Pretend you don’t know anything about what your company offers and you stumbled onto it somehow. Can you tell immediately what it’s all about? Can the search engines? Do this exercise with each inner page of the site as well. Is what each page has to offer, truly crystal clear? Or does your website presume that people already know who you are and what you’re about. If it’s the latter, you may have an online brochure on your hands, which isn’t a good thing.

One of the differences between a website and a printed brochure is that a brochure is often requested by people who already know about the company, but who are looking for more specific information regarding their offerings. Although not ideal, for those browsing the websites of companies they are already familiar with, an online brochure may certainly suffice. Which is probably why so many websites seem to be written like one! Often, when a website is originally designed and written, nobody thinks about the fact that people unfamiliar with the company might be visiting it. However, if you want to gain new customers from the search engines, i.e., people looking for your type of product or service (or even information) who never heard of you before, they need to know within a few seconds that they’ve landed in the right place.

Do you have what they want?

For these folks—and their numbers grow everyday—it’s critical for your website to let them know immediately that they’re in the right place and that you have exactly what they’re looking for. Searchers, by their very nature, are seeking stuff. If you have what they want, then for heaven’s sake, display this information clearly, boldly and succinctly on every page of your website.

It’s important to do this on every page is because, unlike a brochure, people coming from search engines can and will enter your website from any page. There is no linear progression. No beginning, middle or end to a website. Each page is a gateway to every other page, and many people may never even see your home page. But that’s okay if you’ve done your job properly.

Minimally, each page of your website should have a paragraph of text at the beginning that provides a descriptive summary of what the rest of that page contains. The beauty of doing this is that it’s not only extremely helpful to your website visitors, but also to the search engines. This is why it’s so important to be as descriptive as you possibly can—you’re serving two audiences with the same interests, and neither of them may know anything about you when they first get there.

Being descriptive on your website is often as simple as using the keyword phrases people might be typing into a search engine in a natural manner within your existing copy. You’re presumably providing people with information on your pages already. If your content isn’t using your keyword phrases, you should be asking yourself why not? Interestingly enough, writing descriptively provides you with the opportunity to tell those who don’t know anything about you, i.e., search engines and potential new customers, all about your offerings in the simplest manner possible.

Being descriptive just makes sense!

You may have seen websites that have been "optimized" by simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of each page, or by stuffing them into headlines or other places where they don’t really make sense. While this may, in fact, work to tell search engines what the page is all about, it often looks silly to your website visitors because it’s clearly not done for their benefit. Users may not even notice those keyword phrases in a lighter/smaller font stuck in a place they wouldn’t normally be looking. Instead of showing them right off the bat that they found what they were seeking when they started their original search, they are left to scratch their heads in wonderment. If there are no paragraphs of text staring them in the face providing them with this knowledge, it’s easy enough for them to click back to the search engine and buy from the next website in the list.

Don’t lose them before you even have a chance to sell to them

Once a person is at your site, if you actually do provide what they’re looking for, the worst thing that can happen is for you to lose them to your competitor simply because they couldn’t immediately see that you had what they needed. Unfortunately, this is an all too common occurrence with websites that were created without any thought to search engines, or as an online brochure intended for those already familiar with your brand.

Take a look at your website with fresh eyes. Enlist the help of others who may not already be familiar with your website, and see if they can tell right off the bat, what it’s all about. If they can’t, most likely you will find that you have some work ahead of you in this respect; but don’t despair! The benefits of clearly describing your product or service offerings will far outweigh the time investment. What you will find when you fix your pages in this way is a snowball effect. Your search engine rankings will increase, your targeted traffic will increase, your bounce rate will decrease, and your conversions will soar.

Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, a search marketing firm outside of Boston, and co-founder of SEMNE, a New England search marketing networking organization, has been performing SEO since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

The secret’s out: men and women are different—in person and online. Gender differences matter in web design, content, and marketing. It takes more than a girlish color scheme and soft focus photos of smiling children to draw women to your site and earn their loyalty. Color and design matter, but so do content, safety, and service. And oh, by the way: men want compelling visuals and for you to just get to the point. Surprised? You shouldn’t be, as these research findings demonstrate.

"Thinking pink" is not thinking at all

Many Web designers and marketers have a simple strategy to appeal to women: "Think Pink." Often this is a good opening strategy if women are your target market because they do tend to favor pink and purple hues. But color preferences are affected by a variety of factors other than gender including age, personal bias, and culture.

