What we have noticed with SEO over the past 12 months is that receiving one way incoming links are becoming increasingly difficult. We can get links from social media profiles and links from other blogs but unless we are creating quality content, the social media profiles are useless. Added to that, no blogger will want you to contribute to their blog if you aren’t providing value to their readers. Identifying competitor links and unpacking their link graph is crucial to take advantage of your written content but with no strategy and competition analysis in place, your content will not be fully taken advantage of.

The goal for every Company is to be the leader within their respective industry, to do this though company websites need to be conscious of the fact that Google loves fresh original content. To be seen as a leader within your industry you need to be creating your own content and doing your own research. When you provide your readers with high quality research and stats it is bound to gain momentum and receive a few incoming links which will strengthen your blog as a whole.

If you are using WordPress as your content management system for your blog, here is a really cool plugin which creates a news sitemap for you. Download Google News Sitemap Generator.

This is how the Google News Sitemap Generator will generate your post:

<url>
<loc>

http://www.webgrowth.biz/googler-gives-tips-on-news-search/

</loc>
<news:news>
<news:publication_date>2009-09-03T12:29:20Z</news:publication_date>
<news:keywords>
Google Optimisation, Copywriting, Google Optimisation, Copywriting, Google News
</news:keywords>
</news:news>
</url>

Note the publication date <news:publication_date>, this is important for Google to understand what time it was generated. The Keywords <news:keywords> will be used by Google to understand which categories it should insert the news article into.

At the SMX Sydney conference in Australia at the beginning of April, search engineers Priyank Garg & Greg Grothaus (of Yahoo! & Google, respectively) shared information about duplicate content filtering across domains of which many industry experts are not aware of.

They said that if you have multiple content shared across ccTLD domains then Google and Yahoo algorithms are intelligent enough to pick up that it is from the same company.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz created a cool image which will be easier to understand.

So if your company does business in locations throughout the world then it would be a good idea to buy domains targeting specific locations i.e. company.com; company.co.uk; company.de etc. The one downfall I have with this however is that search engines place an enormous amount of value on authoritative domains and domain age so this will negatively impact the domain in the short-run. In saying that though it still will be good practise because 5 years down the line you will regret buying the domains needed to expand your business globally.

As an example webgrowth.biz gets significant traffic from Google South Africa searches (geo-located in Google Webmaster Tools) but if I added my .biz content to webgrowth.co.za via a shared database  (currently 301 redirected to webgrowth.biz)  my rankings/traffic may decrease because my.biz domain has more authority compared to my .co.za domain.

Again, in the short term it may affect my rankings but long term it will help my business grow globally… It’s an opportunity cost I recommend taking!

As always, any input on this highly debated subject is welcome.

Next time you write content for your website or blog ask yourself if it is something that will create discussion and is worth linking back to.  Get yourself into the readers shoes and focus on what your niche is looking for…

One of the more accomplished writers is Brian Clark of Copyblogger.com.  I recommend subscribing to his blog, he always has great tips and techniques up his sleeve.