If you’re considering using an analytics platform other than, or in addition to, Google Analytics, it can be a bit difficult to determine what the best alternative will be. Search Engine Land compiled a great buyers guide to enterprise web analytics tools, but what if you’re in the market for a free to mid-level tool, or don’t even know yet exactly what type of software you need?

Analytics Software Solutions

Below is a brief overview of 25 analytics software options (and one add-on) that should give you an idea of what each tool costs and what functionality each offers. Before you check out the chart and series of descriptions below, note that it is important to go into any analytics evaluation with a clear idea about what you need the software to do. Some important questions to ask yourself before you start to evaluate Web analytics tools are:

• Why do I need a different/new tool?
• What sort of data do I need this tool to give me?
• What actions will be driven by that data? How, specifically, will I use the data to inform decisions and activities?

Just because a feature sounds interesting and provides you with some additional data about your site doesn’t mean it’s actually valuable. You want to know the specific holes in your current reporting that will be filled by additional functionality, and more importantly, you want to be sure that that extra information will drive better decisions and ultimately more revenue and profit for your business.

Once you’ve identified what you’re looking for in these tools, you should be able to use the information below to help you make a better decision about which analytics package will be right for you.

The table below is available as an image, and you can also get the raw data in this Google Doc.

Web Analytics Software Comparison Guide

1.  Google Analytics

Google Analytics was originally designed as a tool for AdWords users. It was basically a repackaged version of Urchin on Demand, which Google acquired in 2005. It was redesigned in 2006 with additions from Adaptive Path after the company acquired Measure Map.

Key Features:

• Benchmark against all other analytics programs
• Content Experiments for A/B Testing

Cost: Free for all users, enterprise solutions available

2. Adobe Site Catalyst

Adobe SiteCatalyst is created by Adobe, best known for its Adobe Creative Suite which includes software programs such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Fireworks.

Key Features:

• Can be enhanced with Test&Target (for A/B testing)
• Drag-and-drop dashboard
• Embeddable reports
• Customization options

Cost: $5,000+ per month

To read to full article, please visit the original post at Search Engine Land.

Google Authorship has been sweeping through the SEO and blogging world faster than a wildfire in the high desert in August. Authors are rushing around trying to get their rel=author tags or email verifications to work in hopes that their shining faces will show up in Google’s search engine results page (SERP) and they’ll see a boon in the click through rates of their content pages and increased traffic all around. Others have their eyes on the future and the Emerald City that is Google Author Rank; the hope being that being involved with Google Authorship now will help to improve their ranking whenever Author Rank does go live. Yet another big incentive for people to enable Authorship is to keep track of their guest posts and other writings around the web, but I think the farther removed you get from the site the more careful you should be about enabling Authorship on your content.

Dragging Down Author Rank

Now this is only speculation, as is most everything regarding Author Rank, but I think having Authorship enabled on a lot of guest posts could actually reduce or keep your Author Rank from growing. Guest posting is a great link building tool and one I am a strong proponent for, but you aren’t going to be getting on the highest of quality blogs with every single guest post. Or maybe your site or blog does very well in its niche and you’ve built of a respectable PageRank and following. If you do guest posts on blogs with less influence than you, and with authors with less Author Rank than you, you could potentially dilute your Author Rank.

Getting Away From Your Niche

Everyone knows that sites that operate within a niche are the best performing, and what is the most relevant site to your niche? Well that’s your own site of course. You can strive to get posts on the most relevant sites, but the truth of the matter is that nothing is as relevant as your own site that features your own content. With that being said, I believe that if Author Rank becomes a reality, it will be closely tied to where the majority of your work is shown. That being said, if your best work is being featured on your homepage than I would be concerned about also attributing Authorship to guest posts that may not be up to par.

The Benefits

I don’t want to rag on enabling Authorship for guest posting because I’m a large user of it. I’m a vain son-of-a-gun and I love to see my mug show up in the SERPs, even better if it’s for a somewhat competitive search term. This builds my influence as a writer in my field and makes it more likely that I’ll be accepted to guest post and contribute at bigger and better sites. Plus, using Google’s author stats tool is a great way to see how your Authorship enabled posts on any site are performing in the search engine and you can filter the results by time, source, location, and more. In a sense, it acts like a scaled down version of Google Analytics. From a link building perspective, this lets me track how well the page is doing and the value of the link on that site.