Numerous women-oriented sites like Avon.com, Brides.com and Komen for the Cure successfully use soothing, pastel colors to create a calm, inviting place to linger and browse. But they don’t stop at just using colors women like. The sites are well organized, provide interesting content, and let users personalize their experience.

Don’t fixate so much on pink that you ignore the larger role color plays in determining mood, purpose, and trustworthiness. Ideally, color choices should be based on your site’s purpose and products.

Common color associations include:

• Trust: blue and white
• Dependability: blue and black
• Danger: red and black
• Cheapness: yellow and orange
• Fun: yellow, red, orange, and purple

Even if women do most of the shopping for children’s toys at your site, a pastel color scheme conflicts with the site’s purpose. Colors appropriate for a toy site (red, yellow, and orange) would not be appropriate for a stock tip or medical information site.

Get more information about color choices by reviewing the results of Joe Hallock’s Color Assignment study.

Girls just want design

A widely-reported study of design preferences from the University of Glamorgan found that women prefer sites designed by other women. The study also noted a clear difference in design and layout preferences:

"Where visuals are concerned, males favour the use of straight lines (as opposed to rounded forms), few colours in the typeface and background, and formal typography. As for language, they favour the use of formal or expert language with few abbreviations and are more likely to promote themselves and their abilities heavily. "

Women users were far more likely to compliment sites that had been designed primarily by other women. Yet, when researchers looked at the composition of design teams, they found find that 74% of sites studied were designed by a man or male-led design team. Female designers or design teams produced only 7% of sites. Over three quarters of sites designed to appeal to women had male design teams. An article at HumanFactors.com has an excellent analysis of this study and its implications for designers.

Certainly, this doesn’t mean that only men can design for men and women for women, but it does highlight the importance of soliciting different perspectives and opinions during the design process.

Usability testing should always be a major component of your design and redesign process. Bring in members of your target audience early in the process and listen to what they say. That’s a basic component of good Web design, no matter who your audience is.

Women are online hunters and gatherers

Conventional design wisdom says that men devour data while women focus on pictures, but the results of recent eyetracking studies indicate just the opposite.

Usability and eyetracking research conducted by Eye Square, a marketing research and usability company, found that many of our gender assumptions about web content are just wrong:

"The empirical findings indicate that there is a big difference in the attentional behaviour between women and men. Whereas women tend to receive textual information very carefully, men start their orientation on a web site at photos and generally, read less text. Concluding from the empirical data, we therefore, describe women as being text orientated and accurate, and men as icon orientated and loose… women read and men do not."

A 2005 study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project: How Men and Women Use the Internet, supports those findings. Pew’s study highlighted some important traits of female Internet users, including their propensity to:

"…penetrate deeper into areas where they have the greatest interest… Women tend to treat information gathering online as a more textured and interactive process—one that includes gathering and exchanging information through support groups and personal email exchanges."

Most women aren’t impulse buyers online. They take the time to learn about the product and get as much information as possible before making a purchasing decision. That’s not always easy, though. Half of women consumers report that they’ve left stores and Web sites because they couldn’t find what they wanted or been able to get enough information about the product.

Build a safe, personal community that emphasizes service

This is an area where small businesses can shine. Large companies may get thousands of emails and phone calls per day, and few are equipped to respond quickly and in a personal manner. We’ve all been frustrated by the canned email responses that arrive days after we sent a query and don’t begin to answer the question we asked.

Personalized service is key to building customer loyalty. This New York Times article discusses the buying clout of women consumers and describes how electronics retailer, Best Buy, moved from the business model of "…a boy store, built by boys, for boys," towards a more consumer-friendly orientation:

"Online, Best Buy has added ‘click to call,’ so that a shopper can ask a representative to call her back at a time she requests to help with buying decisions. In the stores, it has made the aisles cleaner and wider and added shopping bags as an alternative to carts."

As with a physical store, a welcoming environment entices visitors to your site, good information keeps them there, and a focus on trust and privacy helps turn them into customers.

Women users are more likely to trust your information if they think they’re getting the whole story. How can you persuade them that this is the case?

