Search Engine Optimization, or S.E.O., is an important, and
in fact vital, part of any business’s online presence. Put simply,
S.E.O. is the “tweaking” of a website so that it’ll be displayed right
at the top of a search engine’s results pages (y’know, on that first
page of results you get on Google, Yahoo! or Bing etc. when you key
in a search phrase or words and hit “Search”). This optimization is
an important aspect of any kind of search engine marketing that you
do; the ultimate aim being to achieving the highest ranking possible
for your targeted keywords and phrases.
Basically, it works like
this: When an Internet user runs a search using a search engine
they’ll more than likely only look over the first page of results laid
out before them. Typically, they’ll then either follow a link they
found on that first page or they’ll have another go and try another
search. They’d only very, very rarely make it as far as the barren
wastelands of Page 3. What this means is, if your website is not among
the first listed in the search results, its chances of being found by
potential customers are actually quite slim. Basically, there is
little point in making a website submission to search engines if your
site will never appear in the first few pages of results. Sorry.
By
taking the time to think about the writing, formatting, and
organization of your website and making the appropriate adjustments for
S.E.O. purposes, your website will become more “digestible” by search
engines and will be ranked more favorably in their databases. The
result is, with a little work (and it isn’t that much work that you
gotta do), your site will be able to climb from the depths of search
engine results Hell (page 2,569), right to the top of the list (page
1, yeah!). This search engine placement will be highly beneficial for
any entity seeking a truly strong presence online.
The truth
of the matter is that the vast majority of websites on the Internet
are not optimized with the search engines in mind. The result here is
that your competitors who DO posses well optimized sites will
dominate the web traffic generated through the search engines. By
optimizing your own site, you and your company can leapfrog the
competition and direct traffic away from competitors and toward your
own site. After the site is optimized it actually takes very little
maintenance to keep your company’s ranking and the effect of the
optimization can be seen immediately and for years to come.
Now,
whether you’ve hired an S.E.O. guru or decided to attempt the S.E.O.
work yourself, one of the major challenges of a great search engine
optimization campaign is determining how much time to devote to
specific techniques and certain areas of your website. Simply knowing
what to do doesn’t really solve the problem of understanding how much
to do (it’s that old conundrum: how much is too much?). Whether it’s
keyword research, website title optimization, content development or
even link building, often the missing link is the art of knowing
which of your efforts will yield the greatest return on your
investment of money and/or time.
Most of VodaHost’s own optimization work (done from our VodaHits department; check it out: http://www.vodahits.com)
is performed on client’s websites and in nearly every case we are
working to try and achieve improved rankings and increased traffic
within a budget and timeline. Our most typical scenario gives us 90 days
to tackle the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and analytics for a
group of medium to moderately difficult search terms (from a
competitive standpoint).
While every project is different,
when you have to show some success in a relatively short period of
time, it is important to quickly identify the major issues which are
holding back your site. Page title optimization is always very high
on the list but even with that said, when you are working on a site
with hundreds or even thousands of pages, spreading yourself too thin
by concentrating on only one ranking factor will usually fail.
Unless you have an overwhelming number of site architecture or
duplication issues, you are normally better off focusing on just a
portion of the site.
Along the same line is the amount of time
you spend on research compared to time devoted to actual change
suggestions, on-page optimization tweaks or link building (for
example). There are so many different ways to analyze a site or even
one page on a site. There are also dozens of keyword research
techniques and SEO tools, and you could spend countless hours
dissecting the strategies that have seemingly worked on competitor
sites. At some point you simply have to be comfortable knowing you’ve
done enough due diligence to dive in and begin making changes that
will have an impact.
Search engine optimization IS a science.
It’s not like building a Large Hadron Collider but most S.E.O.s
follow a set of tried and true practices that offer the greatest
chance of success. What makes it not like building Large Hadron
Colliders is that Search Engine Optimization is also an art and all
the S.E.O. research in the world won’t do you a bit of good until you
take that first step and actually begin making changes to your
website. Every project and every website is different. This is what
makes the process an adventure that is fun and exciting.
SEO
copywriters have a pretty tough job but it’s certainly not impossible
to write excellent and more importantly, optimized content for your
website. With this in mind, I decided to write a basic set of rules for
S.E.O. copywriters to follow; rules that anyone can reference to
produce website content that both readers and search engines will
enjoy. Let’s not mince words at this point … this is by no means a
complete and exhaustive list; other copywriters might have other lists
or other S.E.O. tips and tricks… It’s certainly not my intent to
definitely “write the book” on optimized content. It’s just a list of a
few methods that have enabled us to achieve the desired results for
our clients in a variety of industries.
