Where I used to spend hours hunting down possible links, or hours developing page copy, I now sit and monitor progress of various people that are doing the work for me.

I’m finding this to be a little boring. But that’s okay because this is also the way I need to operating at this point. I reached near-burnout by trying to do everything myself at one point, even though I felt more “in the trenches”.

I almost need to relish in this new situation and get used to it. I need to focus my time on monitoring sites, making sure I’m getting good quality content and link building help from my workers, and overall looking at the big picture.

I guess it’s not so much being bored, but it’s just getting used to not being so overly busy. Am I working smarter rather than harder? I hope so. I just have to get used to the new pace.

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I know that a lot of people find this to be important in the world of SEO, so it’s interesting to hear what Matt has to say.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some of my thoughts?

I’ve never really been completely convinced that a keyword domain is super-duper-important. Case in point would be my web site about saltwater aquariums.

Aquarist-Refuge.com – that’s the domain name for that web site, but it ranks very well for the keywords “saltwater aquarium” and “saltwater aquariums”. This is not at all because of the domain name. The domain name doesn’t even have the keyword “aquarium” in it.

However, with proper on-site SEO and other efforts, it ranks well for those keywords.

That is why I’m personally not very convinced that a keyword domain is all that important. I do however believe that it holds weight and if you want to use a keyword domain it can help to rank more quickly. It took a certain amount of time and effort to get that site ranked well for “saltwater aquariums”, and I am entirely convinced that if my domain was “saltwateraquariums.com” that I wouldn’t have had to work as hard.

That being said, I do like keyword domains. I seem to be able to get a site to rank with less effort if I can get a domain that has the target keywords in it. However, none of those domain names are terribly inspiring or brandable.

Either way, Matt is basically saying here that Google is looking to put less weight on keyword domains. He doesn’t say they are going to have no weight, he just says they are going to dial it down a bit. Sounds fine to me.

I might not have to worry about finding keyword domains as much as I used to in the past if I wanted to rank well and rank soon for a particular keyword. But that is speculation, only time will tell.

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There are as many opinions as you can possibly imagine, and for the most part everybody is guessing or making educated guesses as to what duplicate content is and how it can affect your site rankings.

What it really comes down to though, in my opinion, is who’s rules do we need to play by?

I don’t like to use duplicate content for anything. I don’t like to take articles already published on other sites and use them on my own sites. I don’t like to take submissions from authors if they are submitting the same content to other web sites.

That’s my stance though.

It doesn’t matter what I think, what matters is who gets to set the rules and who gets to enforce rules.

Right now, I lean towards playing by Google’s rules regarding duplicate content.

Why? Mainly because they are my biggest source of traffic, and I’m trying to get traffic from their playground (their search engine). So, if I’m going to play in their playground, I need to play by their rules.

Also, Google’s duplicate content rules and notes just make sense. They seem to me to be like a “good practice” guide for anybody that is trying to sort out the best ways to use (or the best reasons to avoid) content that is published elsewhere on the web.

A few things that I like about Google duplicate content policies:

• They recommend the best ways to handle url variations and robots/spidering to make sure that there is no confusion for the bots on your web site.
• They outline the fact that content that is even partially duplicated can still be identified by their system as duplicate.
• They make Webmaster Tools available to help us help their spiders, which is very nice of them.

For these reasons, I tend to avoid the following when placing content on my sites:

• I don’t like to use snippets of text from other sites unless it’s a direct, relevant quote, and I link to the source.
• I prefer to write all content from scratch or have somebody write it from scratch. That way I avoid publishing something to my site that is already published on another site, word for word.
• I like to use plugins for WordPress (the main site platform that I use) to help robots better sort out the content on my pages and to help them steer clear of author or tag pages that may show content that is already elsewhere on my sites.

I mentioned that I use WordPress. WordPress is a blogging platform. And out of the box, it shows the latest posts on the home page. So, in many cases you could say that the home page of a WordPress blog is just showing duplicate content from other pages on your site. Google hints that this may be a bad idea, but I don’t think it really matters all that much, mainly because so many sites use that type of format. Many valuable, informative sites.

So even though Google mentions that as a possible negative (showing content on the home page that exists elsewhere in the site), I don’t think it really is anything to worry about.

Anyways, I’m done rambling now. If you are worried about using or handling duplicate content on your web sites, I would suggest reading through Google’s guidelines on this matter and form your own opinion. Don’t form an opinion before you understand how they look at this matter.

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When I first signed up for and started using Facebook, I was about 10 years removed from high school, so naturally the first friend flux was a bunch of people that I hadn’t heard from for about 10 years, since high school.

Then the coworkers also became friends. Then many family members started using it.

I got used to watching the daily life streams of people that I didn’t really think I’d ever be in contact with again in my lifetime. It’s weird stuff. There’s nothing more interesting or disturbing than following the daily drama of somebody you have not talked to or seen for several years since high school.

