Posts Tagged ‘Copywriting’

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Link Analysis Progression

I said in my last post that each link is essentially a vote for the page that’s being linked to. That, essentially, was the original link analysis factors. Things have come a long way since then. Today’s link analysis factors are far more complex.

Over the years what gets analyzed as part of the link has changed in order to provide better search results to web users.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Headings

The first place to begin in writing your content is to create a great heading for each page. In the last post I discussed grabbing the visitor’s attention. This is one of the primary jobs of page headings.

The heading is different from the page title tag. Where the title tag is displayed in the search results the heading is viewed on the page itself. Sometimes you want the heading and the title to be the same, other times you don’t. The title MUST use keywords in it. The heading SHOULD use keywords in it. It all depends on the hook you want to use to grab attention and entice your visitor to keep reading.

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Copywriting

No SEO is complete without good content. You can stuff keywords into the text all you want, and that might be okay to get you some decent keyword rankings for a time, but it won’t do anything to improve the long-term success of your business.

A website without good copywriting is a sports car with an engine that doesn’t run. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is, the content is what is needed to provide your visitors the information they need in order for you to make the sale (or conversion, or whatever else you want your visitors to do.)

Understanding Copy

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We often come to the SEO table thinking that it’s going to be relatively easy. While SEO isn’t inordinately difficult (neither is changing the car oil, building a fence or painting a house) it is often time consuming and rarely ever “simple.” What appears to be a small task on the surface can often become a much larger task once properly researched and considered. Like an iceberg, the bulk of SEO is behind the scenes and requires hours upon hours of labor.

I only need a little bit of text!

Not long ago I was performing a cursory site audit for an e-commerce site. On the surface, the site looked pretty minimalistic. There were only four main product areas, each having anywhere from 5-20 categorical divisions. Each of those divisions contained only a handful of products, many that fit into multiple categories. By all measures, this is rather small for an ecommerce site.

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As a general rule bloggers tend to be really full of themselves. Just as a person needs a certain amount of ego to run for political office, you have to think pretty highly of yourself to write a blog. On the most basic level, you have to think that someone actually cares what you have to say, otherwise you’d just keep your ramblings hidden away in a Word document on your computer’s hard drive. And perhaps people do care. After all, you’re reading this blog post right now. But the danger is that as more people begin reading what one has to say on their blog, the more highly one tends to think of him or herself.

But who am I to condemn? You’re reading my blog post and making me think more highly of myself. But I’ll share. You’re welcome to get in on some of the ego action with your comments below! See? It doesn’t always have to be all about me.

But just because an over-inflated ego causes you to believe people want to hear what you have to say doesn’t mean you don’t have some valuable or important to contribute to the worldwide discourse on your given topic. As a business owner, communication is key and there is no better way to start a dialogue with your target audience than to start a blog.

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Yesterday I started a new series on Destination Search Engine Marketing, discussing the first of the seven building blocks in creating a Destination Website: Expert Information. Before I move on to the second building block I wanted to discuss the different types of expert information which can be added to your website.

There are a number of different types of expert information that can be developed for your website as a means of providing your visitors with additional, quality content. Depending on your site, some types of types of expert information are more applicable than others and not all will be a good fit for you. Each site must be evaluated to determine what kind of expert information will best serve the audience’s needs and expectations. By finding ways to add additional expert information to your site you’ll begin to build a site that can stand up above the competition.

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While back I wrote an article about how having a search engine friendly website does not make it search engine optimized. The article discussed how many web developers promise to “search engine optimize” the websites they develop. While I don’t mean to discount the value of a good web developer (I rely on them heavily) many developers really know no more about SEO than than they do about pluming. Sure, they can plunge a blocked toilet, or write some decent titles and meta descriptions, but there is so much more to SEO (and plumbing) than that.

A good web developer will undoubtedly build a very search engine friendly website. But it takes someone steeped in SEO to truly optimize it. Very few web developers study search engine marketing they way an SEO dedicates their time to learning, studying and practicing the art of on- and off-page optimization.

One of the comments I received from that article really struck home to me and did a great job of fleshing out what I have always believed about SEO:

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• The Harpoon or the Net: What’s the Right Copy Approach for Your Prospects?
• 5 Blogging Goals Worth Chasing After
• The art of teaching copywriting
• 5 Tips for Generating Fresh SEO Content
• How To Use Your Words Online
• Three Questions Your Copy Must Answer to Succeed

• Web Copywriting Tips – Write Sales Letters Which Convert
• When Should I Put Advertising on My Blog?
• Predictive Copywriting – Fight Big Publishers and Win in 2009
• What SEO Copywriting Is and Isn’t

• How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254%
• 5 Remarkable Things You Should Learn From Music (And How You Can Apply Them To Your Blog)
• Improve Your Writing: Get Feedback
• How to Be an Interesting Blogger
• Getting Noticed by Google
• Benefits of consistent SEO copywriting
• 3 Benefits of Consistent SEO Copywriting