I just love when my readers send me cool stuff to check out! This one comes from Garry Egan (sorry, he didn’t give me a URL to link to) and it’s a great tool for checking if anyone’s ripping your articles without your permission or giving you credit. It’s called Article Checker.

You can check simply by entering your URL (or the URL of the article) or by copying and pasting the text from the article into a search box. The thing I like is that it grabs your content in sentences or sections and checks against that, so if you’re wondering if someone’s ripping even partial content, you can find out this way.

The only thing I don’t see is a way to FIND the duplicated content elsewhere. Am I missing something?

Note: I’ve disabled comments on this post because people who can’t read are using it to submit their piece to check for plagiarism… *sigh*. I’m tired of deleting them - one woman called me from China ELEVEN TIMES to ask me to remove her piece.

If you have something to say on this subject, please contact me and I’ll post it for you.

Popularity: 82% [?]

Just a quick post to direct you all to something Rand (SEOMoz) laid out more explicitly than I’ve seen before. I’ve tried to explain this to people over the past few years, and it’s quite difficult sometimes to do without graphical support. It’s now been taken care of, and this post of his will sit high in my list of resources to use when explaining the “right” way to develop a linking plan.

The premise of “The Rising Tide Lifts All Ships” is that it “pays” to have your incoming links pointing to relevant, internal pages of your site, and not just all pointing to your top level domain (www.yoursite.com). In the same breath, he explains why it’s better to have just one top level domain, and not 5 of them for 5 different “parts” of your company.

Example: I see a lot of companies doing this by having one site for their “company info” and one separate domain for a company blog, or if a company’s specialties are blue widgets, green widgets, and red widgets, they’ll have separate “dot coms” for each division. This has even happened with companies like Anubis Marketing (though Anubis isn’t one of the companies to have done this), having one domain for design, another for SEO/Marketing, and still another for a blog. Not a good move.

So there you have it. Go now, and revamp your linking plans, your site structures, and your train of thought. Call us if you need help.

Popularity: 12% [?]

This is a question I get all the time: What does adding functionality to a web site mean?

Basically the conversation gets to this point when I start talking to people about how their sites need to be designed for their visitors, and not for the search engines or for rankings or what have you. Adding functionality to your site means that you’re giving it ease of usability and helping your visitors perform the tasks they’ve set out to perform when visiting your site. Regardless of what those tasks are.

For example: Your site is optimized for the phrase “blue widgets” because that’s one of your company’s most popular products. So when a visitor comes to your site after searching for “blue widgets”, they’re clearly looking for one of two things: a) They’re looking to buy blue widgets, or b) They’re looking for more information about blue widgets.

Adding functionality to the web site would mean to do some or all of the following:

• The first thing you need to do is make sure that you have a page for selling blue widgets (via a shopping cart system - if you’re not donig this yet, stop right now and get on it!), and a few pages about blue widgets. What do they do? Why are they better (or worse) than green widgets? Etcetera.
• Have a good navigation system. The functionality comes in when you provide links to all of these information pages from your sales page, AND from each other. Make the links stand out by putting them under a “Related information:” type header.
• Give your site visitors the chance to do a search for “blue widgets” from YOUR site. Give them the option of either searching just your site, or searching the web. More on Adding Search Functionality to Your Web Site.
• Allow your site visitors to share their stories about their experiences, or ask questions about blue widgets right on your site. This can best be achieved by either offering a “comments” section on your articles, or at the very least, asking for feedback and offering a contact form where they can submit their responses directly to you. Or both!
• Depending on your site’s back end, it can be very simple and easy to add photos in a unique way and further intrique and catch the interest of your site visitors. People want to see what they’re buying, and they want to see it in action. Create slideshows and not just thumbnails, and your visitors might just find themselves surfing your site’s other products just to see the pictures!
• Polls. Contests. Giveaways. Be it the color of your next big widget or just what else they’d like to see on the web site. People LOVE to give their input, as much as they love the chance to get something for free, so any way you can give them this opportunity, they’ll take it.
• Create a section of your site for “members only” access. Include “premium” articles, discount offers, and so on. This not only provides your users with a feeling of being important to you, but it also allows you to collect email addresses from people who are clearly interested in your company’s offerings, for sending newsletters or special announcements later on.
• Offer real time industry news feeds, live on your site. Again, people are coming to you seeking information - the more you give, the more they’ll remember you, and the higher the chance they’ll come back.

This list is by no means exhaustive. But the bottom line is that “brochure sites” are just a huge waste of time and resources these days. They bore people, and they don’t ever stand out to give the visitor any reason on Earth to remember you or come back. Gone are the days of simple one- or three-pages sites just to say “Hey, here we are.” Web sites like that have long fallen by the wayside, and have absolutely no hopes of ever coming back, thank goodness!

Popularity: 65% [?]

The official announcement hasn’t been made yet, but there’s been some chatter that it’s uber important to upgrade to 2.1.2 if you’re currently using 2.1.1 - My guess would be it’s a security issue, so get to doing that upgrade!

You can download the latest version of WordPress 2.1.2 here. Upgrade and installation instructions can also be found on the WordPress site.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Finally - someone did a little Q&A research on this topic! Darren over at Problogger asked his readers, “What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?” and after over 100 responses, tallied everything up in a post titled, “34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog“.

The top three reasons?

1. Too many posts. (This is one of my personal pet peeves as well.) When you’re posting more than once or twice a day, you’re overloading your readers. I’ve unsubscribed from several sites’ feeds for this very reason. The whole point in using RSS feeds is so that you can get everything you want to get in one place, to cut time. When half my reader’s full of only one site - I get a little annoyed and wind up deleting them all without reading them. Eventually, I just unsub.
2. Infrequent posting. Wow, okay… so you either post too much or not enough and you’re going to lose readers. I tend to disagree with this one a little, only because if a user’s not posting, then my feed reader isn’t getting clogged by them, so why not keep on for a while? No, I’m not saying for six months or more… but there is real life beyond the computer screen (gasp!) and sometimes people just have things that grasp higher priority levels than others. It doesn’t mean they won’t come back, and it doesn’t mean they’re a “bad blogger”.

   My number two reason is a little different… I just can’t stand it when a “business blog” gets too personal, or a personal blog gets too whiny, boring, or repetitive. When a blog changes focus, be it positive or negative, it changes the whole reason I subscribed in the first place.

3. Partial excerpts feeds. Ah yes! The debate rolls on! But it’s quite clear that offering full feeds is likely to keep readers moreso than only partials, forcing the reader to click through to your site to get the whole story. (One person mentioned that they had to click through an ad to get to the story!) The bottom line is that people use feed readers to get through their news and stories all in one place. By forcing them to come to your site, you’re defeating the purpose of offering feeds at all.

   I totally agree with this one. Think about why you’re trying to get them to come to your site. Is it so that maybe they’ll click on your ads? Or is it because you want them to see what else you have to offer? Either way, with the advent of “feedvertising”, you can send ads for yourself or any other site you want with your feeds. Check out Text Link Ads, where you can use feedvertising to include your own ads, affiliate links, or allow others to buy links in your feeds.

So there you have it. If you’re doing any of these things - knock it off! Well, at least if you want to keep your feed readership (and possibly those people who have “bookmarked” your site).

Popularity: 10% [?]