SEO Writing 101

By Bhaskar Thakur (c) 2008

Most of the time when we pitch to a new client we are asked for SEO guarantees. “Your competition has guaranteed top results and submission to 100,000 Search Engines and Directories”. We go all out educating clients that Search Engine Optimization is all about smart work and not just adding random keywords and submittíng to every directory possible. I’m writing this article to reach out to the SEO buyers and help them distinguish the crooks from the genuine SEO cos. I’ve compiled my Search marketing experience over the years in this article. I hope this helps you in selecting your Search Marketing initiative.

Commandment 1: There are No Rank Guarantees. (Period)

Search Engines alone control their indexing and ranking algorithm. Do not try to trick Search Engines. The only way to improve your search engine rank is by playing by the rules. And the rule is very simple: make it logical. Web content is primarily for the site visitor and not crawlers.

If your Search Engine Optimizer sold you magic “Top rank on Google in 10 days flat”. Forget it. There are no short cuts. Top ranking in Search Engine Natural Results will take time. Hard work is imperative especially in developing the content on your website and the links to your site.

Commandment 2: Ranking is Not the End, It’s the Means.

Ask yourself what will a top search engine rank get you? Most businesses are interested in increasing sales on a website or at the least driving qualified traffic. Ranking for the right keywords (keywords used by your target audience) is important. There are SEOs who will try to show case results for keywords that occur only on your website. Beware such gimmicks.

Commandment 3: Know Your Competition.

“Rank” is relative position and more so in the Search Engines’ natural results. How well you do in the search engine results is a function of how much hard work you have done in relation to your competition. Analyze your competition’s keywords, links, keyword density and spread, but be sure not to copy your competition.

Commandment 4: Use Search Engine Friendly Design.

A search and visitor friendly design is a must for any successful website. Your website should be compelling enough for repeat visits by search engines and potential customers. Make sure you have search engine friendly URLs and avoid those long URLs with query strings.

Commandment 5: Select Keywords that are Worthy.

You must research your keywords before targeting. There are tools that give you a good idea of a keyword’s search potential for example. It is important to know the number of searches for a keyword in the last month, last 6 months and last year. You should also find out the number of web pages that are targeting the keyword. It is advisable to start a campaign with keywords with moderate competition and a high number of searches.

Commandment 6: Write Great Content.

Even if your website site is technically perfect for search engine robots, it won’t do you any good unless you also fill it with great content. Great means it has contextual and editorial value. Great content brings repeat visits and increases the chance of conversion. Great content is factual and appeals to your target audience. Your web page should have your desired action embedded in the content and you must ensure that the content is fresh. Keep adding and editing content regularly.

Commandment 7: Use Good Hyper Linking Strategy.

Hyperlinks make your content accessible and contextual. You must hyperlink in the right context within the website and to other websites. Good links are appreciated by the Search Engines and by visitors. No one likes to be taken to a mall selling “Macintosh” when shopping for “apples”.

Commandment 8: Write Relevant and Original Meta Content.

Meta content is like a business card. Just as your business card tells who you are and what you do, Meta content tells the search engines the relevance and context of a web page. Resist the temptation to include everything in the Meta content, but make it detailed. Confused? The idea is to include only what is relevant to the page in the Meta Content but to include everything that is relevant.

Commandment 9: Acquire Relevant Links.

The links you acquire are the roads to your web page for search engine bots and visitors. Good links improve your webpage’s equity on the World Wide Web and bad links make a dent in your equity and credibility. Be selective in reciprocal linking. Both reciprocal and one way links work, if you are prudent in selecting the links. Submit your website to the relevant sections in relevant directories.

Commandment 10: Consult Experts, If You Need To.

If you have the competence, there are two ways to learn - learning from your mistakes and learning from others’ experience. You can choose either. If you have the time and can wait for the online dollars, do it yourself. If you want to get started now, it may be useful to consult the experts.