When it comes to Authorship, you may want to be hesitant about trying to get it on every one of your guest posts. Doing so could potentially “dilute” your future Author Rank in the future if you spread yourself thinly across many unrelated websites rather than focusing on a few core sites. Of course, this is just speculation. But if you’re writing content for any site that will take you there are bound to be bad apples in the bunch, and do you want your name tied to those sites? What if the sites get penalized for black hat SEO practices? You can bet that your Author Rank will be affected in some way. However, there are many benefits to using Authorship on your guest posts, like tracking your work and showcasing it on Google+.  In the end it is up to you and where your content is getting featured. If you’re comfortable having your name, image, and Author Rank influenced by it then I say go for it.

Thomas McMahon is a writer for Page One Power, a link building company who has further reading at the Page One Power blog.

As the SEO landscape continues to change in 2013, many tactics that had previously been low cost, easy to implement and effective are becoming less and less effective. For this reason, a lot of small businesses are struggling to choose the right areas of focus to get quality results from SEO on a limited budget. The truth is that things like comprehensive content marketing plans can be very expensive to execute, and for many small businesses a hefty monthly retainer to “do SEO right” might not be a legitimate possibility.

So what can a small business that’s on a budget do to improve their search rankings without exposing themselves to a high level of short term risk?

SEO Help for Those on a Shoestring Budget

1) Leverage External Expertise Strategically

One way to leverage external expertise on a limited budget is to contract with an agency in a specific, strategic way. Rather than engaging in a full-on retainer-based relationship, you might consider:

• An SEO Audit: Have the agency conduct an in-depth audit of your site and give you a list of items to improve. You might consider doing this annually with a different agency every year to get a “new set of eyes” and different ideas for opportunities.
• Monthly Consultations: Some SEOs will sell hourly phone consultations, which like an audit can be a nice way to get some quick insights for a limited fee. If you have $200-$500 a month to spend, you’ll likely be much better off getting 1 hour of time from a skilled SEO than you would be if you spent that money on services (as you’ll likely either get an extremely limited amount of quality link building, or a lot of lower quality link building that’s likely to hurt you more than harm you in the long run).

In either of these scenarios, you’ll have to be able to actually execute on the advice generated in the audit/consultation. But you’ll put yourself in a position to get a premium quality SEO plan on a restricted budget.

2) Generate Blog Posts by Curating and Aggregating Content

Your blog is one of the most effective SEO tools you have in your arsenal. At least it can be, if you use it right. But one of the most common stumbling blocks encountered by bloggers and business owners is a lack of content. Fortunately, there are tons of resources you can use to generate content ideas. (Think AllTop, Twitter, Google News and many of the sites you’re already using on a daily basis.)

The key to coming up with great content ideas is to shift your thinking from that of a content consumer to that of a content curator. What topics are trending? What are your readers and customers asking you about most frequently? What posts have been re-Tweeted hundreds of times on Twitter? Armed with this data, put a new spin on it – and you’ve got yourself a blog post.

To read to full article, please visit the original post on Small Business Trends.

When it comes to link acquisition, SEO professionals and link builders have this long-standing infatuation with .edu links. Much of this preoccupation stems from a belief that Google bestows magical SEO powers on .edu top-level domains (TLDs). But that just isn’t the case.

In fact, Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts is on record saying that .edu TLDs don’t carry more weight than other extensions.

Even though an .edu may not be inherently superior to other extensions, getting an .edu link can still be valuable. Most universities are trusted, authoritative brands with robust backlink profiles, which are exactly the types of linking domains we search marketers covet.

What’s more, there are a ton of ripe link opportunities at schools, if you know where to look. Here are a few actionable and high probability tips and tactics for snagging .edu links.

EDU Link Building Tactics

Faculty Spotlight Links

One of my favorite methods for netting a .edu link is to interview or spotlight a faculty member (or members) from a university. You can find really interesting professors and researchers at a school who are conducting compelling studies, have written books, are noted experts on a specific topic and who would likely be of interest and relevant to your core audience.