• Pay attention to your product descriptions. Make them complete and informative.
• Make it easy to ask questions. Online chat features are very popular because you can get instant answers from a live representative.
• Beef up your "Frequently Asked Questions" page.
• Clearly describe your return policy and shipping charges.
• Highlight your privacy policy and write it in terms non-attorneys can understand.
• Add an "Email page to a friend" link to your pages.
• Product reviews from other users are valuable because they focus on everyday experiences using the product—how it performs out in the real world, and not just how the designers thought people would use it.
• Have a phone number on your site! Most customers will never call, but they like having it as an option.

Small businesses have real opportunities to build personal relationships with their customers. One of the advantages of the Internet is that it allows you to build these relationships with customers who may live half a world away through phone calls, emails, and online chat. Women comprise half the general population and 66% of them go online to shop and do research.

That’s a market no web business, large or small, can afford to ignore.

Christine Churchill is President of KeyRelevance.com, a full service search engine marketing firm. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Originally published in SiteProNews, January 08, 2008

People use search engines to find things. Although you should avoid making your business depending entirely on free traffic from search engines, so is it still important to consider search engines in your overall internet marketing strategy. Ignoring search means leaving a big chunk of business on the table, which will make it much harder to stay competitive depending on the industry you are in and what your competition is doing. SEO isn’t rocket science and to a certain degree technical. It has nothing to do with magic and fairy dust will do nothing to help you with it. It also requires a long term strategy and commitment in order to become and remain successful. There is no silver bullet and no shortcuts.

Because of its long term commitment necessary, is a well formed strategy key to success, a strategy that is followed and verified and scrutinized along the way.

While all 11 steps below are part of a repeating cycle over the time while you are doing business on the internet, so are only step 6 to 11 task that need to be on going on a much more frequent basis. Due to the fact that steps 1 to 5 are not repeated very often, is it necessary to give them special attention and care to get them right at the beginning. Errors made there will affect all the others in a negative way and hurt your efforts along the way.

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important first step that should not be taken too lightly. While you can easily test and change hundreds of keywords in paid search campaigns, so is this not possible for organic search optimization. You usually concentrate on one to five key phrases for the whole site (theme) and one to three phrases for a single page. For large sites with thousands of pages is it hard to optimize every single page to the full extend due to the limits in time and other resources.

2. Competitive Intelligence

Know you competition! What are they doing? Where do they rank, for which terms? Who is linking to them and why? The things you have to do depend on what your competitors are doing. The less competitive your vertical is online the easier is it for you to outperform your competition. This is important to determining cost and resources for your SEO efforts.

3. Web Design and Development

Fixing something that is broke is always harder than building it right from the beginning. If you are in the process of creating a new website, make sure to consider search engine friendly design and architecture before and during the actual development of the website. This will save you a lot of time and money and in most cases put you already ahead of a considerable number of your competitors. Search engine friendly design is not rocket science and search engine friendly design does not have to be ugly. Search engine friendly design is for the most part user friendly design as well, but there are some exceptions where compromises have to be made.

4. Get Your First Inbound Links

Don’t submit your new site to search engines and by no means pay anybody to do it for you. There are many cheap services and software products out there that offer for less than $100 submission to and #1 ranking in thousands of search engines. Don’t do it. If you see an offer like that, hold your wallet and run. Your site should be found by search engines naturally and they will find your site if a page that is already in their index links to you. Why? Because this is what search engines do, following links to discover content. There are plenty of methods to get your first inbound links. Some web directories are recognized by search engines and a listing there will do your site good. Most recognized directories are commercial in nature and charge a fee for reviewing your site. Also check with vendors or good customers (B2B) who have a website for the opportunity to have them place a link to your website.

5. Sitemaps

The larger search engines allow webmasters to submit a sitemap to them via a webmaster console. The search engines also provide reports and other useful information, such as technical problems with your websites you might not be aware of via their console. Even if you decide against the submission of a site map to the search engines, is it advisable to create an account and register your website with them for the reports and statistics they provide for free and which are invaluable for your internet marketing efforts.

6. Web Analytics

You can’t determine success or failure of any of your internet marketing activities if you do not track and measure their effectiveness. Engaging in any type of marketing campaign online, be it SEO, paid search, display advertising, email marketing, social media or affiliate marketing is like fishing in the dark without any type of web analytics solution in place. The options range from free services to very expensive and heavily customizable package. You have to determine what solution will work for you, but you have to start with one so don’t put it off. Web analytics helps you to determine where to improve your site and your marketing campaigns to channel your resources and money to the things that work and pull it away from the things that don’t work. Web analytics is not a cost center if it is done properly.