About The Author
The author is an expert in Search Marketing with over 10 years Onlëne Marketing experience. He heads www.rankuno.com, the specialist in online marketíng and Search Engine Optimization. RankUno empowers its clients around the world with high ROI onlíne marketing programs. He may be reached at bhaskar@rankuno.com.

by Gerry Bavaro

IT’S NO SECRET THAT one of the biggest challenges the SEM industry faces is attracting and keeping qualified people. Even Google isn’t immune from the fact that its main assets walk out of the door each night, and several widely publicized departures have caused concern among Wall Street analysts in recent weeks. But the “SEM people problem” isn’t limited to high-level search executives. It extends to just about everyone working in this business today, but is almost invisible to those outside our industry because outsiders often believe that technology prowess, not good old-fashioned, human labor, is what drives success or failure in this business.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While technology does matter, and the differing capabilities of campaign management tools influence the ease with which positive results can be achieved, the human factor is a much greater determinant of success. Buying keywords from the search engines might be easy, and self-service tools are readily available and provide anyone with a will to try, a way to make campaigns happen.

However, ensuring that these keyword buys actually perform in the context of a dynamic, hyper-competitive, auction-based marketplace is one of the hardest tasks going. It takes seasoned, experienced people to translate potential into reality, business and marketing goals and objectives into smart strategies and well-executed tactics.

Consequently, SEM agencies must invest a lot in developing such talent. For example, at my own firm, it takes almost a year of intensive training to groom account managers for sophisticated search marketing account and campaign management. In-house teams must make similar investments to ensure that their staffs are up to speed on the latest best practices. Naturally, losing people in which one has invested significantly can be a major blow, but in a free labor market one must accept the risk of this happening and simply bear the pain.

Some believe that managing the “SEM people problem” will ease as industry consolidation accelerates and/or a projected slowdown affects online advertising. The belief is that if and when layoffs at major agencies happen (as happened last week at DoubleClick), employees will be less likely to flirt with a promising startup or entertain thoughts of setting up shop on their own.

Unfortunately, any expansion of the general pool of online advertising job candidates will do little to alleviate this problem, because so few people possess the highly specialized skills required to manage complex search campaigns. Consider as well that as other forms of online media continue to evolve toward a more data-intensive, technology-influenced planning, buying, and optimization process, (essentially “the ways of SEM”), the paradigm of what the right or best skills are will continue to shift and seem even more elusive to agencies.

In the real world, these specialized skills aren’t taught at most agencies, by search-engine certification courses, at the university level, or through industry educational programs. This is not to say that there is no educational value at any of these venues; just that it is rare that employees have a chance to be exposed to anything beyond an introductory level. Let’s face it, nothing makes for a successful marketing professional other than plain old-fashioned experience with various client and campaign situations and challenges. I know this because we often interview prospective employees who have terrific looking resumes, but have found them unqualified to manage complex search campaigns. To remedy this, they must endure a fairly considerable part of the same rigorous training program we use to train “green” recruits, as well as a good amount of repetition across real client and campaign problems that must be solved successfully.

People — great people who do great work in SEM — will continue to be scarce as long as this industry is in existence. While technology grabs the headlines, people are the essential assets that determine the success or failure of any given online marketing initiative. This will continue to be true even as technology evolves, because strategic and creative decisions can never be trusted to machines, and innovation in general is always about new ideas and methods driven by great human thinking.

In Part 2 of this article, I’ll talk more about the specific characteristics that well-rounded SEM candidates should have. In Part 3, I’ll address the question of what SEM agencies should do (and what they should not do) to attract and retain their best people. Hint: it’s not just about the money!

There are a few sites I maintain and one of them is for my parent’s housecleaning service, DayMaid Inc. in Northern NJ. My father has been telling me they have been receiving contacts through the Web and converted a lead into a regular client. Way to go Mom and Dad!

So I have been managing and maintaining their Website at DayMaid Inc. It is not the most professional, static looking site BUT the copy is there, the ranking is there, the information is there AND

THEY ARE RANKING IN THE TOP 5 for a combination of the targeted keywords! AND first page ranking for a few other targeted keywords.

I am also using AWeber to capture leads and provide FREE housecleaning tips and in the past day, we have had two subscribers! I even got one of my sisters involved and made her create a MySpace and Facebook page.

