Business Marketing Online (BMON): Google AdWords Management

Evergreen content: the gift which keeps on giving

Chris Rand — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:00:48 +0000

Here's a term you might not have come across, but which is an important one. Evergreen Content describes articles on a website which were written with the express intention of generating visitors over a long period. Often if you need to know some background about something, and it's hard to track down the answer online, there's some evergreen content waiting to be written. If a customer says: "I'm glad I've found you, I've been looking everywhere for someone who sells a widget to put tab A into slot B", then there's an ideal opportunity to write an article called "How to put tab A into slot B". That becomes evergreen content: the gift which keeps on giving.

I've done this several times on this blog. Nearly two years ago I was setting up a standard template for my emails and I wondered: "What do you actually have to put in your email signature?" So I did some homework, created my email template, and wrote an article on what I'd found which still does very nicely in Google, thank you. It's bringing in as many visitors today as it did back in February 2009.

You can do this. To what questions are prospects and customers coming to you for the answer? There's your potential evergreen content. Graywolf’s SEO Blog thought that people might want to know what evergreen content was. So he wrote an article about it.

Evergreen content: the gift which keeps on giving

Keeping up appearances

Chris Rand — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:00:58 +0000

A post called Content Ideas – Creating an Ongoing Series on Graywolf’s SEO Blog made a smart point. It suggested that if you're looking for content on your site or blog, you try to come up with regular features, or something which can be serialised. This is a great idea, because not only does it give you a head start and encouragement in creating new content, but it's something which readers can latch on to as well. It's one of the reasons why magazines all have "editorial calendars" (although in the trade press, I realise that the main one is that some advertisers are obsessed with appearing in special features, and what the advertisers want, the advertisers get).

I hope you all have somewhere on your site where you can push out less formal content, even if it's not a blog. A website where the only updated section is the "press releases" page is doomed to suffer a slow, sad demise. An ongoing series of articles can be a great idea, and inspire you to actually make something happen.

Keeping up appearances

The onward march of WordPress

Chris Rand — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:00:02 +0000

When we rebuild websites for industrial and scientific companies, we always use free, open-source 'content management systems' (the engine behind the site). This is not because they save you, as the client, a lot of money (although they do!), but because they have so many thousands of users worldwide. You can therefore be assured that the system will continue to be maintained and updated, and you won't be tied into a particular subcontractor (including us!) if you need new features in the future.

There are a number of open-source content management systems available, and we're happy to create websites in any of them. But when clients ask us for a recommendation (as most do), we're increasingly finding that WordPress is the best choice, especially for companies who don't have thousands of product lines.

One of the things which WordPress is good at is enabling pages to be 'search engine optimised' as they're created. One of the world's best-known search engine optimisation specialists, Michael Gray, recently brought a lot of ideas together in an article called How I Create and Manage A WordPress Website on his Graywolf’s SEO Blog. The article is particularly aimed at people who are creating a website on a specific topic, but there's a lot of insight there too for those of us who are building business websites.

If you're a company with a small website who wants to step up and compete with the big boys, systems such as WordPress allow you to do just that. They enable creation of a new website which will revolutionise the way you operate to be achieved in a few weeks, for just a few thousand pounds, and very little effort on your part. More details here, and email us if you'd like to see recent examples of our work.

The onward march of WordPress

Google lays your site traffic bare

Chris Rand — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:29:19 +0000

Well, Google's decision to release Alexa-like traffic data for (almost) every web site in the universe has caused a lot of people to choke on their bacon sarnies over the past few days. It's all explained in A New Layer To Google Trends on the Google Webmaster Central blog and I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun playing with it.

But as Graywolf's SEO Blog headlines a post, Google's Two Tiered Internet World Sinks to a New Low. Not everyone is completely happy. Expect to hear more about this one.

Google lays your site traffic bare

Save costs where it matters least

Chris Rand — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:18:18 +0000

OK, so Does Your Website Have a Squeezy Top isn't one of the most in-depth posts ever on Graywolf's SEO Blog, but it contains a fundamental question which you should all think about: is your web site designed and laid out with the ruthless goal of facilitating conversions, or is it series of compromises that barely accomplishes its true goal?

And if you've got time for some more…

Advanced Link: Operator to Explore Your Competitor's Backlinks from Search Engine Journal

From the SEO Theory and Analysis blog: Are absolute links better than relative links for seo? – "Believe it or not, the subject for this post is a query string that keeps showing up in SEO Theory's search referrals…"

To Boost Conversion, Don't Focus on Exit Pages ONLY from Future Now's Marketing Optimization Blog

Save costs where it matters least