7. Content Building

A website is never done. It has to change and grow over time. This is a natural process to adjust to changes in the market, with maturing in this type of medium and your normal business growth. Providing good quality content that is related to what you do, but not necessarily aimed to sell something directly is the best opportunity to increase traffic and exposure of your business. Most people do not link to pages that only serve the purpose to make a sale.

8. Link Building

The internet wouldn’t be a “net” without links. It would only be a collection of independent pages that are not connected to each other. Disconnected pages cannot be found and that defeats the purpose of them, wouldn’t it? Inbound links and internal site linking is important for organic traffic, meaning people seeing and clicking on those links to get to your website, but they are also important for SEO. Inbound links play an important role in virtually every search engine when it comes to ranking pages in their search results. This is a never ending process and while it happens naturally. Be a bit more pro-active to get more and good inbound links. There are plenty of sites out there that should link to you, but don’t know you and your content.

9. Engagement, Trust and Community Building

Social media and Web 2.0 might be buzz words, but the underlying core elements they are made of are much more elementary and fundamental. Don’t live in a bubble and talk to people without allowing people to respond and to interact with you. People will talk about you, with or without you being around. Take the opportunity to become part of the discussion to build trust and deeper relationships with your customers or potential customers. Listen to what they say and learn about their wants and their needs. Hear what they say about you and your products, especially the criticism and improve on them.

10. Ranking and Traffic Analysis

Check where you are today to be able to compare it with data in the future. Look for trends and evaluate the success of your goals, which you should have specified before you engaged in any type of marketing campaign. You did set goals that are measurable I hope. Improving ranking is important for SEO, but more important than the ranking is the traffic that comes with it. Does the change in ranking yields in the traffic you expected? Does this traffic actually convert?

11. Conversion Analysis

No matter what you do, everything will come down to one critical factor at the very end. What is your bottom line? Did you make profit or did you lose money. While losing money in the short term for strategic reasons is okay, so Is losing money in the long run deemed to failure and the end of your business altogether. Whatever you do, it has to contribute directly or indirectly to a positive Return of Investment. Web Analytics is part of the process of making this determination among other tools and methods. Expand the things that work and help your bottom line and rid yourself of the things that don’t. Improve of details to increase conversion. This requires testing. Don’t reject anything upfront without testing it first. Things that work for others might not work for you, but the same is true the other way around.

Carsten Cumbrowski is an internet marketer, entrepreneur and internet marketing strategy consultant. You can find tons of resources to the various channels and topics in internet marketing free at Cumbrowski.com including further details about the SEO fundamentals that were discussed in this article.

I will also bet you a £1 that there is at least one tip that you didn’t know you could do via Google!

Dave

Internet Marketing has grown phenomenally over the last few years but the shift has quite clearly moved to a market that is driven by the consumer and that is no longer dictated by journalists and corporates. Online consumers are responding more favourably to non-intrusive, relevant and socially attractive campaigns and have quite frankly had enough of intrusive, forced online advertising campaigns.

The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:

1. Optimize your website’s content
2. Create a content development strategy for your website
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
4. Publicize your website through article marketing
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
6. Create a Company Blog
7. Experiment with video marketing
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
10. Create an effective email marketing strategy

Let’s look at each of these in more detail:-

1. Optimize Your Website’s Content:

First and foremost, get your website content right. Make sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines. An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing.

2. Create a Content Development Strategy for Your Website:

In addition to optimizing the existing content on your website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to continuously increase your website’s content on an ongoing basis. All new content should be written specifically with the web reader in mind and should also be optimized for the search engines.

3. Invest in a Paid Search (Pay-Per-Click) Campaign:

When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your advertisements that are being advertised on search engines, this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising. Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the products or services that you promote and sell on your website. Paid search advertising is particularly beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on search engines through natural search.

4. Publicize Your Website Through Article Marketing:

Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts as one of the most effective promotional methods to publicize your website and to increase the number of back links (incoming links) to your website content. To ensure ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable article directories, content publishers, article announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds). Each article should be published on your own website first and should include a bookmark button to encourage social bookmarking.

5. Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy:

Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top global companies will have had some form of social media marketing strategy in place. Corporates and small business owners should create a clear social media marketing strategy as part of an integrated communications and marketing strategy. Social Media has become an essential component of online marketing and search engines are adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation. One of the effects of the social media revolution is an exponential increase in the amount of content online.

6. Create a Company Blog:

In the past, corporates have focused marketing and communications efforts on becoming faceless. This has changed significantly. Where the online consumer has become very much in control, companies will no longer be able to connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality. More and more companies are starting to realize the significance of establishing a company personality and we are starting to see more Corporate Blogs coming alive. Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight.

7. Experiment With Video Marketing:

There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of YouTube’s traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet Television websites, streaming video is dominating the international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to capitalize on this exciting channel. As companies seek to simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more interactive which could have huge implications for Affiliate marketing.

8. Engage Your Audiences With Web Widget Marketing:

Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted marketing technique in recent months. Many new Blog oriented services are launching Widgets providing businesses with the opportunity to quickly introduce their services and new products to audiences.

Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for businesses advertising online.

9. Discover the Benefits of Mobile Media Marketing:

Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric pace as many web companies recognize the huge potential in mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard websites are converted to ones that can easily be accessed by mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that their websites are mobile-friendly. This leads the way for new and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with improved brand and marketing experiences.

10. Create an Effective Email Marketing Strategy:

Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing customer base and to expand your client base significantly through permission marketing and regular targeted communications. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success. By combining technological advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future still looks bright for email marketers.

By Gillian Meier (c) 2008
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2008/jan/9.html

If you are looking to market your site using some of the techniques above give us a call or drop us a line and we would be happy to talk.

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http://www.cornwallseo.com/search/index.php/2007/02/11/let-a-woman-teach-you-the-secrets-of-linkbait/

Headlines are the most crucial part of writing linkbait. More people read the headline than will read the body copy. If the headline fails everything else does. No one will read your brilliant copy if the headline fails to entice.

This morning I went to my local Tesco to pick up some much needed nappies and chocolate muffins (the muffins were for me and the nappies for my kid, just thought I’d clear that up). I checked out the magazine rack. I can never resist a peek at the magazine rack. I love magazines, if anything gives you great ideas it’s a rackful of contemporary mags.

I particularly enjoy the covers of womens magazines. First there are plenty of them, so you get to see a more varied opinion than other vertical markets and second they write damn good headlines. In fact, if you want to learn how to write good linkbait get hold of as many womens magazines as you can and note down interesting headlines.

The secret of good linkbait is a good headline, backed up by killer content.

Here are 18 interesting headlines I noted down this morning.

57 Beauty treats
10 Secrets of love that lasts
105 Chic and modern hair ideas
106 Love you body updates
249 Fashion finds for Lesss
789 Dream looks
836 Spectacular big day ideas
100 Valentine sexy looks
345 Style Savvy Steals
Top 25 Style Updates
687 Sexy new style tips
1001 New bags shoes sandals
22 Instant Wardrobe Updates
100 Best Beauty buys Handbook
68 Pages of Hot New Must Buys
837 Style Ideas
20 Ways to have an easier labour
26 Secrets to a stress free life

I chose to write down only the headlines that were numbered and to my surprise every womans magazine had a headline with a number in it. Is this the secret of writing a good headline? It’s definately one way of writing a seductive headline.

What the headlines have in common is they all solve problems. They all make the promise that if you read the article you will gain a piece of information that will improve your life.

Not every woman reads these magazines and not every woman has the problems listed in the headlines. But each magazine is targeted at a specific type of woman with specific needs. The headlines are crafted in a way to attract those type of people.

Does your blog and website target a specific type of person with obvious problems?

Do your headlines and titles promise a solution to one or more of your readers problems?

Are your headline short and to the point?

I have learned to step out of the box once in a while. Switch off the computer and look around for ideas. The magazine rack of your local supermarket or newsagent is awash with ideas and differrent ways of looking at things. Next time you are at the magazine stand, note the headlines of womens magazines. Go on, I know you’ve always wanted to.

Full article and comments
- http://www.cornwallseo.com/search/index.php/2007/02/11/let-a-woman-teach-you-the-secrets-of-linkbait/

The Nielsen/NetRatings study found that web users in the UK clicked on more than 1.3bn search results in July this year, which equates to 29,000 per minute.

