How unique content builds Web sites

You are a unique individual. No matter how high and mighty, no one is more unique than you. Not Angelina Jolie, not Barack Obama, not the Incredible Hulk.

Unique is an absolute, as most of us learned in high school English. Meaning there is no such thing as most unique, almost unique or any other shading.

That is unless you're a Google engineer.

Web search and traffic analytics operate with two "unique" concepts -- "unique visitors" and "unique content." Put simply, the more of these the better.

Unique visitors (aka absolute unique visitors) -- slanged down to "uniques" -- refers to the number of people who land on an Internet property in a given period, throwing out all repeat visits. Someone who calls up a site 10 times counts the same as another person who visits once.

The other major measure is total page views, a raw number that makes Web publishers happy because it's always higher. Both of these measurements come in and out of fashion with advertisers and others keeping score.

(If you publish a web site or blog, Google Analytics should be your traffic tracker. It's free and it's remarkable. Google now links AdSense with the Analytics, a vaguely creepy concept that makes the data even more robust.)

The other "unique" -- unique content -- represents a trickier concept. Google and the other search engines value original content over pretty much anything other than high-quality incoming links.

No one outside Google seems to know for sure, but the percentage of original content needed for a Web page to score as unique seems to be 65 percent to 70 percent. That gap allows for incidental repurposing of content such as blockquotes of cited passages or widely distributed quotes from press releases.

The flip side of this is duplicate content, sometimes a bad or very bad thing. At best, the publishing of duplicate content is no apparent help for those trying to lure traffic. Google and the other search engines seek to present content on its source page.

(Unfortunately, most people experienced in writing for the Web have horror stories about some scraper -- automated thief -- outranking them with their own work. There are remedies for content larceny, including contacting Google legal. I've done this successfully.)

My clients often struggle with the concept of unique content. Cutting and pasting material from several sources, for example, does not constitute original content. As the teacher used to say, you have to do your own work. And then present it in one place.

When clients send me text for a Web page or post, I always run a Yahoo! search on several of the sentences. Frequently, there are matches, meaning the content has been duplicated and thus already has been indexed in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

In general, this makes the "new" content worthless in terms of SEO. In extreme cases, copied content leads to search engine penalties. (Some SEOs say the duplicate content penalty is a myth.) Then there are the copyright violations, meaning possible legal problems. The Associated Press, for example, recently declared war on bloggers who dupe their news.

But the issue of duplication is not purely one of right and wrong -- even with permission from the creators, serial use of duplicate content can lead to wheel spinning or worse. Duplication of your own work remains duplication, even if the readers are being served. Remember that the Web revolves around links, not republishing.

Many writers build their site's authority and traffic by syndicating content on the Web. This is almost never a problem, even if you repeat the content on your own site. Google and the rest recognize this as a legitimate form of content distribution. Just don't count on your site getting credit for the work in the SERPs -- and don't be surprised if the ranking goes to another site.

Another point: Unique content does not mean unique topics, ideas or conclusions. Facts cannot be copyrighted. This is basically a matter of original wording, presentation and style.

Experts in search engine optimization universally agree that relevant unique content is the No. 1 element leading to success in terms of traffic, readership loyalty and ad dollars.

Unique content is king.

Anyone up for a lava party?

Just finished a new web site that says aloha to people planning trips to the Big Island of Hawaii.

Specifically, it's a visitors guide to Hilo and the Volcanoes National Park -- the area on the east side of the island of Hawaii.

Please check it out, especially if you're unfamiliar with this unique part of Hawaii. The big draws are active volcanoes that rule over the lush ancient lands and the powerful observatories built upon the mountains.

The site -- bigislandeast.com -- uses City, a WordPress theme from the retired Revolution premium line. Revolution now is known as StudioPress. Only developers who bought licenses from the company before 2008 have access to these cool "oldie goldie" themes. I like both the old and new designs, and so do my clients.

The logo was done by Hawaiian/L.A. artist Kristie Kosmides.

The Flash-style gallery is actually a Javascript-based WP plugin known as Featured Content Gallery. That plugin has undergone a major rewrite since the City theme came out, so I did the update and all is well. Themes can live for a long time if you keep up with the updates and upgrades. I have another one that is almost ancient, but I love the look and it still gets the job done, many versions of WP down the road.

Big Island East is typical of hybrid blogs/web sites that seek to capitalize on the best of both formats. Visitors to this site, for example, can comment on almost all of the articles, even though they're not blog posts in the way most people think of them. But the look and feel of Big Island East would never be confused wih your basic Blogger/TypePad/WP theme.

(The closest current Studio Press theme is Lifestyle, which has just been updated to make it easier for average users.)

