Time To Freshen Up Stale Sites & Perform Some Niche Site Spring Cleaning

Spring is here and now is the time of year when I like to take inventory of my sites that might be lacking freshness as far outdated products and models go. Now of course if you are in the cellphone or smartphone niche, this could be a constant ongoing process, but not all niches are that fast moving.

Usually I will start by going to Amazon and taking notice of any new items that might be best sellers and work backwards from there. I firmly believe older models, depending on the niche, have their place as well as most end up on eBay. That of course is right up my alley as well.

Depending on where I am in my other content creation, I may or may not decide to farm out the product info writing to my writers. Over the years I have found that I can use my time more wisely by paying them to research and write these. There are some niches though that I enjoy more than others and will sometimes tackle that content myself. It just depends site to site.

The best thing about adding new products is the appearance that the site is being updated in the eyes of both the surfer and the search engines. If the site has any age to it and a little authority, these pages can rank almost instantly and reward you in organic and search traffic much quicker than say a brand new site.

Not every niche is a winner as I hit duds like everyone else from time to time. Start with your best producing sites and work backwards. It will take some time, but usually well worth the time to do. While your at it, have a look around at any updates or errors you might need to take care of and treat the site like you are giving it a Spring cleaning.

Cutts On Article Marketing

Matt Cutts recently commented in the video below his thoughts on article marketing. Even though he frowns on it, you can tell if done right, it can help in your back-linking process. The problem is that not everyone does the process right. They do not start with a good high quality article to spin. They then do not spin it thoroughly using The Best Spinner, do not spin and rotate their anchor text and they likely do not belong to some good networks such as SEO Link Vine.

Article marketing should only be a small portion of your back link building strategy as well and all back link building should be slow and as natural looking as well. As best as you can get it. People hate to hear that it takes a good 6 months to a year to get a site seeded real well and producing a reasonable income. The old days of knocking out 1000 directories and submitting one article to 50 article directories in the first week is over.

Although Matt says they frown on article marketing, it can still be effective if done right. I have many sites that are proof of this. If you do it like 80% of the masses try to do, it will not help one bit. Take your time, spin them good, rotate the anchor text and pages they link to and submit over time.

Also be working on building other as close as natural backlink methods too. Not just through articles.

Recovering From Google Farmer Panda Update

Not sure how I missed this, but the great Vanessa Fox has a fantastic post up on Search Engine Land about what to do if your traffic has gone down since the Google Farmer/Panda Update. It is quite a long post, but she covers it pretty thoroughly. I have had a handful of sites affected by the last update, but am pretty sure what changes I need to make. Not drastic mind you. Pay close attention to the authoritative Content and duplicate content. While not surprising, many sites might fall into the more ads than content category. She also covers how Google recently launched an algorithm update intended to address scraper sites, but I know for a fact that this still needs tweaking on their end. I see scraper sites outranking some original sites everyday. Web spam is always changing and sometimes Google seems to chase their own tail in this department quite often. Anyways, read it slow and absorb it as it is a great post. She really writes great stuff and is worth following.

Video On Outreach For Linkbuilding

The latest Whiteboard Friday on SEO Moz is fantastic this week as it is done by Tom Critchlow and he covers what he calls Outreach for Linkbuilding. None of this is earth shattering and you will of course recognize that he mentions Twitter, which I have had great success with in certain niches. He gives great tips on how to reach out to other webmasters and online marketers for backlinks. Plain basic stuff, but broken down for you to easily understand.

Awesome Twenty Ten Weaver

I have been quite busy with doing a few new builds and recently was turned on to the Twenty Ten Weaver Wordpress themes. Everyone has seen the new default Wordpress theme, Twenty Ten, well the Weaver child themes makes easier than ever to customize. The theme extends the Twenty Ten theme by offering much more functionality such as customizing design colors and inserting code into the head area of your site as well as other areas. The best thing many of you will like is that it is easy to use and free. The video below does not do it justice, but the Weaver system is great for a newbie or advance webmaster. I have always liked themes with easy to add headers and this theme will let adjust sizes very easily. You need to play with this as it includes several child themes that look great and are easy to change colors on as well. Try it, you will love it too.

CloudFlare Free Content Delivery Network Service Review

A reader recently asked me if I have ever used CloudFlare, a free and paid Content Delivery Network service. I had never used it but recently put it to the test on a few sites without any problems. It is very easy to set up and point your nameservers in their direction. It honestly took me only 15 minutes from, start to finish. I am putting it to the test on a few moderately heavy traffic sites along with the W3 Total Cache plugin and am impressed with load times. I will let this run on these sites for a few months now to see how it goes. Here is the promo video below and a full tour here.

Us in 90 Seconds from CF Vimeo on Vimeo.

Site Structure By Yoast

Joost de Valk tackles Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO in his latest post and it is a great one. Yoast walks you through developing a good site structure, naming your sections and internal link structure. Such an easy to follow post with great images to illustrate the flow of the structure as well. Best thing about it it that it is nothing new as Yoast later reveals that the post was originally wrote in October 2007 for dev.opera.com. He says the only thing that has changed since is it's appearance and the adding of a few reference links. As you can see there is nothing magic, mostly common sense, but easy things like this are easily overlooked. Great post for a Friday. Have a great weekend everyone.