The travel sector received the most, with 41.6m clickthroughs from search engines, which accounted for 4.7% of all clicks. Next was the social networks sector, with 40.2m clicks, followed by research tools, such as Wikipedia, with 39.3m clickthroughs.

Search was the fourth most popular category, receiving 37.4m, or 4.2% of all clickthroughs, with Google predictably the leading brand in the sector. The search engine now accounts for 80% of search clickthroughs in the UK. Yahoo was next on 7.5%, AOL received 5.5%, MSN/Windows Live 2.7%, and Ask.com on 2.1%.

According to Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst for Nielsen//NetRatings:

“Britons online are most likely to be searching for travel deals, social networks or reference information through sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers. To see how deeply ingrained search is in the Internet today, one needs to look no further than the fact the fourth most popular search destination is search itself. In other words, people use search engines to find other search engines!”

The study also looked at the percentage of visits coming to each sector from search, revealing that reference and research sites rely on search engine traffic the most, receiving 79% of traffic from search, thanks largely to the prominent position of Wikipedia on many of Google’s search results. Travel websites were next on the list, also relying heavily on search traffic.
Download the Nielsen/Net Ratings Study

SEO Copywriting is a skill. For most people it’s really something you learn over time by doing it, paying close attention to what your competitors are doing and reading up on how to write copy for websites, blogs, press releases and articles.

There are some simple rules that will help the beginning SEO copywriter and keep the experienced “know-it-all” like myself grounded!

First let’s start by really defining SEO copywriting.

SEO copywriting is the art and science of combining three elements:

(1) Valuable Content: providing the reader with content that affords them the opportunity to learn, experience or clarify a product, service, position or opinion. Key factors in creating “value” in your content include organization, a high level of detail, a birds-eye view, reader perspective, usability and specific calls to action.

Your content must provide the reader with ”news you can use” if you will. The overall reader experience must take into account a variety of different levels of knowledge/proficiency with the topic. Here’s where defining and organizing your thoughts come in. Start with a bird’s eye view of the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, then expand into greater detail on a point by point or step by step basis.

(2) Readability: The user must be able to understand what the heck you are talking about. A good rule of thumb is to write for the reader first, then make a second and third pass for the search engines.

(3) Structure and Formatting: Search Engines are becoming smarter about assessing the “value” of your content, but they still rely on a variety of distinguishable factors which are outlined below. There is no hard and fast rule for any of these tips. Use them all “sparingly” and remember #1 and 2 above.

10 SEO Copywriting Tips

(1) Use Bold, and Italics: Just like a regular old human reader the search engines give more weight to words and phrases that are in bold or italics. Just don’t go too crazy or you’ll irritate the search engines and give your reader a headache (unless you’re selling aspirin, but that’s a different article on subliminal copywriting!).

(2) Internal Hyperlinks: You are your own best resource, so use and to a certain extent abuse yourself. Hyperlink to other resources/pages of your site which are relevant to the copy you are writing. This will benefit the reader, increase the amount of time they spend on your site and help you with the search engines. Don’t forget your ALT tags.

(3) External Hyperlinks: Incorporating links to external resources which will benefit the reader can help you in two ways (a) they provide a third-party validation to a certain extent of your “expertise” and (b) afford you the opportunity to pick up some extra coin if that resource provides reciprocal linking or has an affiliate program.

(4) Use Bullet Points: Using a bullet point or numbered system helps break up your copy into consumable pieces, aids in the clean design of your page and makes it easy for the reader to “go back” and reference previous points without wasting time reading through dense copy.

(5) Content “Mass”: Never have less than 400 words on a page. If the content you are providing is in fact valuable you should be able to come up with aroundt 1,000 words.

(6) Use Examples to beef up your content with relevant keywords. (See #8).

(7) Keyword Density: I like to try for 7% density for no more than 4 sets of keywords or phrases per page. Segway to #8.

(8) Break your keyword sets/phrases into tiers or alternates to enable a better flow while maximizing density and penetration (based upon Yahoo!’s Keyword Selector Tool, WordTracker, WebCEO or a like keyword recommendation program).:

Example: Target: SEO Copywriting
Tier 1: SEO Copywriting
Tier 2: SEO Copywriter
Tier 3: Writing copy for SEO
Tier 4: SEO copywriting services

Example Sentence: “Instead of spending time evaluating SEO copywriting Services become a SEO copywriter yourself by following these guidelines and you’ll be writing copy for SEO in no time.”

