Write Mindset » SEO

The number one thing about SEO that people just don’t get

Simon — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 09:47:00 +0000

There’s one thing about writing search engine optimised copy that people just don’t seem to ‘get’ – and I’m including here some people who make a living out of SEO.

I have clients who ask me to write SEO pages for them, to promote their business. Some use ‘expert’ SEO advisors, who come up with dozens of search terms they want included on a particular page.

I keep telling these people, you can’t do this. You can’t optimise a web page for that many different keywords and phrases. It just doesn’t work like that.

If you’re going to create an SEO webpage, you need to optimise it for just one keyword or phrase. Just one. Not half a dozen others tagged on alongside. Just one.

Let’s discuss bananas for a moment. Say I wanted to optimise a page for the phrase ‘Hawaiian bananas’. But because I also have other varieties of bananas for sale, I decide to mention them as well. I add some details about Costa Rican bananas, and Jamaican bananas.

Pretty soon, that webpage isn’t optimised for Hawaiian bananas at all. No. It’s optimised for bananas. But that’s not going to do me much good, since bananas is a very competitive search term.

My niche web page about Hawaiian bananas just lost all its SEO juice, and now it’s having to compete with every website out there that mentions bananas. All 14,200,000 of them. Whereas, there’s only 2,200 pages that mention Hawaiian bananas.

Actually, make that 2,201.

Picture by Jason Gulledge via Flickr

Ebook launch: SEO for writers and bloggers

Simon — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:07:11 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen your attention please: I would like to announce the launch of my first ebook. It’s called ‘SEO for Writers and Bloggers‘ and it is on sale now.

It’s a thorough, easy to understand and clear explanation of how to write search engine optimised copy, for blogs, websites, articles, hubs, whatever. It focuses mainly on on-page SEO (the stuff you write, the stuff you control) but also looks at ways to boost your off-page SEO (your popularity or reputation on the internet). It is designed to be the only book you’ll ever need if you want to write effective copy that ranks well in the search engine without sacrificing readability.

If you can’t be bothered to read the whole book, or don’t want to buy it, here’s what it says:

SEO is all about two things: the relevance of your content; and the reputation of your site.
Good content is the best policy.
Keyword research is dull but kinda useful.
Don’t worry too much about keyword density.
Use your keywords at the beginning of your H1 headline; in the first para, in the last para, in bold, in italics, in a list, as an external link anchor, and as an internal link anchor.
Search engines don’t pay much attention to H2 and H3 headlines (subheads) – but they’re a great place to put keywords to increase frequency / density.
You need to put keywords in the right places behind the scenes as well: at the start of the page title; in the meta description (because it usually forms the descriptive text used in the results page, and will encourage click throughs); in your URL (slug); and in alt tags and image names.

The book also deals with off-page SEO – which is all about the reputation of your site. Your reputation comes from what other people say about you:

You need lots of links
But the quality of the links is more important than the quantity
The anchor text used in the link is vital
You’re not really supposed to create your own backlinks – but everyone does
The great thing about making your own links is you control the anchor text
Many of the traditional places to go for backlinks are actually very weak – Google doesn’t pay them much mind. These include: blog comments; article sites; bookmarking sites, social media. They’re all good for direct traffic, but not so much for SEO.
However, the direct traffic people might link to you in their blogs- and that is good for SEO.
You get stronger link juice from sites such as HubPages, Squidoo and Scribd.
Google rates its own Blogger platform highly. You can exploit this.
Guest posting is good for traffic and SEO
Your links out can be as important as your links in. Add links to authority sites such Wikipedia, media organisations and popular blogs to boost your own ranking.

If some of that didn’t make sense to you, that’s because this is an abbreviated run through. It’s all explained in clear English in the ebook, and set out with a logical, easily to follow structure. It’s 50 pages long, costs $14.95 (at present – I’m putting the price up tomorrow. No I’m not, just joking there). And you can buy SEO for Writers and Bloggers here.

There – sales pitch over. So you can relax, just relax, you are feeling sleepy. Feeling sleepy. Go and buy my SEO ebook. Go and buy my SEO for writers and bloggers ebook…..

Scribe – the SEO tool for writers

Simon — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:20:55 +0000

If you’ve been around blogs much of late, and you’re even remotely interested in SEO (search engine optimisation), then you’ve probably heard about a new tool that’s out called Scribe.

There are adverts for it springing up on various blogs, including this one, partly because it really is a great tool for writers.

Also, of course, because it has a generous affiliate earning rate. So, yes, you guessed it, this is an affiliate review. Warts and all though – I’m going to give you the nitty gritty of how I’ve been getting on with Scribe both in my professional copywriting and my blogging.

