Do you syndicate your content? You could be weakening your SEO

It's flattering when a website wants to repost your content via a syndicate arrangement. As an early website or blog, you may want to syndicate out your content in an attempt to increase exposure.

As a person with SEO awareness, I've never wanted to syndicate my content because I figured that if my blog had an article, I wanted to build links to it at my blog, thereby strengthening my link power for my blog as a whole, and that post in particular. If I posted my content on another blog or website, and people linked to it, then those links do not help my website. My name gets out there, but really, in the online world, you need to have a heavy hitter website or blog in order to have traffic and influence on the web.

That said. Someone in a forum shared a link with me on Google's approach to duplicate content and syndicated articles. It validated my gut instinct of not giving away content since you are essentially competing against yourself. From Google:

"Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt."

If you are going to syndicate, you could and should seek out a link from the website who is reposting your article, and most likely, they will not want to block that content from being indexed because they are using your content to create more content on their own websites - without writing it themselves. Therefore, you could consider compromising by allowing them to publish an abstract of your article, with a link to your website or blog to get the rest of the article. Good luck!

What an Alt Tag/Attribute and Link Love Can Do for a Temporary Home Page

So by the way, I'm starting a new company with two power houses in the women's entrepreneurial world (official announcement to come). And in doing so, we are building a mega website with lots of fun function for promoting your business. The purpose of today's post, however, is to demonstrate how a brand new URL with very little content and a lot of secrecy is already ranking Page 1 #2 of Google for the company name in as little as 6 days (could be less, this is just when I checked) without submitting to any directories or sending any requests to link to other websites.

Step 1: Buy the domain. Duh.

Step 2: While you build the core of your website, put up a temporary home page. But don't put up a giant image with your company logo and text saved in Photoshop or something. Go the extra mile and make the individual images that are not text, like your logo, and create content to go onto your page. Pay the programmer extra to do this for you. It's worth it. Google and other search engines will be able to start crawling what text, links and images you do have on there.

Step 3. If you have images, you have the opportunity to fill in the "alt attribute" sometimes known as the "alt tag". This tells blind people what image is appearing if they can't see it (it's spoken to them). Or if a person has images turned off on their Internet in order to load pages faster (aka not sucking down images), they can read what image would have been there. These alt attributes are considered by Google, so if you can, and if it makes sense to what the image actually is, include your keywords in these alt attributes.

Here is a screenshot of how my search term "collective e" is finding the keywords on the web page:


This picture shows how the search results are displaying the copy on the page. In bold, in the search results, Collective E is displayed. But as you see here in the picture, circled red, Collective-E is an image of a swirly font. Therefore, it is not actual text. To put "alternative" text there, for computers to read, we inserted "Collective E". It is that alt="Collective E" that is seamlessly being displayed in the search results.

Step 4: Find reasons to put links on your temporary home page. Gives search engines more to travel through on your site, and one more reason why you might look like a worthwhile and helpful website.

Step 5: If you have a blog, link to your new website from your blog on your side panel, like I did.

Step 6: Start Tweeting about your new website at Twitter.com to your friends, and include the URL in the tweet. Try to use the actual URL instead of a TinyURL, just for ultimate impact's sake. Google is returning tiny Tweets in its search results, so make sure you're lookin' good!

Step 7: Find a reason to blog about your new company, and include the company name, Collective-E, in the blog post. And link to it (as shown).

You are well on your way to building a solid foundation for a well optimized site. When you do launch, your content will be searched all the quicker by the mack daddy search engines. Just think - you haven't even built the Facebook Page for it yet (a Facebook Page is a public access page that search engines index), or added it as a Company or a Group in LinkedIn!