Rule 1: Google doesn’t appreciate Shakespeare – people do
Search
engines are exceptional consumers of content. They read everything
on the Internet they can get their crawlers around. They’ve read
every book in every language – twice (as well as several million
books more worth of blog posts). Thing is, they don’t really
understand it… They couldn’t tell you if the text and websites they
read are any good from a critical standpoint. Google can tell you
what a sentence or paragraph or article is roughly about without
knowing whether it’s prolific in a profound sense or a plentiful one.
For
the most part, a search engine such as Google will assign value to
content according to the behavior of human readers – not according to
some arbitrary algorithm that projects an entry’s staying power. If
people like it, Google likes it. So certainly do your SEO copywriting
for people.
You can optimize and optimize and optimize, hoping
Google will reward your efforts with premium rankings, but if human
readers don’t enjoy it, then neither will Google. How does Google
know if people like it? By following the links…
A popular
saying in the S.E.O. community is that “Content is King.” Um, yeah,
but it’s really not that simple. Try searching for a classic book,
like Bram Stokers ‘Dracula’. What ranks No. 1? The actual text of the
book? A scholarly critique? An original book review? Nope. Nope. And
nope! It’s a Wikipedia entry. Why? Because Wikipedia has about a
billion and one links pointed at its site. Is this a good thing for
search engine users? Probably not. Is it good for the tens of
thousands of book reports written by students who never read Mr.
Stoker’s book? Certainly not.
I introduce this fact not to
discourage anyone or to underscore Wikipedia’s considerable
advantage. This extreme example is introduced to emphasize the fact
Google rewards links, not great content.
How is this valuable to
you? In most cases, you won’t be competing with Wikipedia but with
rival companies, organizations, groups and other bloggers. So just
get more links than them. It’s that simple. How do you do that? Write
more engaging content than them.
But isn’t that contradictory?
Didn’t you just say content is worthless? No, SEO copywriting is
DEFINITELY in. What I said was to get more links. And you get links
by writing better content.
Rule 2: Always write engaging content
At
its very best, the Internet is a democracy and everyone connected to
it has a vote. Those copywriters who compose the posts that receive
the most links (or “votes” to Google) win not elections but great and
powerful search engine rankings. Your best S.E.O. copy-writing
strategy is to reach out to “voters” by writing content they will
link to. You must write content people within your niche will blog
about, share on Facebook or Tweet about. You must write content that
gets people talking about your products, your services and your
company.
Don’t be frightened to take a unique stance on a
familiar topic to stir up a bit of controversy. Nobody ever really
stood out by being the 700th person to agree with something. The
people who generate buzz about the Internet are those provocative
rogues who are brave enough to support a daring, perhaps even
unpopular, position. Fresh will always win the fight. New angles are
always the best, even if they’re seemingly ludicrous, because they’ll
bring in the links.
For instance, say Galileo had a blog way
back when (now there’s a thought!) and he wrote an incredibly
controversial post about the world being round – not flat. People
would think he was absolutely crazy. They’d bash him in the comments
section. He’d be the laughing stock of every astronomy forum but I’m
willing to bet that people would link to him. And I bet his blog
would rank No. 1 for “The World is Round.” And I bet a whole lot of
people would be searching for that once they realized that he was
probably right.
So, WRITE ENGAGING CONTENT! Establish yourself as an authority on a subject or introduce a fresh argument.
Rule 3: That’s already been written about 75 million times, but THAT hasn’t…
Everything
(okay 99.9% of stuff) has been written about before at least once.
The Internet is very much like The Simpsons where everything has been
done before and yet there are still infinite questions left
unanswered and there are countless arguments that haven’t been made.
There are countless viewpoints that haven’t been introduced yet… As
an S.E.O copywriter, it’s your job to find them.
You can get
started by identifying the hot topics and trends in your industry –
then take an angle on them that nobody else has really considered.
In
addition to spotting these Internet trends, perform some critical
analysis yourself. Do your due diligence. Search Google for specific
industry-related questions. Which ones have no adequate answers? What
information might prospective clients or customers want that’s so far
been inaccessible to them? Don’t know what information they want and
can’t find? Then ask them.
Then, once you’ve identified a fresh topic, write the optimized content for it.
Rule 4: My keyword density formula is WAY better than your keyword density formula
The
question here is: What is optimized content? Is it content that
follows an exact keyword density formula (so-many instances of a
“keyword” per total number of words)? Should you incorporate keywords
into every singe sentence? Every paragraph? I heard you’re supposed to
infuse one keyword into every seventh sentence – is that even true?
Not really, no … It’s nonsense.