The link opportunities for spotlighting a university faculty member are pretty abundant. You can acquire:

• Links from their faculty page: Nearly every faculty member has a dedicated faculty page where they host syllabi, course updates, background information, published works, notable accomplishments, etc. Many also cite websites and online pubs that they’ve been featured in, which could spell a linking opportunity for your site as well.
• Links from news pages: News items can really be a few different opportunities since most universities have a few separate news streams. There’s a university level feed, with more campus-wide news, and each college or school within that university generally has a dedicated news page that highlights accomplishments of students, faculty or staff members specific members of that school as well, like news on from the School of Humanities or the College of Engineering. Interviewing or writing a feature article on a professor often qualifies as a newsworthy event.

Examples include:

• University news page: news.pitt.edu/in-the-headlines
• School news page: epidemiology.pitt.edu/News/news.asp
• Faculty page: epidemiology.pitt.edu/sekikawa.asp

You may need to get creative here too, in the event that a stand-alone interview isn’t link-worthy enough for the school you’re targeting. For example, I ran this post a few years ago “The Best Search Marketing Research Papers.” Even though it was run in 2009, that page still shows a few solid .edu links are still in place.

Alma Mater Links

One of the higher probability methods of acquiring .edu links is getting mentions for former students. Every university has an alumni association with its own dedicated website, and nearly all publish an alumni news section with notes about the accomplishments and milestones of former students.

Alumni associations are generally news-starved and will publish most items on former students, provided the info is somewhat noteworthy. And like the general news sections at universities, many schools have alumni news sections at both the university and school level. Some of the potential link opportunities include:

• Class notes: Has anyone in your organization done anything noteworthy recently? Have they done any fundraising, run a marathon, received an award, wrote an ebook, earned a big promotion, had a baby? Find out where they went to school, what year they graduated, what their major was and submit your news item.
• Alumni profiles: Gather the school, year, major information from the executives or thought leaders in your organization, the company founder, the CEO, etc. Write a flattering spotlight about them and their accomplishments and submit it to their alma mater as a profile. Writing something up ahead of time means a better shot of getting it published.
• Group interviews: If you use group interviews in your content marketing efforts (and if you don’t you should be), there’s another opportunity here. Now even the participants aren’t employees of your organization, you should still ask for their alma maters so you can shoot a note to their alumni associations to say they’ve been featured as an expert on your website.

For the full article, please visit the original post on Search Engine Watch.

Are you a newbie to the world of content marketing? If so, you might be totally overwhelmed with the scope of the industry. Content marketing is more than just words—we’re talking about videos, graphics, e-books, blog posts, white papers and so much more. So where do you begin if you’re just starting out? Check out these seven tips for grasping the world of content.

1) Have a Content Marketing Plan and Stay Organized

One of the most important things you’ll ever do for your content strategy happens before you even begin, and that’s creating a solid marketing plan. You might feel like you just want to dive in and start pushing content out the door, but doing so will only result in disorganization, lack of consistency and lackluster results. A content marketing editorial calendar is a valuable tool for content organization. Use an editorial calendar to schedule posts and topics in advance, so you don’t find yourself trying to come up with content ideas at the last minute. An editorial calendar also helps you stay accountable for producing content regularly.

2) Look Beyond the Written Word

As you’re creating a plan, think about the different forms of content marketing that exist. Content is more than just words on a page, and content marketing includes a variety of formats, such as:

• Blog posts
• SEO landing pages
• White papers
• E-books
• Videos
• Webinars
• Infographics
• Image galleries
• Case studies
• Informative guides

All of these formats can be used somewhat interchangeably for a well-rounded content strategy that connects with various segments of your audience. What works for another company might not work for you, so you’ll need to test (and test some more) to find out what resonates most with your audience. An IT security firm, for example, may have a lot of success with longer forms of content such as downloadable white papers and reports, whereas a publisher of family safety information might get traction with their audience by publishing an informative buyer’s guide to security cameras, and still yet a nutritional supplement company can publish a landing page on tips for keeping your immune system healthy as part of a content strategy designed to target an audience seeking health solutions. Those are a just a few examples of a range of real-world content marketing tactics in action to give you a better sense of what I’m talking about. But above all, when you’re formulating content ideas, think about your audience and the type of content you’re creating to help determine which asset type and content format best suits your goals.

For the full article, please visit the original post at All Business Experts.

In November I asked a group of ~50 SEOs one simple question:

“What was the most creative way you, or someone you know, got a link?”

This was personally one of my favorite posts because there was so much awesome, actionable, and insightful responses. But it looks like I wasn’t alone – it’s now the #1 all time post on Inbound.org.