Now, these days, the daily dramatics from people of past times has given way to a much more commercialized stream of information. I’ve started to “like” many business for many reasons, and now whenever I log into Facebook I’m basically seeing a feed that consists of the following:

• Some people that I haven’t known for a long time posting pictures of their babies that I’ll never see.
• Some people that I haven’t known for a long time bitching about daily life.
• Lot’s of new blog posts and new article announcements from many online publications.
• Lot’s of commercial and promotional stuff from local businesses.

Logging into Facebook is kinda like going to a high school reunion sponsored by all the businesses that have enticed me to “like” them on Facebook.

These days when I log in, it’s becoming more and more overrun by businesses and people with commercial intent, it doesn’t seem so much to be the friendly gathering ground that it used to be.

The more that I think about this, I should start focusing on the people or organizations that I really do want to hear from. If I did this, I would:

• Only be be friends on Facebook with people I currently know or socialize with, and family members.
• Only follow the Minnesota Twins and bands that I like to keep up on.

Yeah, I might do that.

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There is one thing that I really like about 1Password, and there is one thing that I really do not like, and the rest of my opinions seem to sit somewhere in the middle.

What are these two things I’m referring to?

What I Love About 1Password

The main thing I like about this app is that it encourages me to come up with very strong passwords for accounts that I have. This reduces chances of getting accounts hacked. This is a good thing.

Before I used 1Password, I had a hard time keeping track of hundreds of passwords. If I wanted to be able to remember a password off the top of my head, I would have to be able to use a password that I could memorize. This usually was not good for security, as I would use a password that I already had been using on other accounts, or something that was easy to remember and then therefore guess.

However, with 1Password, I basically just have to remember that one main password. The rest of my account passwords, for web sites and what not, can be as cryptic as I want them to be, and 1Password remembers them for me.

So – that is the one thing that I like the most about this app – I’m able to use very cryptic passwords for hundreds of accounts and not have to worry about referencing them or typing them in each time I need to log in. Awesome.

What I Don’t Like

For all the convenience that 1Password offers, there is one thing that I get annoyed by (especially in terms of using it with Firefox). It needs to be updated quite frequently. It seems like at least every couple days there is a moment where I need to get into a web site quickly, and I click the 1Password button to do the login.

I then get prompted to update. That’s fine I guess. I need to keep this app updated. But to update I have to close Firefox entirely, update the app, then open Firefox again. This can be pretty annoying when I’m in the middle of a task that involves having many tabs open in Firefox. There have been many times where I totally got derailed with tasks because of the fact that I had to close Firefox, update 1Password, restart Firefox, then try to get back into my groove.

This wouldn’t be an issue if 1Password didn’t update so often, but this happens a lot. Then consider that I use 1Password on 3 different computer every day, and it seems like I’m always getting derailed by update requests from 1Password.

Oh well. It’s still a pretty slick app and I’ll continue to use it. I just wish there was a more efficient and non-disruptive way to handle the frequent updates.

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I do have one reason that I sometimes like to look at my web traffic stats every day.

I like to look at the keywords the people are using to find my site. They often contain phrases that are questions. Answering these questions makes for great content ideas for the sites.

Let’s say I am looking at the list of phrases that people types yesterday to find one of my sites, and I see the question “how to clean aquarium glass”, sitting there nicely as a keyword phrase.

Great, I just have a new content idea for the day. I can write a post that helps people learn how to clean aquarium glass, and it’s probably related to a lot of the other content on the site since somebody found the site using that key phrase.

Using this technique, I can usually weed out ideas that go into more depth or get more specific than some of the general topics that are already on a site. This is a good thing.

That’s about the only reason I can think of at the moment to take the time to look at web traffic stats each day, the right stats and info can make content idea generation pretty snappy.

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I call stat checking and analysis fun, because it is. Doing so allows you to see information that shows you how well your efforts are (or aren’t) working.

Do you log into Google Analytics every day? Do you spend a good chunk of time each day looking at various accounts and reports to see how your sites are positioned in the SERPs and how much traffic you are getting?

You might be spending too much time doing that, if that is the case.

Your time is probably better spent working on adding more content to your sites and making sure that they are getting proper exposure on the web.

I’ve found it’s best to look at web traffic and SEO positioning stats about once a week. This gives me a good chance to see where things are compared to one week ago. Looking at these types of stats on a daily basis, it sometimes looks like things aren’t going anywhere since the numbers usually don’t make big jumps from day to day.

Let’s clear up why I even look at those stats in the first place. I like to see if a site is getting any traffic, and I like to see what that traffic is doing. This helps me figure out who my visitors are and how to better cater to them. I also like to see where my sites are positioned in the SERPs for target keywords. This helps me to figure out which target keywords need more work.