My
own thoughts on keyword density are as follows: forget keywords and
write naturally (as I emphasized in Rule 1). If your content is about a
topic you hope to rank for, odds are you’ll use these keywords or
phrases quite naturally. Injecting keywords where they don’t belong
will only produce choppy and spammy content that neither Google nor
your audience will appreciate. It’s a waste of time.
Furthermore,
when it’s clear what your content is about, your readers will
unwittingly know what keywords you want them to put in their anchor
text links. If The Incredible Car Blog writes a blog about what cars
will be like in 2020, odds are those linking to the post will put some
variation of “2020 Cars” in the anchor text. And one link like that
from a really reputable site is worth more than 1,000 instances of
“2020 Cars” included in your original post.
So write honestly
and eloquently, be informative and entertaining. One of the best ways
to do that is to write something you’d want to read yourself. Don’t
worry about optimization when you’re writing. Once you’ve completed
the most engaging content in the world, that’s when you go back and
optimize it.
Rule 5: The brutally honest secret to optimized content
How do I optimize content? Well, I’d love to tell you how.
There is a huge S.E.O. Myth: Optimized content is merely content with keywords included.
If
writing optimized content was simply the process of stuffing a bunch
of keywords between other words, you wouldn’t need writers. You
could take existing content and scatter a bunch of keywords around.
You might find this on a car dealership’s website:
“It was the
best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness, it was a great time to buy New
Chevrolet Cars in Miami!”
Does that mean you don’t want keywords
in your content? Of course, not. You MUST have a few keywords. Just
don’t overdo it. Let the opportunities present themselves naturally
and then pounce on them, without remorse!
Let’s go back to that
Miami car dealership. Maybe they already have some unique web
content with 5 or 6 natural instances of “Chevrolet Camaro in Miami,”
a phrase they rank No. 1 for in Google. Spectacular! But they’re
missing out on tons and tons of related searches. Why? Because they
have no instances of “New Chevrolet Camaros in Miami,” or “Used
Chevrolet Camaros in Miami,” or “Pre-Owned Chevrolet Camaros in
Miami,” or “Best Miami Dealerships for Chevy Camaros.” There’s any
number of ways people in Miami will search for the same car, but this
dealership is only really taking advantage of one of them!
THAT
is what optimized content is. It’s writing naturally and then
searching through your content for ways to improve it. Anticipate the
ways your audience would search for you, and then give it to them.
Don’t set out to write content just so you can stuff it with 50
instances of a phrase you want to rank for. Write something of value
to prospective clients and consumers, and then go back and optimize
content accordingly.
Rule 6: Duplicate page titles confuse search engines
Attention
must be paid to every facet of search engine optimization, but
perhaps no single factor is as fundamentally important to search
engine rankings as page titles. While page titles might seem an
incredibly obvious area of concern when optimizing websites, duplicate
page titles can actually diminish search engine rankings and quite
drastically too.
Duplicate page titles can be the result of
laziness, a lack of awareness, a limited website publishing program,
or any number of other reasons but the bottom line is it’s simply
imperative that unique and descriptive titles be used on your web
pages in order to maximize search engine rankings. The more
information search engine crawlers can deduce from each page heightens
the likelihood your site will be pinpointed for a specific keyword
or phrase.
There are numerous ways to determine the different
(or in some cases duplicate) page titles in your website. But whether
you manually click through every page of your website, explore your
entire site per a “site colon search” on Google or Yahoo! (for
example typing “site:vodahost.com”), or extract your site’s data from
utilities such as Google Webmaster Tools, the first step to
rectifying title page redundancy is learning exactly which pages bear
what titles.
As page titles offer arguably the most telling
description of page contents for search engine crawlers, it is
essential that each page title be unique to the contents of that
respective page. For instance, on the VodaHost website we tailor
individual pages according to topic. Therefore, a page displaying an
article about the S.E.O. Value of Keyword Rich Anchor Text is aptly
titled “Keyword Rich Anchor Text for S.E.O. | Anchor Text Link
Optimization”.
E-commerce websites would be wise to title each
web page according to the particular products and category being
advertised on that page. This adds notable value to each page, which
consequently strengthens the website as a whole.
No matter what
the contents of your website are, we recommend titles that
accurately reflect the page content and contain the keywords or
phrases you ultimately hope to rank high for in search engines. If you
try any search query on the major search engines, you will notice
the page titles cut off around 60-70 characters, so try and stay
within that range. As an example, the homepage of an SEO firm might
have a title something like:
Internet Marketing : Search Engine Optimization : VodaHits.com
Again,
page titles might seem such an obvious and mundane concern that
little should be written or said about them; however, neglecting page
titles will undoubtedly have one of the most negative impacts on even
the most polished websites. Contact VodaHost if you need help.