After it was published, I got a lot of SEOs wanting to contribute as well, but very few people actually noticed the updated additions. That’s why I decided it was time for round 2, just because each response is just as awesome as the ones in the original post.

So, even though there are only 27 responses in this round, they’re equally insightful as the first group’s!

A former member of Matt Cutts’ search quality team was recently quoted as saying:

“…getting a link from a high PR page used to always be valuable, today it’s more the relevance of the site’s theme in regards to yours, relevance is the new PR.”

Now, the importance of on-topic links and contextual relevancy is really nothing new. But it’s statements like “relevance is the new PR” (emphasis on “new”), aggressive Penguin refreshes and updates, the evolution of SERP behavior, and the devaluation of keyword anchor links that make it clear Google has and likely will continue to dial up the importance of domain and document-level link relevancy.

But why dial up relevancy? Theoretically, link relevancy helps to:

• Determine trust.
• Decipher the topic or context of a target document.
• Deliver relevant information in the right context (i.e., relevant query results).
• Sort out link spam.

So as Google places more value on link relevancy, so should you.

Trouble is, most link profiles are littered with irrelevant links. Sure, the link anchor text may be relevant, but all the links are from off-topic domains (faking relevancy).

Links from irrelevant domains aren’t bad, per se. Irrelevant links still pass trust and authority, and having irrelevant links is part of a natural, diverse linking pattern.

However, if all or the vast majority of your links are from topically irrelevant domains, that’s a problem.

So when it comes to link building now, it’s paramount to prioritize domain relevancy the same way you would domain trust and authority, and strive to build “on-topic” links as a core focus of your creative link building efforts.

With that, here are a range of tactics and linkable assets you can leverage to build relevant links.

Authoritative Guides

Publishing authoritative guides isn’t a new link-based content marketing tactic by any means. But it’s a very effective way to build relevant links.

The key is to create quality guides that are not only information-rich and expert level, but topically aligned with your niche and the general theme of your site. That way, you can reach out to a relevant linking audience, particularly one that has proven to link to similar resources. Investing in design to make your guide remarkable, definitely helps gain traction as well.

Given the oversaturation in with cold email outreach, one way to increase your chance of getting links with authoritative guides – particularly links that are highly relevant – is to cite a variety of resources and reach out to those sites and authors to let them know you value their insights and you’ve cited them in your guide. Call it ego stroking, but by adding this component, you might be able to double link outreach and social sharing success rates.

Point being, if you want to get traction with a relevant linking audience, you need to give them a reason to link. And, as often is the case, just creating a piece of great content isn’t enough of an incentive. So think of creative ways to up the engagement ante.

Tightly-Themed Infographics

By and large, infographics as a scalable link tactic have been waning in efficacy. And, frankly, that’s true of most outreach-based link building tactics. Folks are weary and leery of cold outreach for content “your audience will find useful.”

However, that doesn’t mean these tactics are dead. It just means they’re harder, which to me is a good thing. It raises the barrier to entry and means links acquired are theoretically more valuable and more defensible. So where in the past, you might need tens or hundreds of links to be competitive, now you can really move the needle in your vertical with a handful of quality, relevant links.

Returning to infographics, the key to acquiring valuable on-topic links is to target very concentrated, industry-related topics and your linking audience, rather than casting a wide net with a broad concept. Again, you’re goal is link relevancy, not link volume, so you want to be narrowly focused with topic selection.

Targeting really granular, industry specific trends, pain points and themes is an effective approach here. And I highly recommend identifying your linking audience ahead of time and engaging in some pre-outreach to gauge interest level, sentiment and/or receptiveness for your concept.

Another approach is to include data or research from relevant organizations in your infographic and shoot them a note about citing their work when the graphic goes live. You can also try co-branding an infographic with an authoritative, relevant site to get them to link to it as well.

Industry Spotlights

Who are the thought leaders, influencers, experts, or even the prominent websites or leading publications in your niche? Find out and write a feature article about them on your blog. These spotlights have a high success rate since there’s built in promotion and engagement with the subject of your spotlight and their audience.

These types of linkable assets are often added to the subject’s about page or list of accomplishments on their site. And many times they’ll drop a note about it on their blog: “I was recently featured on this website.”

