Creating Fat Content

The book I read to research this post was Creating Fat Content by Dr Andy Williams which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is around 220 pages so is fairly and is about writing online content that will rank high in the Google search engine. Google calls websites with lots of search terms but little actual content thin sites hence the title of this book having the word fat. There have been literally hundreds of updates to the acronyms used by Google over the years. At one time search engines merely looked for how often a word or phrase was repeated in a website article and ranked accordingly. This led to many highly ranked spam sites with little content. Then they started looking for appropriate domain names which again had a similar result. Google with there acronyms which try to decipher the actual content on a site was a game changer and they bought one company that had come up with an even more intelligent way of organising these sites and incorporated it into the search engine. Currently Google downgrades sites that scrape content from elsewhere or repeatedly break copyright infringements. They try to identify the writers of content so it isn’t worth hiding behind a web identity. They rank trusted content higher particularly popular brands. They also look at do you add useful content as it is no good embedding articles and youtubes which they regard as being available elsewhere. When you enter a search term you will often see popular youtube videos on the youtube site highly ranked. They also look at the number of links and interaction with your site but penalize sites that swap links. This book is really interesting and I learnt a lot from it and do recommend it.

 

SEO Expert Strategies

The book I read to research this post was SEO Expert Strategies by Sam Adodra which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. Sam is a SEO expert who lets us in on some of his secrets. Of course any book on SEO stops being up to date quite quickly as they are almost constantly updating the search engine algorithims. This mostly focuses on Google. Apparently once Google the search engine went offline due to failure for 5 minutes and website traffic in the immediate aftermath fell by 40 % which will give you an idea how important it is. People who do black hat SEO techniques like swapping links or having a website with an appropriate name but little content get penalized by the search engines and it is almost to recover if you fall foul of this. If you have links Google expects it to be from sites on a similar topic to yours. Official sites like .gov ones are highly prized if they link to yours. If you have a photo on your site you should always give it a descriptive name and fill in the alt text which is displayed instead of the photo in text only browsers. This helps the search engines. The name of a site if it was descriptive used to search engines but lots of low quality sites using this ploy cropped up so now it is a lot less important. You should have a good index with links to other pages on your site. Also actual content is king and of course it does no harm to have links to other relevant sites. In terms of social media a link from Google+ is the site most highly prized and in general links from sites such as these are good. Some people have parts of the site like the e-commerce section hidden from search engines. They may penalize you a little for this. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and do recommend it. It is around 150 pages so is a fair length too.

WordPress Search Engine Success

The book I read to research this post was WordPress Search Engine Success by Kathy Burns-Millward which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is only short but very interesting. It’s primarily about optimizing your WordPress blog or other type of site for search engines like Google. Search engines apparently love WordPress and often rank these sites highly in search results. If you have a WordPress blog you tend to get lots of back links from other sites, the program automatically alerts the major search engines when you do a new post & lets you include search terms for each post. Also each post and page is given its own URL, simplifying the search engines job. The URL can be customized and some users include a category as part of the name but this isn’t advised. You are better off sticking with the default name and including a descriptive title which of course influences the URL name. Any blog posts should be a decent length as this helps search engines. There is a wide variety of types of website the WordPress program can be configured to make especially when self hosted. It is far more than just a blog. At one time it took 6 weeks for a search engine to check a new post but the process happens in a few hours. Also if their were no links the search engine would probably never find your site. I did really enjoy this book and it has a lot of useful information. I learned quite a lot from it.  I think I downloaded it for free.