What is Scribe?

If you know nothing about SEO and want to learn the easy way, then Scribe will get you going, and might be all you ever need.

Scribe is a plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. You access it in the dashboard area of your blog. When you write a post, such as this one, it analyses what you’ve written, and tells you what Google will make of your article.

It tells you what keywords will register with Google. It also tells you how you can strengthen those keywords, or how you can bring other words or phrases more to the fore.

It dishes out good advice on how and where to use your keywords, so you quickly and easily add extra SEO juice to your posts.

Scribe in action – for copywriting

I’ve been using Scribe SEO this week to write a website for a client – a school for the performing arts (all together now: “Fame! I’m going to live for-e-e-ever….”. OK, I’ve got that out of my system, on with the review).

Their specific brief was to search engine optimise the core pages of the site, the home page, about page, and five to six pages on their courses.

The school was getting plenty of hits to their home page, but not really moving that traffic through to inner pages.

They wanted to SEO the course pages, to bring in more targeted traffic.

The courses include things like drama, music and musical theatre.

The SEO terms were very straight forward: they wanted the drama page optimised for the terms ‘drama course’ and ‘drama school’. And so on.

So how did Scribe perform?

If you’re a professional blogger, Scribe will pay for itself in increased traffic.

It was slightly awkward to use in this way, because it has been designed to make life easy for bloggers using WordPress. It is, after all, a WordPress plugin. But I was writing copy in Microsoft Word.

To use Scribe for this job, I had to create new pages within one of my WordPress sites and copy and paste the copy across. I also needed to transfer across keywords, meta description and page title.

This isn’t really how this tool is intended to work, but all the same it did a pretty good job. It told me the density of my keywords and I was able to make adjustments as necessary to maximise my scores.

One area where it fell down was the musical theatre page. I used the phrase ‘musical theatre course’ repeatedly throughout the article, but Scribe never picked it up as a keyphrase. It picked up ‘musical theatre’ but not ‘musical theatre course’, no matter how many times I used the phrase.

I doubled checked on a website where you can analyse these things (for free, by the way). There you have to manually enter the keywords you are using. This site recognised the phrase ‘musical theatre course’ and gave it a thumbs up on density: around 3 per cent.

Why didn’t Scribe pick it up? I’m not sure at present. It may be something to do with the SEO engine it uses. It might be that Scribe is right and Google won’t acknowledge ‘musical theatre course’ as a true keyphrase on that page.

But my guess is that it is a limitation with the software and the way it analyses the keywords.

Overall, however, Scribe did make it easier for me to produce the SEO copy for my client.

Scribe in action – for blog posts

When it comes to writing blog posts, things are even easier, and more effective. You can simply write your post in a natural way, not worrying about keywords in the slightest. I did this with my recent article on how to motivate people. Having written the article, Scribe told me that the keywords registering were ‘pleasure’ and ‘motivate’.

That was fine by me. They’re not brilliant keywords, but then again, I wasn’t all that bothered about SEO-ing the heck out of the page.

Having seen what keywords had cropped up naturally, I then used these in the meta description, page title and keywords, to add some extra SEO juice.

So if someone ever searches for something odd like: ‘write + pleasure + motivate,’ they’ll come across my page for sure.

Hang on, why make assumptions? Let’s test it. Let’s do a quick Google search and… yes, number three in the ranking worldwide – behind the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and some course being held at the British Library by the United Kingdom Literacy Association.

That’s pretty good company I reckon. I’m moving in exalted circles.

Will anyone ever search for such a thing? maybe not, but when writing blog posts, I reckon Scribe can save you tons of time, and really improve your ability to SEO pages without going to too much effort.

If you’re really into your SEO, and do lots of keyword research, and you’re writing articles to target specific terms because the traffic will bring you rewards such as money, then it is definitely a tool you should look at.

There are, however, other ways to check your keyword density, many of them free. And once you get the hang of putting your keywords at the start of your page title and meta description, and using plenty of hyperlinks, then you could get by without it.

I would say Scribe has three key advantages:

2) It allows you to write naturally and see what keywords have been created, then make improvements;

3) It’s a good way to learn to basics of SEO with a bit of hands-on work. So, you could try it out for a month or two, learn what it has to offer and then review how you’re getting on.

The question is, will I keep it? Will I renew my subscription every month? I’m not sure. Why? Well that’s simple, and it’s Scribe’s potential Achilles heel: the cost.