Everything we have done for DayMaid has been all organic; we never paid for AdWords and the traffic started coming in after three (3) months. See how powerful the use of organic online marketing can be?

Make sure everything is related from the copy on the Website, the tags, your articles, link exchanges and the many other organic techniques that need to be completed to continue getting those page 1 rankings.

Go Day Maid!

Some copywriters do not write for the Adult market and others do but may not advertise it. About six months ago I had a second site designed by Josh Gilmore for our Adult copywriting section of our business. It is called PB Vixen.

PB Vixen is a partnership created by Ralph Greco Jr. and myself, Lisa Weinberger. Ralph has over 30 years writing erotica and then there’s me, the editing and online marketing obsessed Vixen, so when we team up we produce some amazing, converting, optimized copy for the Adult market.

I am happy to say we are ranking number one in the search engines for the keywords: Adult copywriting.

We began getting a few calls and some emails and when I asked the clients how they found us, they said they did a Google search. Another case study that in less than six (6) months we have organically ranked at the number one position for one of our targeted key phrases. Pretty amazing considering the Adult market is over flooded with sites.

What does this tell us? That by sticking to the basics of SEO writing and online marketing, ranking number one and maintaining the top position can be achieved.

by Lisa Weinberger

Have any of you discovered Twitter yet? What a fun social network where you can post one liners every minute if you really wanted to.

Through the Web or mobile, you can let all your followers know what you are doing or share a blog post, article, video, song or just your thoughts on the day. Its such a simple site but fun and keeps you connected to others on the net.

So if you haven’t discovered Twitter yet, come on over and start Twitting and make some new Twitter friends!

by Catharine P. Taylor , Wednesday, March 26, 2008 Granted, it’s way too easy to dump on Starbucks these days, but I was taken aback when I started to Google the name of the coffee chain’s so-called social networking site on Monday and discovered the glee people seemed to take in dumping on MyStarbucksIdea.com.

“You know social networking has jumped the shark when Starbucks gets into the act,” said Elinor Mills at News.com’s News Blog. At Jim Romenesko’s (yes, that Jim Romenesko) Starbucks Gossip blog, one commenter said that “the new ’site’ is just a rebranded Starbucks centric Digg. Just kind of bland.”

Said another: “The website is a complete joke. All of us know they already view this site [Starbucks Gossip] to read everyone’s opinion. Although I’m sure they will read and maybe even use others’ suggestions, it’s nothing more then another PR move to let customers know they’re here to listen and to be able to monitor something, unlike starbucksgossip.com.”
New York magazine called it “The biggest (and possibly worst)” idea to come out of Starbucks’ annual meeting last week.

So is the Starbucks social-networking site that bad? Well, yeah. At least if it’s defined as a social network. New York termed it “a virtual suggestion box” and that description comes closer to fitting the bill, except that visitors can vote on ideas submitted by other Starbucks registrants (yes, you have to register), and comment on their ideas. Not that the most popular ideas will necessarily be implemented, mind you. To me, being able to comment and vote is a big “so what?” That level of interaction is just the baseline cost-of-entry for this kind of site these days. There’s nothing particularly special, or all that social network-y, about My Starbucks Idea, though it would have been considered revolutionary three or four years ago.

In fairness to Starbucks, the company itself doesn’t seem to be calling it a social networking site. After combing Starbucks’ own release about the site and other “Strategic Initiatives To Transform and Innovate the Customer Experience” — enough of the corporatespeak! — all I could find was a reference to it as an “online community network,” which might be something slightly different… I guess.

But I’m probably splitting hairs with the definitions. Some of those who complained about the site on blogs and news sites can rightly be charged with indulging in gratuitous Starbucks-bashing; Starbucks has been built up, even revered, over the years, so now it’s time for the tear-down. But the site — and the Starbucks brand — does have deeper problems than a bunch of people who like piling on. Whether it’s called a social network or an online community network, My Starbucks Idea doesn’t do much to connect Starbucks loyalists — or even haters — to each other. In fact, somehow, even though it solicits ideas and feedback from consumers, the site feels like it’s much more about Starbucks than the people who go there. It’s like the popular kid who wants dozens of friends around her, as long as all they do is talk about her.

