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So, you know I wrote about the cuts in Google’s page rank and how it was hitting people who’d bought in links and were feeling the pain of Google’s ethical stance? Well now I’m not so sure.

Yesterday, Barablu — my latest SEO project — felt the sting of demotion too. Its page rank fell one point, from 5 to 4.

Yet (as far as I can see) Barablu has NEVER in the past operated any dodgy practices, especially link buying: I wish the same could be said for the competition. No, the loss of a PR point in this case at least must be more than a Google moral backlash.

As usual, Google are keeping tight-lipped about the reasons behind the recent PR massacre and to be sure there are many sites around who’ve suffered more than Barablu. Yet, what makes this whole adjustment even more puzzling for me is that I know for a fact that sites which don’t exist are maintaining their page rank!

Now I’m not talking about some dodgy blackhat technique: the site in question — which I shouldn’t name for confidentiality reasons — ceased operations back in July because the owner couldn’t afford (or couldn’t be bothered) to pay his site dues. It was duly decommissioned and all the pages deleted; if you go there now you get the usual 404 errors.

However, if you search Google for the site right now you’ll be told that it has 41 pages and a PR of 4, albeit with no backlinks! As they say, go figure!

Go Tell The Marines!

In truth, Barablu’s real problem is years of unwitting, benign neglect. It was first in its field — making free calls using a mobile phone — and it still out-features the competition but it languishes in the lower reaches of the search engine rankings on almost all of its keyword phrases because, until now, no-one ever said anything. A recent comment on an Italian blog summed it up: “Even if Barablu is not very visible — not advertised properly — the software offers some interesting services you should try.”

As I write, I’m waiting to unleash a new Barablu website on an unsuspecting world, but for now all I can practically do is to encourage everyone here that I can to blog their socks off about Barablu and its associated technological fields via the Barablu Blog (catchy name, don’t cha think!).

For you see, as I think I’ve been saying for a while now, Content is King! And even with the meagre resources at hand right now, Barablu’s SEO is actually improving. See you at the top … .

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Surfing websites like I do all the time, I’ve become very good at spotting those which have been crudely SEO’ed to within an inch of reason. It’s very easy to get sucked in by the great Nirvana of good Keyword Density.

Time and again, you find tiny passages of content crammed with so many keywords in such a small space that they become almost unreadable. They have been optimised to be picked up by the Google Bots and the Yahoo! Slurps but for the end-user — the humble surfer wanting to find answers to questions and possibly buy your services — they can be practically useless.

As one part of my quest for good web content, I’ve written a tool which you can use to show how much you’re repeating yourself. Keywords aside, you should be aiming at variety in the way you express yourself.

The long answer is that keyword density is just one part of the picture. A well optimised website pays as much attention to density of content, back-links etc.

A friend pointed me to this tool which does some calculations to give an overview of how well the site works with search engines against others. One of the outputs is a comparison radar graph. What you want to see is a weird big space-hogging pentagon; anything less and your site is not what it could be.

If your site shows this big pentagon, then you’re obviously not obsessed with keyword densities. Good for you!

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People often say: “There’s no point in me writing content, I can’t write.” Yet, paradoxically, these same individuals are often the most fluent people I’ve ever met, especially when it comes to their specialist subject.

I’ve recently been advising a mate on ways to increase his site traffic and suggested a blog. “I’m not sure how interested people will be,” he said. “I’ve never read a blog nor has anyone mentioned one to me but I do often see a small surge in sales when the site gets talked about on forums.”

I told him the best blogs were those with real opinions and real information. And it didn’t need to be groundbreaking content either: one of the web’s biggest problems is that most of us don’t have the time (or the inclination) to wade through the waffle to find the nuggets of fact.

So here is some handy advice for would-be content writers

Write From The Heart

Use the sort of words you’d say to a friend who shared your passion but beware of jargon in content

Keep It Short

Write it in 250 words or less: any shorter and your reader will think: “Why did he bother?” Any longer and he’ll ask himself: “Can I be bothered?” .

Keep It Relevant

If your chosen keyword density is less than 3%, consider writing another posting.

Don’t Be Afraid to be an Explainer

If content can be better put, put it. Stephen Hawking wrote a guide to his A Brief History of Time because he realised it went over the heads of most people.

Don’t Be An Impulsive Publisher

After you’re written what you’ve written, read it again – TWICE. And give yourself a break in between, you’ll be surprised how many content errors will reveal themselves after a short rest.

Practice Really Does Make Perfect

Even Shakespeare started somewhere. Writing — like sex — gets better the more you practice IF you’re willing to be self-critical. Allow your writing to be less than perfect from the start.

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Everyone likes good publicity: just look at the film posters quoting reviews of the movie. Of course, these can be misleading. A recent blurb for the TV movie The Girl in the Café quoted The Oregonian newspaper:

“An endearing romantic comedy.”

However, what The Oregonian actually said was:

“This new offering from HBO Films is at its heart a bit of political propaganda wrapped into an endearing romantic comedy that starts losing its laughs when it gets to Reykjavik and decides its teachable moment has arrived.”

You can see more of these at Gelf Magazine.

A company like the one I work for doesn’t need to be so economical with the actualité: these days Regus is well used to good news stories so one of the content ideas I’ve been examining is a gallery of what professional news organisations say about Regus, a sort of online scrapbook.

Of course content usually comes with a price, and as Regus discovered recently with a CNBC video clip of or CEO, Mark Dixon, simply linking to a video or article is not enough to guarantee of page views and good-linking SEO. Within hours of linking to the clip on CNBC, they imposed a subscription-only tag. There’s nothing suspicious here: in a charged-content model, content is usually free for a set period before the curtain comes down.

News providers like magazines, newspapers and broadcast media have been arguing for years about charging for content (news agencies like Reuters and the Press Association survive by charging for content, but their main customers are the aforesaid magazines, newspapers and broadcast media). Yet because the enduring ethos of the Internet is still “everything is free”, it’s been very difficult to get drive-by surfers to pay for anything. Some have tried. Most have failed. My former employers, TIME magazine, charged for content from their printed magazine for four years and made a profit — the only part of the operation that did!! — but when their sister site AOL decided to open up their content to everyone, TIME decided to drop the “curtain” — and still made a profit!

Incidentally, TIME used to charge for magazine content seven days after it hit the newsstands on the basis that people would pay for a magazine online which they couldn’t buy on the streets. The exception to this rule was religious stories — which they charged for immediately: religious feeling as it is in the U.S., readers would pay for that content at any time. Religious stories were the big money earners!

The experience at Regus is that a “What They Say About Us” page runs into the buffers because some of the content linked to will be off limits to non-payers (or at least non-subscribers), and to ensure that dead links are kept to a minimum — an absolute must for SEO — requires a high-maintenance solution: checking all links all the time.

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