I sort of packed it all into one sentence, but you should get the gist.

(9) Write for what the reader is searching for, not what you think they should be searching for. Remember that your job is to provide the “solution” to the problem, not create a greater problem by making the reader/searcher feel dumb. If they are searching for Ham and Green Eggs instead of Green Eggs and Ham, give them Ham and Green Eggs – “The Searcher is Always Right” to paraphrase a service industry mantra.

(10) On Page Structure and Code “Tricks” There is an old saying from high school debate teams: “Tell them what your gonna tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them”. The same applies to SEO copywriting. Use an “introductory statement”, then your body content with bullet points or numbering, then a “summary” (which is essentially the same as your introductory statement). Don’t forget to avail yourself of page specific meta tags, page title, ALT Tags, Image Tags, Screen Tips, etc. to fill in the blanks for the words that just didn’t fit into the “flow” and to increase the relevant weight of your selected keywords.

Remember, SEO Copywriting is a skill. For most people it’s really something you learn over time by doing it, paying close attention to what your competitors are doing and reading up on how to write copy for websites, blogs, press releases and articles.

Follow these simple rules that will help the beginning SEO copywriter and keep the experienced “know-it-all” like myself grounded!

Happy SEOing!

Kaboodle Ventures SEO Copywriting
The Blog Mill Blog Templates

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Conlan

If you are looking for more advice on creating copy for your blog or website give us a call. Likewise, Key Multimedia can write regular content updates and articles for your website or even revamp your copy to make it more SEO firendly.

Dave

To understand what Domain Name Service (DNS) is and how it is used, it is best to start with an example: John Sample wishes to register and setup his web site and email. Here are the steps involved:

A DNS Example
1. Registration of the Domain: John goes to some company, such as LuxSci, and finds a domain name that he likes and which isn’t taken by someone else. He then registers it, paying a fee for one or more years. What does this registration actually buy him? It depends on the company he registered at and for what exactly he signed up; however, it usually only means that John has now leased the domain name for some period of time. He doesn’t actually “own” it, he just has the sole right to use it for some period of time, after which he has the right to renew his lease.

Note that when you register a new domain name [say at Lux Scientiae], it will take 0-24 hours for that domain to become live and functional on the Internet. If you register it elsewhere, it may take longer.

2. Sign up for web and/or email hosting: John then contacts some company, such as LuxSci, to order hosting. A hosting company provides the computers on which John’s web site files will reside and/or which will accept email for John at his new domain name.

What is missing? DNS. Registration of the domain gave John a “name” on the Internet; obtaining web or email hosting services gives him an “address” — the Internet addresses of the computers owned by LuxSci that will be handling John’s web and email needs. What is missing is a connection between the name and the addresses.

I like to make the analogy that DNS is like a “phone book” for domain names. It contains entries that indicate which computer address corresponds to which domain name (and vice versa). You probably use DNS all the time and don’t even know it! Whenever you type an address such as “http://google.com” into your web browser, the web browser uses DNS to find out the numerical address(es) of the computers that handle Google’s web site; it then uses these addresses to connect to those computers to get the web site files.

Thus, anyone who has a domain name needs DNS services. These services are usually provided by your web or email hosting company because they know their computer addresses, and should be in a position to update your DNS settings for you if any of their computer’s addresses needs to be changed I.e. LuxSci will manage your DNS settings for any or all of your domains for you.

You may be able to manage your DNS settings yourself if, for example, your domain registration company provides this service to you, or if you use a company like EasyDNS (of which LuxSci is a partner and whose services LuxSci offers at a discount to its members).

3. Transfer your domain. If your web hosting company is going to take care of your DNS settings for you, you need to give them control over these settings. This means telling your domain registrar (Register.com in this example) what servers your web hosting company is using for your DNS…. your web hosting company will tell you what to say.

DNS Summary
Now you should have a rough picture of the complexity involved in managing a domain name — there are at least 3 sets of computers involved!