You can also leverage this tactic to net .edu links. Spotlight a researcher or faculty member at a university for something notable they’ve done. They’ll often link to it from their personal faculty page, which contain lists of other relevant links, with potential co-citation benefits as well.

Remember, this is about relevancy. Be sure to stay on-topic with your targeting.

Group Interviews

Publishing group interviews is akin to the spotlight feature (ego bait asset), but on a much grander scale. Rather than featuring a single expert or thought leader, you want to feature dozens, like here and here.

…

For the full article, visit Search Engine Watch.

More and more businesses are turning to content marketing to drive qualified traffic and leads online. For anyone unfamiliar with content marketing, it’s best described as creating and sharing content to engage and acquire potential customers. Content marketing falls under the larger inbound marketing umbrella, which includes blogging, SEO, social media efforts and email marketing.

Move the Needle with Content Marketing

One of the key reasons content marketing is growing in popularity is because Google has been very aggressive in their continued attempts to clean up rampant Web spam by devaluing many link-building techniques. So as cheap, low-value SEO techniques no longer work, companies are turning to content marketing to move the needle. Great content — that is well promoted — can generate many of the signals that Google values, such as links, shares and coverage from authoritative publishers. But producing great content isn’t just about grabbing links or catering to Google. It’s also about educating people and building trust in your brand.

In addition, content marketing can be highly scalable tactic which allows online business owners to build valuable “Web assets” that drive passive traffic and leads for the life of a document versus, say, renting traffic with tactics like paid search. Finally, content assets can generate some of the highest ROI for a company and help draw users into all levels of your sales and marketing funnel.

So if you’re a business owner or in-house digital marketer, you might be wondering “What are some of the most cost-efficient content marketing tactics I can leverage, and where should I invest in my marketing dollars for the best return?”

To answer those questions, here are three high ROI content marketing asset types, the benefits they offer and tips on how to create them:

Blogging

Publishing useful content on your blog is a highly effective way to build your audience and engage them. It’s also a great way to position your company as an authority in your niche and build brand awareness. As for return on investment, according to ZAGG, a mobile device accessory provider, their blogging yields 172% ROI.

To read the full article, visit All Business Experts.

The SEO world continues to shift its collective focus to all things content: content strategy, content generation, content marketing, etc. This is a net positive since most content on the web sucks.

It should come as no surprise that this seismic shift in content attitude among marketers is in lock step with Google’s aggressive crusade (verging on Draconian) to purge the SERPs of low value rank spam, and bubble up content of value.

However, it isn’t enough to simply take a seat on the “awesome content” bus. Heck everyone is doing that. One look at the meteoric rise in “content marketing” searches is all you the proof you need.

If you really want to dominate your niche and distance yourself from your competitors, you have to take the wheel of the “awesome content” bus, be a leader and set precedent for your industry. And by implementing the following 27 tactics (which range from keyword targeting to link analysis to content usability tips), you will dramatically improve the value of your content for readers, users, customers and engines as well and absolutely own your vertical.

1. Review Keyword Targeting

Check your analytics; see which keywords searchers are using to find specific documents on your site. Are those terms well aligned with the topic of the content, with user intent and with the audience you’re targeting?

Ask yourself if you were searching those same keywords and landed on the document would it answer your questions, serve your needs, educate you? If not, think hard about retargeting or aligning the topic better with searcher intent.

2. Create Descriptive and Engaging Headlines

The title of your document is the first and most important piece of on-page copy the user is going to see. It sets the tone for what will follow and also allows the user to determine whether to continue reading.

If users aren’t engaged and bail here, it doesn’t matter how awesome your call-to-action or unique selling proposition is. Read this for more on creating engaging headlines.

3. Vary Page Title (Headline) and Title Tag

This is more for engines than users, and mixing up the keywords, modifiers, stems in your page’s heading and title tag helps your assets rank for a broader basket of keywords, allowing your content to work even harder for you.

For the full article, visit: Dramatically Raise the Value of Any Piece of Content with These 27 Tactics

It may be a new year, but that hasn’t stopped Google from rolling out yet another Panda refresh.

Last year Google unleashed the most aggressive campaign of major algo updates ever in its crusade to battle rank spam. This year looks to be more of the same.

Since Panda first hit the scene two years ago, thousands of sites have been mauled. SEO forums are littered with site owners who have seen six figure revenue websites and their entire livelihoods evaporate overnight, largely because they didn’t take Panda seriously.

