Spring is here, and so is the latest edition of the SEO Chat newsletter. I don't know about you, but spring always makes me want to get busy with decluttering, cleaning stuff, coming up with new ideas and generally being creative. Have you ever noticed how many creative and idea-driven people like to work with Apple computers? And have you also noticed how smug they get because they're convinced their systems are pretty much immune to the threats circulating on the Internet? Well, if you know someone like that and as an SEO or site owner I'm sure you do you might want to hook them up with the article we're highlighting this week from eWeek. Yes, even Macs can end up as part of a botnet. Click the link for the details; forewarned is forearmed.

But on to more cheerful topics, like the articles we've published for you this week. If you've decided that you don't have the time to devote to SEO and want to hire an individual or a company to do it for you, you'll want to check out Monday's item on buying SEO services. There's a lot to consider, especially with all of the fly-by-night SEO shops that exist. If you're the kind who likes to roll up your sleeves and do the work yourself, Wednesday's article may appeal to you; it discusses a tool that can help you with your links. And if you're looking for a way to try out blogging by easing into it painlessly, check out Tuesday's review of Tokoni. This hybrid site is specifically aimed at the casual blogger who doesn't want to learn a complicated new interface.

We've been covering duplicate content a lot over the past few weeks, in part because there's a lot more to it than you'd think. This week's thread ponders the question of how sensitive search engines are to whether certain content duplicates other content. Can you get away with just re-ordering a list? If not, how much work do you have to do? Scroll down to find out, and be sure to stop by the thread and add your two cents!

You can also find useful information about content in Tutorialized. We have tens of SEO-related tutorials contributed by our visitors; content-related topics include how to hire a content writer, how to create content, and more. You'll also find items on choosing keywords, optimizing for particular search engines, building links, and just about anything that concerns SEO. We cover other technology-related topics on Tutorialized as well, so do check it out!

Our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, should be of interest to anyone worried about their bounce rate. Do your visitors seem to not be interested in what your site has to offer? Maybe you're doing something to scare them away. Want a partial list of pet peeves you can check to make sure you're not forcing anyone to reach for the eye bleach? Scroll down to the Spotlight, and don't think for a minute it's complete; there wasn't enough room for everything, but this should be enough to get you started.

As always, thanks for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

• News of the Weird gets a guest appearance by Dev Shed Hulk. It is a smashing good time.
• Juan Valdezburg is the most interesting lawyer alive. Here's hoping we do not get sued.
• Reverend Bitwise returns with proof that Tech God exists and that gamer nerds are not the only ones that drink Code Red Mountain Dew.

Watch the video!

Xenu Sleuth is one of the most important open source tools in web development and search engine optimization. Xenu Sleuth performs the task of crawling and checking links in a domain, just as other bots such as Googlebot and Yahoo! Slurp do. This article explains how to use Xenu Sleuth to improve the external or outgoing links on your web site.

Xenu Sleuth is free and can be downloaded here. However, this is a tutorial focusing on Xenu Link Sleuth 1.2j. I believe that the developers released a more recent version. If this is the case, please find a link in their site to download the recommended (older) version.

External links are the types of links in a website that go out to other domains. Search engine rankings in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN give importance to the quality and relevance of external links in your website.

Read Using Xenu Link Sleuth to Spot and Improve External Links in a Domain

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Consider the bar raised

Tokoni Takes Storytelling in New Direction
by Terri Wells
2009-04-21

Tokoni came out of a year-long beta in October 2008, and favorably impressed a number of reviewers with its approach. An interesting hybrid of social networking, blogging, and community, the site has been compared to Gather and Associated Content. It's a place for telling stories, so what story does it have to tell?

Tokoni is backed by former eBay executive Mary Lou Song and former Skype president Alex Kazim, who serves as the company's CEO. Indeed, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and eBay itself made investments in the hybrid web community. Why would employees of an auction site, and even the site itself, be interested in this kind of business? To hear Kazim tell it, it comes down to glass ducks.

There is a story behind the glass ducks, of course - of a special gift given to a daughter, of losing everything in a fire, of seeing the exact same type of ducks again on eBay selling for a little too much money, of a deal worked out with the seller to buy one duck at a time - and then getting the ducks in the mail all at once, because those in the community who heard the story were so touched that they bought the ducks for the community member. Kazim and others realized that eBay, by the nature of its market, is full of such stories, but it isn't the best place for them.

Read Tokoni Takes Storytelling in New Direction

Buying Search Engine Optimization Services
by Ivan Strouchliak
2009-04-20

This article will help you buy search engine optimization services if you do not want to learn SEO on your own. It will explain what to look for in an SEO company, what you can expect to pay for good work, and what kinds of questions you should ask about their practices.