One set belongs to your domain name registrar. They keep track of what domains are registered, who owns them, and what computers manage the DNS settings for each of these domains. (This information is stored in a big database called the “whois” database).
One set belongs to the company that manages the DNS settings for your domain. These computers understand what computer addresses correspond to what domain names. Other computers, like your web browser, can ask them to look up the name for an address, or vice versa.
The third set belongs to your web and email hosting company. On these computers, your web site files are stored and your email is delivered. There are almost always different computers than the ones that handle the DNS lookups.
Mail Exchange (MX) Records
An “MX Record” is a DNS entry that indicates what server(s) handle the email messages for your domain. These can be, and usually are, different servers than those than handle your web site. “MX” stands for “Mail Exchange”. Typically, you will have 2 or more MX records for your domain. One is primary; the others are secondary and will queue your email temporarily if your primary email server is down, forwarding it to your primary server when it comes back up. We strongly recommend using 2 or more different MX records.

Subdomains
If John Sample registered “sample.com”, then he really can have any number of domain names, as long as they each end in “sample.com”. I.e. “john.sample.com”, “x1234.sample.com”, and “www.xqy.apple.sample.com” are all domains that John has a right to setup and use because he has registered “sample.com”. These are all called “subdomains” because you cannot register them individually, but get them if you register the normal domain “sample.com”. Subdomains are created when entries for them are made in the DNS settings for your domain.

You can configure your DNS settings to use any addresses you wish for web and email for any of your subdomains. Your DNS provider should allow you to do this as a matter of course. However, your web or email hosting provider will probably charge you extra for the use of additional web sites (for each subdomain) or additional email domains.

If your subdomain is configured to point to another domain name or subdomain name, rather than to a computer’s address, it is known as an “alias” or a “CNAME”.

DNS Propagation: Time-To-Live (TTL)
The “Time-To-Live” or TTL is an important DNS setting that you should be aware of when you want to change your DNS name to address settings or to change the company that manages your DNS. A TTL is roughly the time, measured in minutes, hours, or days, that it can take for any change in your DNS settings to take effect all throughout the Internet. A small setting such as 20 minutes will cause all your settings to propagate across the Internet in about 20 minutes or so, a large setting can result in the changes taking days to be noticed. A typical default setting can be 6 to 24 hours! Clients for whom LuxSci manages their DNS generally have their TTLs set to 3 hours, unless they request otherwise. Note that the TTL is also the time it will take for changes in the TTL to take place…!

Why are your changes not instantly available? The answer reflects the clever way in which DNS works. Your changes ARE available instantly on the actual computers that manage your DNS. However, they aren’t the only computers that give out DNS information to the world — there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of these DNS servers around the world. How would an end user know to ask your particular DNS server for your particular address? That would require another type of “phone book”! No. Instead, an end user just asks their nearest DNS server for your address. This DNS server is probably owned by their Internet Service Provider. If this DNS server knows your DNS information, it tells the end user. If it doesn’t know, it effectively asks your server, tells the end user and stores a copy of the information in case someone asks again.

This distributed method of looking up DNS information is good because it is fast and minimizes the work your DNS servers have to do. It has the drawback that the other DNS severs have stale information whenever you change the data on your servers. To compensate, you can set the TTL on your DNS settings. Effectively, if a DNS server has information that is older than its TTL, the DNS server doesn’t trust that the data is accurate and goes to get a fresh copy. This is why the time it can take your DNS changes to propagate across the Internet is approximately the TTL settings you have made for your domain.

The following is a rundown on announcements made by Brett Crosby, senior manager for the program, at the eMetrics Summit:

Site Search: You can now use Google Analytics to track site search activity. Reports will show the keywords and “search refinement” keywords people use, the pages from which people begin and end their searches and how it affects conversion rates and site behavior.

Limited Beta Test of Event Tracking: These new reports are part of the movement to measure engagement at sites in addition to page views. Analytics users can now evaluate visitor engagement with a site’s interactive elements, such as Ajax, Javascript, Flash movies, page gadgets downloads and other multimedia Web 2.0 experiences.

Limited Beta Test of Outbound Links: In the coming weeks, Google will unveil its Outbound Link Tracking feature. This feature will report on links visitors clicked on your site that direct them to another site.

We have been Google Analytics on our clients accounts for some time now - and look forward to seeing these new upgrades.

For more information about how Google Analytics can help you make key decisions about your web presence give us a call.

Dave