The costs and the rewards

Let’s face it, Scribe isn’t cheap. Blogging generally is cheap. Hosting costs a few dollars a month. WordPress is open source, and therefore free. Most plugins are also free. I’m running a premium, paid for theme called Thesis, but there are plenty of free alternatives around.

Scribe is not free. Not by a fair margin.

They have three price brackets: $27; $47 and $97 – per month. That works out at quite a lot, over the course of a year.

For $27 dollars, all you get is 30 goes at analysing your copy each month. You’ll probably want to run the analysis at least two or three times on each post or article. So it’s maybe 10 to 15 posts.

That’s probably enough for most casual bloggers. On the other hand, most casual bloggers don’t make much, if any, money from their blogs. So it will probably look like an unnecessary expense to them.

For $47 you get 120 evaluations a month. Or for £97, you get 300 evaluations.

Now, if you’re one of those people that somehow makes thousands of dollars a month from affiliate income and adsense and stuff, then $97 to improve your SEO and save a whole bunch of time is not that bad a deal.

For most bloggers, though, it’s going to sound like a lot of money.

I’m not convinced they’ve got their pricing right on all this. Clearly they have expenses behind the scenes and are using up bandwidth and all sorts in providing the service. They have costs, for sure. (And they have to pay those darned affiliates…)

But I don’t know if the WordPress community is really ready to pay this kind of money in significant numbers.

Buying advice

This is an affiliate review, with affiliate links, so I’m bound to encourage you to give Scribe a go.

However, I can honestly say I’ve found it both interesting and useful. I’m probably going to keep it for a second month, at least (although I got an early-bird deal of $27 for 300 evaluations a month. And I’m still not sure I’ll keep it indefinitely).

If you know nothing about SEO and want to learn the easy way, then Scribe will get you going, and might be all you ever need.

If you’re a professional blogger, I reckon Scribe will pay for itself in increased traffic, and targeted traffic at that. So in that sense, it’s a bargain.

My advice would be to give it a go for a month, maybe two, and then review things. As an ongoing cost, it’s a bit scary. If you’re seriously ‘monetizing’ (hate that word) your site, on the other hand, then Scribe’s probably a sound investment.

To find out more about Scribe, click here.

Pic on this post by Jefka via Flickr

SEO: “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists”

Simon — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:59:53 +0000

Here’s a passionately written blog post which has gone viral, and which should interest anyone involved in writing search engine optimised copy. I found it through Boing Boing (my main source of news these days, I have to admit) – and it’s a post in which the writer has a real good go at anyone involved in SEO:

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.”

That’s just how it starts. There’s more. Lots more:

And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you.

Do. Not. Trust. Them.

I have a lot of sympathy with the opinions in this post, even though I sometimes write about SEO, and offer it as part of my copywriting service. I don’t do everything connected with SEO, simply writing web copy in a way that Google’s spiders will find the search terms.

It’s actually pretty simple stuff – and a way it is obvious, as Derek says in his piece.

On the other hand, I was involved in creating SEO copy for a web designer the other day – a company which itself offers an SEO service, and yet I had to explain to them some of the basics, such as optimising one page for no more than one or two search terms.

The same company was also planning to optimise its site for the term “online solutions.”

I had to explain that I didn’t think anyone goes into Google and searches for “solutions”. Do they?

So, while much of SEO may be “obvious” to those in the know, most people don’t have to engage with all this stuff.

Isn’t that the basis of most professions, from lawyers and doctors to designers and chefs? You specialise in one area that may not be rocket science – but because you specialise, you know what needs doing.

Nontheless, Derek has a lot of good points to make about how the quest for Google love is distorting and harming web content. It’s actually a subject close to my heart.

And one I’ve ranted about myself, on occasion.

Is your SEO copy bad marketing?

Simon — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:50:07 +0000

Writing copy that concentrates on keywords too much can become very bad marketing. Why? because it tends to focus on the features of the product or service too much, and not the benefits to the user. That’s bad marketing.

The customer may be searching for “lawn mowers”‘ but what he wants is short grass

It’s something you have to be aware of whenever creating copy for your website. You have to achieve a balance between writing for people or writing for search engine robots.

For example, when a copywriter creates his own website, he’ll use the word “copywriter” as often as humanly possible. So, he’ll end up writing about himself, the copywriter, and the copywriting that he can offer. Features of the service. But any copywriter knows that you need to turn the features into benefits for the customer. It’s good marketing.

The copywriter should be explaining how he can increase sales, attract customers, save the client money, provide exceptional service and so on.

The same applies with lawn mowers. The customer may be searching for “lawn mowers”‘ but what he wants is short grass, great value and delivery by Tuesday.