Those two things don’t need to be done every day, it’s a waste of time. What I really need to do every day is add more content to the sites and attempt to build more links to the sites. That’s basically what it boils down to. And staying focused on those two efforts are what makes looking at the stats on the weekends a lot more interesting.

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Linkvana isn’t really that cheap to start with (see my recent Linkvana review for more details), so the fact that they are adding services that require you to spend more money to take advantage of them can be kind of insulting.

But, I took a deeper look at the blog commenting service details and I think it might be worth a trial run, just to see what type of impact it makes on one of my projects.

Read on to learn more about the details of this blog commenting service.

When I first think of outsourced blog commenting, I think of spam. I have never really been a big fan of the idea of outsourcing commenting. I prefer to leave the process of making comments to myself – getting involved with discussions, and building relationships with other webmasters myself through the use of blog commenting.

But I looked at the details of this service, and it looks like it could have pretty good value. Here’s what they say about this new service (a quick run-down):

• The comments are placed on PR3-PR5 pages (rather than just a page within a PR3-PR5 site)
• The comments are placed on pages outside of the Linkvana network, and they claim that these pages/blogs are tough to find since they can’t be found with a lot of conventional techniques that are preached on marketing forums. I would imagine that by this, they mean that they’re simply not just using easy-to-find Comment Luv blogs, for example.
• They say the pages these comments end up on only have 3-20 outgoing links
• They leave value-adding comments, no spam, and everything is hand written, no automation

In addition to this, they will give you a report that shows you where the links were placed.

I think I’m going to buy some credits and give this a run, I’m curious to see what type of effect this service might have. It’s worth a test at least.

These additional services that Linkvana is coming out with (including their social bookmarking services) are kind of intriguing to me. If you are already outsourcing this type of work, or if you have hired somebody to do this stuff for you, their costs are probably pretty comparable. You really don’t need to spend much time at all to order some bookmarks or to order these comments, so the time commitment factor is pretty enticing.

I like to spend as much time working on the content on my own sites as possible, and being able to outsource stuff like this can be very valuable.

I think it’s just the fact that these services are being offered through a network that already has a fairly large monthly fee is what kinda turns me off a bit, but you gotta spend money to make money if you don’t feel like doing all the work yourself.

If you wanna try it out, use this link to subscribe to Linkvana and you’ll get 50 free credits – you can use those credits to purchase some of these blog comments.

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What I like to do now includes printing a physical sheet of paper (oh no!). This is something that I’ve tried to avoid, printing anything on paper really, but it works out good for me in this instance.

What am I doing differently now?

I use a daily checklist.

On this checklist I have various general categories of stuff listed out in a table, with a column to check off each item after I feel it’s complete.

I keep the items on the checklist pretty general. Stuff like: Take care of any hosting support tasks, review SEO projects, take care of any billing, keeping social media channels updated and stuff like that.

I put the sheet on a clipboard. The clipboard makes it seem more official, or something.

Then I basically refer to the clipboard throughout the day, checking off each item once I feel each general area of business has had enough attention for the day.

Some days I can check off certain items rather quickly, since they don’t need daily attention. But I at least have a general guide of stuff that I should be paying attention to, even if it’s just a quick look, on a daily basis.

Then, when all items are checked off for the day, I know that I’ve taken an honest look at all areas of business that I really need to be paying attention to. This really has been helping me avoid a scatter-brained type of feeling.

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Exposure on the Web can be a race at times. It’s a race to get content online. It’s a race to get search engines to index and rank your content well. It’s a race to convert visitors into buyers. I could go on and on.

Within all these individual races that we participate in, with our Web properties, we need to think more like the Tortoise and less like the Hare.

Why?

Sure, the Hare can outrun anybody, but he also get’s distracted and loses sight of his main goals.

A Hare that can stay focused can be a dangerous opponent, so don’t throw that approach completely out the window if you have the ability to run fast AND be consistent at the same time.

But most of us don’t.

Most of us have a lot of different stuff (Web properties) that we are trying to take care of, and racing fast with any one of them will make us lose focus on the larger picture. Racing fast with one project might also burn us out, creating a situation where we neglect the rest of the properties due to racing too fast with one.

It’s best to take it all slow and steady, don’t run so fast that you need to stop and sleep for too long just to rest up again. Do everything with a mode of consistency.

• Consistently post new, thoughtful content to your sites
• Consistently keep social media channels updated
• Consistently work on SEO effort such as link building and networking with other webmasters

You get the idea. Don’t run super fast by writing or adding 10 new posts to a site in 3 days, and then needing to take a nap under a tree for a few days (like the Hare, maybe exaggerating slightly) just to recoup.

Why shoot for consistency like this? The people and machines that look at your Web properties like consistency. Your site visitors like consistent content. Search engines like consistency in how content is added to a site.

Aiming for consistency will help keep you in front of those targets in the way that they like to be catered to.

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