What are you after? Business growth, profits or rankings? Search engine marketing is one of the most, if not the most, effective form of marketing, but you have to deliver the goods. As effective as SEO is, it won't help you if the business model is wrong. We had clients with ugly sites that trigger an "I'm outta here response" with no original or decent business model, yet they hoped SEO would do magic. Search engine optimization will make a good business even better, but it won't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Examples of bad business models:

Making a generic site and throwing onto it a bunch of affiliate links and AdSense.

Being clone number 1,000,001 in a competitive niche. There are a lot of opportunities in competitive fields; you just have to provide bigger perks, better offers and generally do everything better than your competition. Don't be a clone.

Making a site identical to other sites, with no promotion other than SEO in hopes of making it big.

Read Buying Search Engine Optimization Services

Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other
tech related tutorials.

How Can I Boost My Google Rankings?
A guide to improving your rankings in Google.
Read the tutorial.

Learn Techniques Required for Creating Content
WordPress business blog from average to extraordinary.
Read the tutorial.

Submitting your URL to Search Engines
Choose SEO quality over quantity with this submission tutorial.
Read the tutorial.

How To Hire a Content Writer
Learn how to effectively choose and hire a content writer for you website copy needs.
Read the tutorial.

What Do Search Engines Want and How Do They Rank?
Positively communicate with search engines.
Read the tutorial.

How to Get Ahead In Your Niche with RSS!
How to get ahead in your niche with RSS!
Read the tutorial.

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Here's a slightly different twist on the duplicate content issue: how different do two items of content have to be before the search engines decide it's NOT duplicate? Check out the answer in this week's thread, and be sure to join the conversation.

Duplicate Content Question

Hi everyone, quick question.

If I were to publish content to one page and then published the same content in let's say reverse order, is it still considered duplicate content? For example, one post has a top 5 _____
1. item a
2. item b
3. item c
4. item d
5. item e

Now is the following post about the same top 5 ___ considered duplicate content to search engines? How "different" does a page have to be to be not considered duplicate content?

1. item e
2. item d
3. item c
4. item b
5. item a

Thanks for the help and suggestions!

Regardless of whether it's duplicate content, how could this be useful for any purpose?

And it would really depend upon everything else on the page. Does the page look the exact same otherwise? Any other text?

We sell about six different products that come in about 40 different styles. These were being sold on 40 different pages, each page listing the six products. For example...

Page A: Wooden Widgets
===================
red wooden widgets
blue wooden widgets
green wooden widgets
yellow wooden widgets
pink wooden widgets
orange wooden widgets

Page B: Brass Widgets
===================
red brass widgets
blue brass widgets
green brass widgets
yellow brass widgets
pink brass widgets
orange brass widgets

On these pages we had unique descriptions for each of the colors but those same descriptions were repeated on all 40 of the pages just changing Wooden to Brass to Steel to Plastic.

These pages were dynamite until a few years ago when most of the pages were filtered from the search results. The remaining pages ranked well but lots of pages were AWOL. We shuffled the order of the colors from page to page and that brought back lots of the pages but still lots were missing.

We finally did a rewrite and now they are dynamite again. Lots of really boring work to rewrite all of those as unique. Multiply to see how much boring work that was.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

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Don't Scare Your Visitors Away!

You'd be surprised at the good advice you can get from following signature links in forums. One sig link I followed in the SEO Chat forums led, not surprisingly, to an SEO blog with some excellent advice on how to reduce your bounce rate. A bounce, as you know, is when a visitor looks at just one page in your site, and then clicks away. How do you fix this problem?

The first step is approaching it from the right direction. You probably have a high bounce rate because you're not engaging your visitors. So you need to think about ways to make your web site more engaging. You don't need fancy animations and lots of bells and whistles to do that; indeed, those might actually scare your visitors away by overwhelming them. Instead, think about your web site's impression when a visitor lands on it.

Do they have to struggle to find what they want? Nobody wants to scroll down forever to get the information they're looking for, and nobody wants to scroll sideways for anything. Set up your navigation so that users can see right away where they need to go; whether you use navigation on the top or the left (or some combination), consider putting the link to the Contact Us and About Us pages in a prominent enough position so that they're impossible to miss.

Think about the colors you're using. If the colors for the text and background don't contrast strongly, your visitors will go blind before they buy something from you. Seriously, you want the words to stand out from the background. Also, make sure that the colors you're using are appropriate to the audience you're trying to reach. Don't use pink or purple if you're trying to sell to straight men, for example. Don't use a black background if you're trying to project a trustworthy image.

How long does it take your web pages to load? Nobody has time to waste anymore; even if you think you can ignore the folks who still have a slow Internet connection, what about all those people who shop online during their lunch break at work? Do you think they're going to wait for your site to load, or click elsewhere?

Sad as this may sound, there are tons of other things that can scare a visitor away too; you may not be able to correct for all of them, but many of them are well within your control. You just have to put yourself in your visitors' shoes. You may also want to have your friends and family review the site; since everyone has different pet peeves, this may turn up problems you may not have thought of on your own, but which may cause a significant part of your targeted audience to run the other way. Good luck!