If you’re a graphic designer, clients won’t search for “professional image”, “design impact”, or “creativity”. They search for “graphic designer.” So your copy has to keep mentioning “graphic designer” this, “graphic designer” that. But that’s not a benefit.

What’s the solution? Balance.

How important is Google?

You need to know how important keyword searches are to you. If most visitors come from other sources – perhaps through a direct mail campaign, Internet advertising clicks, or because they are a regular customer and have you bookmarked, then your copy should focus more towards good marketing, with less emphasis on search engine robots.

But if Google searches are everything to your organisation, then play the game by their rules.

Remember the customer

Carefully written copy can at least try to play both games. You can keep using keywords, but always bear in mind that you need to bring the focus back onto benefits for your customer.

try to play both games

It’s not easy, but it’s what good web writing should be about: keeping one eye on the search engines and pleasing them when necessary, but always bringing it back to people, to customers, to benefits. Because that’s good marketing.

Disclaimer: This post is based on an original article I wrote about 18 months ago and circulated around several of those ‘article sites’. So you may have seen something similar elsewhere. But this is my work.

Accidental SEO

Simon — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:30:43 +0000

If you publish on the web, it pays to analyse who’s visiting your site and how they get there. It can produce some startling results – and can really help improve your marketing and your interaction with customers.

For example, for my day job, I work as a freeleance copywriter. I’ve been doing this for about ten years, and used to be a journo before that. To promote my services, I have a brochure-ware site, which I put a bit of thought into when I created it but haven’t been back too much. It brings in some useful business, however.

Now, I’ve recently investigated and installed Google Analytics which gives you all sorts of useful information about who visits your website and which pages they go to. The bizarre thing with my website is that there’s one particular page that gets lots of hits, more even than the home page, which I worked on extensively, giving it lots of lovely search engine optimisation treatment.

But most hits go one page – the one called ‘costs‘.

I was puzzled by this, but intrigued. Could it mean that people aren’t out there searching for a ‘copywriter’, they’re actually trying to find out how much it costs to hire a copywriter? Maybe.

I think the answer, however, is that for some reason my site scores very highly in Goggle for the search term ‘copywriter costs.’

At the time of writing my costs page comes second in the rankings. And that’s searching on Google.com doing a worldwide search. I’m based in the UK, with a .co.uk URL.

How I have achieved such a high ranking? No idea, really, although I strongly suspect it’s just because I’ve got a really strong page description and set of meta tags / keywords.

Actually, I’m a bit embarrassed about it, as I have no real information on that page about how much it costs to hire me or any other copywriter. I sell the idea of delivering real value, and fudge the whole issue of costs with:

My day rate is available on request.

And the moral of the story? Well, first of all, you need to think about what really concerns your audience or potential customers. They may want some copy written, but the thing they most want to know is, can they afford to hire a professional?

And the second thing is that the real key to search engine optimisation is the words you use. Because that brochure-ware site of mine has barely any inbound links pointing at the costs page and doesn’t have a particularly high page rank. Get to work on those keywords in your meta descriptions.

What is SEO?

Simon — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:10:11 +0000

Glad you asked. SEO is short for search engine optimisation. What follows is a brief introduction to SEO, especially as it relates to keywords and copywriting.

Search engine optimisation helps your website to rank highly in Google searches (and other search engines too, of course). In many ways, it’s a science and a black art rolled into one. Perfecting it is complex, but getting the basics right isn’t really all that difficult.

The situation is that the search engines are in a constant battle with people who create web sites – some of whom are spammers and others who simply want lots of traffic.

Search engines want to give people the right information, which means relevant information. Of course, if you’re creating a web site, the search engine doesn’t necessarily believe what you tell it. You may say (in your meta tags and site description) that your site is about such and such. But are you telling the truth? (Pornographers and spammers typically lie).

So Google takes a look at what your site is really all about, by reading the copy. Or rather, by getting its robots to read the copy.

This, of course, means that the copy on your website has to be carefully written. You need to think about the search terms people will use, and use these throughout your website. Ideally, you need to concentrate keywords together on certain pages. You need to aim for a density of keywords that will make that page rank highly for that search term.

So why not just make a long list of keywords and put them on every page? Because Google and other search engines aren’t so easily fooled. Google looks for relevant use of keywords in real sentences and tends to ignore lists.

You also need to get the “density” right. If you use a particular term too often, Google will think you’re spamming – and could blacklist you.

Google also spots tricks like invisible text (white on a white background). Trying to fool Google can be very counter-productive and it can get your site blacklisted.

The best way to convince Google that there is plenty of relevant content on your site is to have plenty of relevant content. Which means you either write some yourself, or get someone to write it for you.