submit almost the same article to at least the top publication sites without needing to create something fresh. And so began the age of www.dupecop.com and similar services to check the percentage difference between docs.

Here too though, writers beware, Google’s web crawlers are more sophisticated than people give them credit for, and even an article that appears to be 50% different can be picked up as a dupe. To safeguard this technique, a service like QuoteFinder http://blogoscoped.com/quotefinder/ is recommended. Just change the sentences that show more than one online source in your new article.

The Best Solution for Duplicate Content… Doh!

I however, have an even better solution! Stop creating duplicate articles completely and start writing original and unique content that really offers value to your readers and hopefully potential clients. Nobody likes a fraud, a hack, or a two-timer – and that’s what you’ll look like if the smarter-than-you-think readers find out you’re duplicating content out there, or worse, simply rehashing someone else’s. Don’t destroy your potential credibility, visibility, and profitability because of laziness. Make each article you write count and make sure it’s one-of-a-kind.

The following benefits of article marketing can be yours…

• Increased page rankings (with inbound links)
• Increased webpage traffic
• Increased credibility
• Increased visibility
• Increased clients and customers
• Increased profits

But if you duplicate content all you’ll do is lose the above benefits plus…

• Waste time
• Waste money
• Become discouraged

What to do with your now unwasted time?

Search engines also like pages to stay fresh! Update your articles from time-to-time. Add in new information, take out parts now obsolete, add in some graphics, optimize the keywords, and keep editing until you get ranked on the first page for your targeted keywords. A well maintained and fully tweaked article can bring in more traffic and more business than 15 hurried and forgotten pieces any day!

So do continue with your article marketing, and do submit your awesome work so people can find it at EzineArticles, your blog, or other sites, but steer clear from tendencies to submit duplicates – in the end, you’re just committing internet marketing suicide. And like spam, we know how deadly that can be.

You can read more from the source over at Google and their warnings and guidleines about duplicate content.