It's always a rush to finally finish a web site, especially one as content rich as this one. Kind of feels like the kid is leaving home. You're a wee bit sad to see the site leave the nest (always more stuff to fiddle with), but you're doubly glad to have it take flight and get out of your hair.

Stand by for WordPress 2.8. Or jump in now.

The workhorses at WordPress.org have uploaded Version 2.8 as a beta, available to all.

There are more than 100 upgrades and fixes in this iteration, so you might want to jump on board when it's released. I am in the habit of waiting for a .1 version after a major update -- letting others deal with the release bugs -- but this time I'm going in on official release day. Easy to get a feel for the severity of problems in the release in the WP forums.

WordPress made updating a lot easier with 2.7, so this will be the first big test of that one-step process via the dashboard. Anyone who's been on WP for more than five months remembers the risks and pains of updating the old-fashioned way. There also is the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plug-in that has never failed me.

For the brave, foolhardy or public-service-minded, switching to the 2.8 beta is now an option.

Here are some of the promising new features in WordPress 2.8:

• A new routine for theme installations. (Not that the old one was hard.)


• A "custom header" for menu text. (Whatever that means).


• A documentation lookup for the theme and plug-in editors. (How about a universal code string search?)


• An end to notifying the author of his own comments.


• Improved widget interface. (Thank God.)


• Allow editing of all plug-ins.


• An option to use plug-ins on individual pages.


• The ability to run several galleries on a single page.


• Improved database performance. (Always an adventure when the DB comes into play.


• More subject options for tag clouds (such as show categories instead).

Blogging for money: a bankrupt concept

The best way to make money blogging is to blog about how to make money blogging. No secret there.

How many people actually succeed financially at blogging? Recent estimates say maybe 2% of bloggers make a modest living, with the sweet spot somewhere about 100,000 page views a month.

"Brazen Careerist" Penelope Trunk, with 400,000 page views a month, says don't bother trying. Unless you already have a large and loyal audience, work for big media or are incredibly talented -- such as the alpa-female blogger Heather Armstong of Dooce.com.

Proceed directly to Trunk's straight-no-chaser post, "Reality Check: You're Not Going to Make Money From Your Blog."

Let me contribute this ugly sidebar: The amount of time it would take most of us to reach 100,000 page views -- via the obsessive link building that Google's search system pretty much demands these days -- leaves no time for actually producing content. That catch-22 drives most seasoned bloggers to the brink. Or the want ads.

Still, lots of bloggers are trying and some are succeeding, as Mark Penn of Burson-Marsteller reports in the Wall Street Journal: "Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters," he says. The columnist has taken some fire for his informal blogger census, and later issued a call for more reliable counts.

Penn's post remains must reading: "America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire."

Hat tip to ProBlogger Darren Rowse, whose roundup post on blogging and money completes this downbeat trilogy.

Oh and ... This blog makes no money; I don't really try. The best techniques I know are to work multiple streams of income across numerous Internet properties. Some of the projects can be time-consuming flagships, but most should not require much updating. Read the ProBlogger post for various approaches to monetization.

7 things I learned at OMMA Global

This real-estate web site guy and I engaged in some useless networking today at the online marketing conference in Hollywood.

First came the quick check of name badges. He read mine; I read his. No apparent help. Then a few minutes of what-do-you-do? Zip. We had nothing to offer each other, really, standing there awkwardly in the hotel's Grand Ballroom -- but it sure beat paying attention to the ad panelists as they droned on from the stage. Something about performance and ROI.

Real estate guy and I quickly agreed on one thing: Subscribe to the right feeds and you'll learn more from opening your morning email than from any of these multi-day online conferences.

Only a fool runs into a swarm of "experts" and comes away empty-handed, though. Here are some things I picked up at OMMA Global Hollywood just before fleeing the scene:

Great expression: "It's just new sprinkles on the same old cupcake." Man, I miss those corporate sayings of the week, spread on the wings of hipster salesmen.

Instant web traffic-builder. Work the word "Twitter" into all of your blog's headlines. 

Analytic anality: "Metrics are useless if you can't act on them." The corollary being most second-tier metrics are useless unless you seek to kill time.

What to say to SEO clients: "If you build it, they will not necessarily come. You have to go out there and find them."

SEO tip of the day: "Build your keywords for conversions, not traffic."

Resistance is futile: "If you are going to be an online publisher, you are going to be invested in different distribution channels."

New definition of online video: A power point with some guy doing a low-fi voice-over.

Apologies to OMMA, which does put on a good show. I believe that if you go to any industry conference and have your mind expanded, you're either 22 or in the wrong business. Wish I could put names to these quotes from panelists, but I was in sloppy mode.

WordPress says let's go to the video (tutorial)

I love online video tutorials for tech-related tasks. Not for resolving those hair-pulling, silent-scream problems, but for the minor mysteries.