If your site is guilty of transgressions that might provoke the Panda and you haven’t been hit yet, consider yourself lucky. But understand that it’s only a matter of time before you do get mauled. No doubt about it: Panda is coming for you.

Over the past year, we’ve helped a number of site owners recover from Panda. We’ve also worked with existing clients to Panda-proof their websites and (knock on wood) haven’t had a single site fall victim to Panda.

Based on that what we’ve learned saving and securing sites, I’ve pulled together a list of steps and actions to help site owners Panda-proof websites that may be at risk.

Step 1: Purge Duplicate Content

Duplicate content issues have always plagued websites and SEOs. But with Panda, Google has taken a dramatically different approach to how they view and treat sites with high degrees of duplicate content. Where dupe content issues pre-Panda might hurt a particular piece of content, now duplicate content will sink an entire website.

So with that shift in attitude, site owners need to take duplicate content seriously. You must be hawkish about cleaning up duplicate content issues to Panda-proof your site.

Screaming Frog is a good choice when you want to identify duplicate pages. This article by Ben Goodsell offers a great tutorial on locating duplicate content issues.

Some suggestions for fixing dupe content issues include:

• Meta directives (e.g. noindex, follow).
• Canonical tags (rel=“canonical”).
• 301 redirects.
• Block pages via Robots.txt file.
• Remove URLs via Webmaster Tools.
• Choose your preferred domain in Webmaster Tools.

Now, cleaning up existing duplicate content issues is critical. But it’s just as important to take a preventative measures as well. This means, addressing the root cause of your duplicate content issues before they end up in the index. Yoast offers some great suggestions on how to avoid duplicate content issues altogether.

Step 2: Eradicate Low Quality, Low Value Content

Google’s objective with Panda is to help users find “high-quality” sites by diminishing the visibility (ranking power) of low-quality content, all of which is accomplished at scale, algorithmically. So weeding out low value content should be mission critical for site owners.

But the million dollar question we hear all the time is “what constitutes ‘low quality’ content?”

Google offered guidance on how to asses page-level quality, which is useful to help guide your editorial roadmap. But what about sites that host hundreds or thousands of pages, where evaluating every page by hand isn’t even remotely practical or cost-effective?

A much more realistic approach for larger sites is to look at user engagement signals that Google is potentially using to identify low-quality content. These would include key behavioral metrics such as:

• Low to no visits.
• Anemic unique page views.
• Short time on page.
• High bounce rates.

Of course, these metrics can be somewhat noisy and susceptible to external factors, but they’re the most efficient way to sniff-out out low value content at scale.

Some ways you can deal with these low value and poor performing pages include:

• Deleting any content with low to no user engagement signals.
• Consolidating the content of thin or shallow pages into thicker, more useful documents (i.e., “purge and merge).”
• Adding additional internal links to improve visitor engagement (and deeper indexation). Tip: make sure these internal links point to high-quality content on your site.

One additional type of low quality content that often gets overlooked is pagination. Proper pagination is highly effective at distributing link equity throughout your site. But high ratios of paginated archives, comments and tag pages can also dilute your site’s crawl budget, cause indexation cap issues and negatively tip the scales of high-to low-value content ratios on your site.

Tips for Panda-proofing pagination include:

• “No index, follow” paginated pages.
• Tag paginated content with “rel=prev” and “rel=next” to indicate documents in a sequence.

Step 3: Thicken-Up Thin Content

Google hates thin content. And this disdain isn’t reserved for spammy scraper sites or thin affiliates only. It’s also directed at sites with little or no original content (i.e., another form of “low value” content).

One of the riskiest content types we see frequently on client sites are thin directory-style pages. These are aggregate feed pages you’d find on ecommerce product pages (both page level and category level); sites with city, state and ZIP code directory type pages (think hotel and travel sites); and event location listings (think ticket brokers). And many sites host thousands of these page types, which other than a big list of hyperlinks have zero-to-no content.

Unlike other low-value content traps, these directory pages are often instrumental in site usability and helping users navigate to deeper content. So deleting them or merging them isn’t an option.

