SEO content ideas and the Hawthorne Effect

[Alston]

SEO is trying to make your website and web pages relevant for your keywords. Since a search engine spider can't really read a website, it uses other means to determine relevancy.

How new your content is and how often it is updated are two of the factors that have a big impact on how often search engine spiders visit your site and how they rank your site. This is why blogs and forums like this one often do so well in the SERPs.

I'm hoping that we can exchange some ideas for creating new content on our sites.

Here is my entry:

Creating a page that shows a list of local hospitals and the insurance networks they are in.

I'd like to know some of the other ideas people have used to add content to their websites that are:

• useful to your visitors
• are positive or neutral to the credibility of your site
• have a positive impact on SEO

The Hawthorne Effect basically means that in certain areas you will get improvement by doing something, but to a large degree it doesn't matter what that something is.

The difference between doing this thing verses doing that thing isn't really important. (Some might say that this is largely true of parenting.)

This is not entirely true of SEO or anything else, but new content and constantly updated content, even poorly optimized content has impact.

 

[CHUMPS FROM OXFORD]

Alston...I like the reviews from your blog. I would think that it generates some traffic to your website.

 

[Alston]

I think so too. Blogging is one of the best and easiest ways to add content.

Once I reach my sales goals for 2008, I'm going to commit to blogging at least 5 times a week on at least one of my sites.

From a search engine's perspective there is nothing unique about the content on a blog. The SEO value is in the "recentcy" and frequency IMHO and blogging is so easy to do. You can even blather on about nothing on a blog and seamlessly include a few long-tail keywords and not affect your credibility. You can't do that on your home page.

 

[InsuranceGuru]

My understanding is different. Presence on the web appears to have the biggest impact on optimization. In short, how many links do you have to your site from external sites? How many sites does your site link to? What ways is your site linked/being linked to? RSS? Forum postings? Blog Comments?

Also, the authority (not necessarily the pagerank) of a site has a lot to do with the affect it has on your own site's optimization. Authority appears to be some form of calculation of organically generated backlinks from other sites to your own site.

Content updates and relevancy to the search phrases (particularly in the title bar of the browser window - which also shows up in the Google index) appears to have very little affect on how one ranks for different search phrases, as does the description in the title bar of the browser window. Some seem to think the "long-tail keyword" approach is geared well for start-up, but in the long run it is the authority that matters.

Authority for a search phrase (or phrases) appears to generate from the backlinks from other authoritative sites that populate for that particular search phrase and other related phrases. The more backlinks from relevant, authoritative sites, the more development of optimization you will have.

We took edgeoninsurance.com to top-20 listings for several search phrases of three to five words in 90 days. I think we could have done better by creating an ad account using targeted, niched ads and making our content more niched from the start. But no matter. Optimization is what it is. Content is just a small percentage of that, though, from the results we've seen. Real organic optimization takes the interest of other, authoritative sites in your niche, and that requires a larger userbase than most people have. This site is not as optimized as it could be due to the fact that it probably doesn't have a large number of backlinks.

Only three sites come up that link back to insurance-forums.net. Were insurance forums to have more back-links from authoritative sites within the various insurance search phrases, they would be coming up on more searches with higher authority, regardless of pagerank. We've found that pagerank=/=authority. Content and relevance appears to affect pagerank, whereas authority is more of a "behind-the-scenes" kind of process that occurs naturally over time (or quickly if you pay large quantities of money to create authority for your site). I prefer the former over the latter.

 

[JRoot]

Alston - I've started blogging about different underwriting situations I run into for life insurance. ie. Recent Stroke victim and life insurance. I'll let them know what underwriters are looking for and what they can expect to be rated.

Insurance Guru - I took a look at your site and by no means am I an expert on this. Why do you have google adwords on your front page? I immediately discredit any site I go to for important information when I see those ads.

 

[Sam]

There is no question in my mind that content is king. If you have quality content with proper onsite optimization, it is pretty easy to beat out sites that have poor content but better offsite optimization, ie better links.

If you run a google search for insurance forum, insurance forums, insurance agent forum, life insurance forum etc... you will find that our website has better rankings than some sites with higher page rank, better quality backlinks, that have been around longer and even have better onsite optimization. However we have more and better content.

There is a side issue in that having strong content makes your site much easier and more attractive for other sites to link to. Lots of people will link to a funny blog post or informative blog post on an insurance site a lot faster than they will link to a random insurance site with no quality content.

Aside from being the easier of the two to create, quality content will stand the test of time, whereas backlinks and search algorithms will always be changing.

the holy grail for any search engine is to do a good job of serving the exact information that their searchers seek. If you provide the info, you will always be better off long term than a site with poor content and some great links.

As with any seo advice, there are no absolutes and both ways can work. I am just sharing what has worked for us.

 

[007]

Content is King, Keywords are Queen, and Back Links are Jack...

 

[Alston]

As with any seo advice, there are no absolutes and both ways can work.

I agree. I've got a lot of content on my two main sites, but I've also got a lot of back links. I'm sure there is a synergy.

I just wanted to throw an idea out to the group that any do-it-yourself webmaster could use to improve their site. A lot of the other SEO stuff (CSS, XHTML, long tail keywords, etc.) is pretty technical, but blogging and adding static content is within the technological reach of most who have created their own sites.

 

[InsuranceGuru]

Insurance Guru - I took a look at your site and by no means am I an expert on this. Why do you have google adwords on your front page? I immediately discredit any site I go to for important information when I see those ads.

I'll keep that in mind. EoI has so far served as a test site for us to work with SEO and see what kinds of results we can generate. Adsense gives us some chump change to pay for the domain (we don't even pay for the hosting as far as I know). We simply wanted to have the chump change to keep it paid for...

We'll actually be changing the content (when I get time) on EoI and be adding another site that will work cohesively with EoI, essentially a different approach altogether but still related to insurance. A forum will link to both sites and offer a more fluid interaction. But for now, just understand what EoI is and that it will probably be completely rehauled within the next two to three months. Our goal is to create some websites where content is generated by the userbase that creates enough pageviews to attract larger advertising dollars. There are requirements for that and a lot more money to be made that way than through adsense.

Baby steps. Gotta crawl before you can walk there, Root.