Supposing there's a new piece of legislation out which will affect lots of your customers. They're not going to wait for you and your competitors to tell them about it, and they're certainly not going to wait for the next issue of Large Red Widget Monthly. They're going to go straight to Google, and you want to be there waiting for them.

Getting an article written on a topical subject before your competitors do can give you a massive advantage in online search. If it's an article full of originally-expressed sentences, even better, because the first articles up about a subject are usually rehashed material, and Google doesn't like that. You can do better.

There's more on the subject in Creating Unique Content: Do It Before Someone Else Does on Marketing Jive.

How you can break the news and reap the benefit

There are two things bad about this. One is that it tells the search engines nothing, and puts your SEO on the back foot before the search engines even look at your page. The second is that it tells the reader nothing, especially when they see the link in all its glory in the Google results. It's amazing how many people now scan down the green URLs when they get a results page.

URL Best Practices and Guidelines Reminder on Marketing Jive outlines what great URLs should look like. The problem is that it's difficult to change what you've got, and probably impossible if you're controlled by an inflexible content management system. However, if you do decide to rip up your site and start again, which is often not as daunting as it sounds, make sure these rules are followed. It's quite possible to redirect the old URLs to the new pages without much work, and without losing anything in the search engines.

It makes sense to have URLs which make sense

Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it? So how do you send people to that page from, say, a print advertisement? It would appear that most companies shrug their shoulders and just quote the home page instead. But "Find out more at www.redwidgetcompany.co.uk" is (as I've said before) the equivalent of inviting prospects to your company and putting a notice up in reception saying "Welcome! Find your way to our showroom yourself". Quite simply, it's not good enough.

Wouldn't it be a lot better if you could send people to the right page with an address they'd be happy to type in? Something like www.redwidgetcompany.co.uk/fast? Or even a specially-created www.fastwidget.co.uk? Well guess what – there's nothing stopping you. Whilst a specially-created URL will cost you the princely sum of about five pounds a year, the short URL at your existing site won't cost you a penny – someone just needs to add one line of text to a special file on your website, which is a two-minute job. If (like me) you use cheap ten-pounds-a-month web space for your company's website, you're going to have to find out how to do this yourself. But if you're one of those companies spending a lot more on your web hosting, this is the sort of thing which your web host should be offering to justify all that money they're charging you.

There's loads of information about the whole subject in the comprehensive article Vanity URLs and SEO: The Definitive Resource on the Marketing Jive blog, which not only provides an introduction to the subject, but links to loads of other good discussions about web page redirection.

Vanity URLs – not for the vain

At the other extreme, football managers often say "I'm not worried about what our rivals did elsewhere tonight, I'm just concentrating on next Saturday's match", and it's preferable for us to be concerned about how our own company is performing, rather than worrying about the opposition. But we can learn from their successes.

When it comes to internet marketing, everything your competition is doing is laid out in front of you, and it makes sense to use all of this information. A good technical article to read is 5 Ways to Analyze Inbound Links for Competitors on Marketing Jive. If you find yourself consistently being beaten in the search engine results by an irritating rival who you ought to be beating, it may benefit you to investigate how they're achieving that.

How to determine what your competitors are doing better