Instead, the best strategy here is to thicken up these thin directory pages with original content. Some recommendations include:

• Drop a thousand words of original, value-add content on the page in an effort to treat each page as a comprehensive guide on a specific topic.
• Pipe in API data and content mash-ups (excellent when you need to thicken hundreds or thousands of pages at scale).
• Encourage user reviews.
• Add images and videos.
• Move thin pages off to subdomains, which Google hints at. Though we use this is as more of a “stop gap” approach for sites that have been mauled by Panda and are trying to rebound quickly, rather than a long-term, sustainable strategy.

It’s worth noting that these recommendations can be applied to most types of thin content pages. I’m just using directory style pages as an example because we see them so often.

When it comes to discovering thin content issues at scale, take a look at word count. If you’re running WordPress, there are a couple of plugins you can use to asses word count for every document on your site:

• WP Word Count
• Admin Word Count Column

As well, here are some all-purpose plugin recommendations to help in the war against Panda.

All in all, we’re seeing documents that have been thickened up get a nice boost in rankings and SERP visibility. And this isn’t boost isn’t a temporal QDF bump. In the majority of cases, when thickening up thin pages, we’re seeing permanent ranking improvements over competitor pages.

Step 4: Develop High-Quality Content

On the flipside of fixing low or no-value content issues, you must adopt an approach of only publishing the highest quality content on your site. For many sites, this is a total shift in mindset, but nonetheless raising your content publishing standards is essential to Panda-proofing your site.

Google describes “quality content” as “content that you can send to your child to learn something.” Which is a little vague but to me it says two distinct things:

• Your content should be highly informative.
• Your content should easy to understand (easy enough that a child can comprehend it).

For a really in-depth look at “What Google Considers Quality Content,” check out Brian Ussery’s excellent analysis.

When publishing content on our own sites, we ask ourselves a few simple quality control questions:

• Does this content offer value?
• Is this content you would share with others?
• Would you link to this content as an informative resource?

If a piece of content doesn’t meet these basic criteria, we work to improve it until it does.

Now, when it comes to publishing quality content, many site owners don’t have the good fortune of having industry experts in house and internal writing resources at their disposal. In those cases, you should consider outsourcing your content generation to the pros.

Some of the most effective ways we use to find professional, authoritative authors include:

• Placing an ad on Craigslist and conduct a “competition.” Despite what the critics say, this method works really and you can find some excellent, cost-effective talent.  “How to Find Quality Freelance Authors on Craigslist” will walk you through the process.
• Reaching out to influential writers in your niche with columns on high profile pubs. Most of these folks do freelance work and are eager to take on new projects. You can find these folks with search operators like [intitle:“your product nice” intext:“meet our bloggers”] or [intitle:“your product nice” intext: “meet our authors”] since many blogs publish an author’s profile page.
• Targeting published authors on Amazon.com is a fantastic way to find influential authors who have experience writing on topics in your niche.

Apart from addressing writing resource deficiencies, the advantages of hiring topic experts or published authors include:

• Authoritative authors raise the perceived value of your content.
• You can leverage authorship credentials on Google+.
• Author profiles display in the SERP snippets, and can improve CTR and help users find great content.
• AuthorRank! It may not be a ranking signal just yet, but it will be.
• Authorship engagement and satisfaction which may contribute to AuthorRank.
• Higher engagement levels lead to longer clicks vs the short clicks. And I have to assume “time on page/site” is a signal Google pays attention to.

Finally, I wanted to address the issue of frequency and publishing quality content. Ask yourself this: are you publishing content everyday on your blog, sometimes twice a day? If so, ask yourself “why?”

Is it because you read on a popular marketing blog that cranking out blog posts each and every day is a good way to target trending topics and popular terms, and flood the index with content that will rank in hundreds of relevant mid-tail verticals?

If this is your approach, you might want to rethink it. In fact, I’d argue that 90 percent of sites that use this strategy should slow down and publish better, longer, meatier content less frequently.

In a race to “publish every day!!!” you’re potentially polluting the SERPs with quick, thin, low value posts and dragging down the overall quality score of your entire site. So if you fall into this camp, definitely stop and think about your approach. Test the efficacy of fewer, thicker posts vs short-form “keyword chasing” articles.

Panda-Proofing Wrap Up

Bottom line: get your site in-shape before it’s too late. Why risk being susceptible to every Panda update, when Armageddon is entirely avoidable.

The SEO and affiliate forums are littered with site owners who continue to practice the same low value tactics in spite of the clear dangers because they were cheap and they worked. But look at those sites now. Don’t make the same mistake.