In addition to the obvious show-and-tell benefits -- you watch the cursor do its thing in the code or CMS environment -- you also get to fast-forward past the obvious stuff.

I'm always multitasking until the teacher gets to whatever is throwing me. Maybe just sort-of listening with the video screen buried under the usual sea of open windows.

WordPress.org (the self-hosted platform) has more than its share of mysteries, so stand by for good news: the how-to archive WordPress TV is now on the air.

So far, most of the topics seem geared to WP newbies and the citizens over on wordpress.com, but no doubt you'll find something interesting in the tutorial directories. There's one section for WordPress.org and another for the plug-and-play WordPress.com, although some topics apply to both formats. In some cases, there are videos on the same topic for each "flavor."

Here are some of the basic videos in the WordPress.org category :

• Adding a widget to your sidebar.


• Adding an About Me or other page.


• Publishing a post at a later time.

Here are a few of the more advanced topics:

• SEO and optimization for WordPress ( a lecture)
.

• The Gravatar plugin setup.


• Add a PayPal button.

Change www to non-www via redirect

If users can call up your blog using both www and non-www URLs, it's time to select a preferred domain and perform a 301 redirect.

You want all users to access your site the same way. Or at least Google does.

There are many variables at work here, so I suggest a search for redirect www and non-www and redirect non-www to www.

Confused? You might want to start with this squidoo page on 301 redirects.

You might also check the High Rankings forum for redirects or any number of other web forums, including Google's.

My knowledge of server-side is basic, so please read all you can about this issue, including Google's page on 301s. If your host is helpful with code, count your blessings and see if the support guys will check your work.

This code worked for me in changing www to non-www -- on a GoDaddy-hosted Apache/Linux set-up.

www to non-www

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

and for the reverse, non-www to www

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Don't forget to change "example.com" to your name.

I'm posting these because there are quite a few bad examples out there.

If you don't know what to do with these blocks, please don't try. Dig into the information linked above and learn all you can before acting. WordPress, in particular, has a complicated set of concerns about all this.

Good luck ... let's be careful out there.

Redirect update: Google and the other major search engines released a new "link" tag that is supposed to resolve issues of duplicate content on the same site. The links go on the duplicate pages and point to the canonical URL, meaning the one you want the search engines to serve up. Sounds like a good thing. Now if they can get Webmaster Tools to work ... )

Starting a blog? Start here.

I love it when people do my job for me. Darren Rowse at ProBlogger just posted a best-of series of links for beginning bloggers.

Written for first-time bloggers but not for dummies. ProBlogger remains high on my top 10 list of email/RSS resources for blogging and search optimization.

Here's a vital question the blogging guru asks right away:

"Does (your blog) topic excite you? Are you motivated enough to write about it for the long term? ... Be brutally honest about this because as I found, we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we are interested in a topic when we are not. ... If you’re not interested in your topic your potential readers will sense this and the chances of success will fall."

Almost always true. I have had the experience of starting a blog that's off-topic for me, only to find I've later become fascinated with the subject. (That blog covers the national debate over driving laws for cell phones and text messaging).

And then Rowse hits this major, major point:

"If you’re wanting to develop a serious blog and have aspirations for it to be used on a professional sort of level (whether as a business or corporate blog, as a blog to build your own profile or a blog to earn income from advertising) I’d recommend you go in the direction of a stand alone blog."

You may be a mere babe in the blogging world, but these are grownup decisions that can make or break any project.

By stand-alone blog the ProBlogger basically means WordPress, the self-hosted CMS system found at wordpress.org (not wordpress.com). Rowse goes on to recommend simple hosted platforms (such as Blogger or TypePad) for people who are in it for fun.

Once again, if you're serious, I urge you not to go with a one of these prefab blogging solutions. I made this error on my first blog, DVD Spin Doctor, which is on TypePad. This led to innumerable headaches, including serial problems with Google that forced me to do reverse-SEO on the site. Going with TypePad for a content-heavy blog with commercial aspirations was the biggest error I've made in this business (so far).

With self-hosted blogging, your URLs do not have some Net publishing company's name included. And you're not looking at a nightmare when you want to move the blog.

Here is a blog built on WordPress(.org), the home video review blog DVD Gift Guide. Try doing that on TypePad or Blogger or WordPress' separate prefab blogging platform.

Of course, I'm hosted on Blogger here, for this straightforward writing project. Aha! Is that the mask of hypocrisy we see? Nah. Having a presence on Blogger has helped me understand the platform and help clients. No biggie. The price is right. Probably will move it to WP at some point.

Back to ProBlogger's incredibly useful post. Rowse goes through almost all of the issues a first-time blogger should consider. I agree with pretty much all of it. Thanks, man.