Controlling Data & Helping Consumers Make it Smarter

Part 4 of my recent ongoing article...

Dynamic Site Advantages:

If you use a weblog or any other type of dynamic site, as content ages you create a large quantity of pages which can rank for a variety of terms in many engines. The site archive systems mean that posts not only get their own pages, but can also be organized by date and category. This creates what is considered to be legitimate keyword driftnet content bank.

People can also subscribe to the feeds to remind themselves when to come back and read your new information. Many people who read feeds also write sites with feeds, and can provide you with additional link popularity and another channel to acquire readers from.

Most people who subscribe to what you have to say will usually be people who agree with many of your points. This means that when they talk about you or mention your site you are:

• likely to be presented to additional like minded people with similar biases to your own
• in a positive manner
• from a voice readers likely trust.

If people disagree with you and still subscribe to your feed then there is a great chance they will frequently want to say how wrong you are, maybe even linking through to your site.

Ultra Targeted Content:

Not all ideas need a whole article to explain. By publishing your thoughts with one topic per post it makes it easier for you to refer back to your own content in the future. It also makes it easier for others to point at / link to / reference it.

Ultra targeted content will also stand a good chance of ranking high for it's keyword theme since it is so well targeted.

Consumer Feedback & Product Catalogs:

For a long time creating pages by keyword phrase permutation was a functional SEO strategy, but Google does not want to display hollow product databases in their regular search results. Creating industrial strength spam works well for some, but as time passes the hollow databases need to get better at remixing sources and integrating user data.

If there is commercial value for a term Google believes Froogle & AdWords work well. It seems to be almost a yearly process that Google dials up the rankings on authority sites right around the Christmas shopping season. This forces merchants to need to buy in to the vertical shopping sites, buy AdWords, or spend Christmas out in the cold.

Allowing user feedback and interaction makes your content more original than most competing sites. It also adds value to the consumer experience & makes it easier to link at your site. Both of which make Google far more likely to want to include your site in the result set. Tim O'Reilly states Data is the Next Intel Inside:

While we've argued that business advantage via controlling software API's is much more difficult in the age of the internet, control of key data sources is not, especially if those data sources are expensive to create or amenable to increasing returns via network effects.

Google is just a giant feedback network, learning to better understand the relationships between queries, links, and content. If you own the smartest and richest consumer feedback network in your vertical you will only continue to gain profit, customers, and leverage, at least up until someone creates a better feedback network that displaces the current one.