Allowing Starbucks consumers to connect with one another is a missed (or maybe future) opportunity. Few brands have the opportunity to build a real-world community into a virtual one, and vice versa. Think of the ways you could expand this virtual community out into the real world of baristas and chai tea lattes, by building communities around individual stores, adding Twitter-style feeds to let consumers weigh in on whether the new Pike Place Roast was any good, and building upon some of the corporate responsibility initiatives the company has in place by further involving customers. Instead, the site is a series of disconnected blog posts, and while some of the posts have garnered hundreds of comments, the site, as it is today, isn’t particularly sustainable.

Though one person who responded to a tweet about the site I posted on Twitter said she’d stayed engaged with My Starbucks Idea for 30 minutes, there’s only so long that one can read about ideas for in-store coffee tastings and drink-of-the-month specials before the content gets old, and you find yourself thinking it’s time to head over to TMZ to catch up on the latest with LiLo and Brit. They are endlessly fascinating; MyStarbucksIdea.com isn’t.
Catharine P. Taylor has been covering digital media and advertising for almost 15 years. She currently writes daily about advertising on her blog, Adverganza.com and can be reached at cathyptaylor@gmail.com

by Lisa Weinberger

I attended a conference in San Jose, Cali in November hosted by Simon Leung and met a great group of Internet Marketers. The light bulb went on last night, (yes a few months later), and I realized I met Mr. JV, Rod Beckwith who has some amazing software programs to help with SEO. From article spinners, automatic submittal programs and more!

It is one thing to purchase a product from someone you have never met but I actually met Rod and he’s a great guy. He actually knows what he is talking about and not just some hyped up sales letter on a squeeze page. We both presented at the workshop so I was able to actually learn from the creator of these different programs.

The submittal process of articles and press releases can take hours and Rod has taken his experiences with his own online businesses and created some great “helpers.” When managing online marketing campaigns, it never hurts to use software programs specifically designed for the purpose of giving your clients the best service with the best results.

Happy SEOing!

by Lisa Weinberger

I am not sure how many people realize that when they are conducting a Google, Yahoo or MSN search, they are logged into their account. If you have a gmail account, when you do a Google search, do you realize that Google knows where you are located and structures the search for that area?

For example, if I am signed into my gmail account and do a search for “Pet Sitters,” the results that pop up are usually ones located in Arizona though I never used the word Arizona or AZ in my keyword search.

For anyone providing SEO services, there are different markets to consider when creating an SEO campaign for your clients Websites. Some SEO’s will use state or city sub-domain names so when particular individuals in a specific area are searching for services or products, their site will come up in the results.

Ah, how tricky the top search engines can be!

As I do not know if this book has been written or in the works, I have decided to share a small part of my knowledge about SEO. If you are doing a search and you type in your Website name to search, you SHOULD show up in the search engine results. If you don’t show up, then you need to contact your online marketing firm or contact us to take over the campaign.

The real achievement is if your Website shows up in the search results when certain keywords or phrases are searched. Think about it, how many people are really searching for your name? I mean besides maybe old friends or ex’s, who else honestly would be searching for Lisa Weinberger?

Do you get the point? You want search results to draw potential clients to your Website and hope your site will convert the visitor into a new client or sale. A Website is only a strong tool if it can be found by potential clients. Online marketing and SEO copy needs to be performed and executed and the minimum amount of time to start seeing results is three (3) months.

by Anna Schibrowsky, Friday, Feb 8, 2008 11:00 AM CST

The conclusion of the 3-part series.

Part 3: Complete Sentences

Your grade school teachers demanded that you always use complete sentences.  No sentence fragments were allowed!

The kids popped open the fruit punch.  They splashed it into their glasses.

Traditional marketing copywriters say go for the attention-getting words.  Leave out the fillers.  Create a sensation and an emotion.

Pop! Splash. Slurp. Mmm. Acme Tutti Frutti Juice Drink. 100% juice. 100% fun.

Complete sentences may pack in more words, but your SEO copy needs to be high conversion copy too.  The headlines that work in print will work on the web.  And people don’t read online copy – they scan it.  Break your copy into bullet points and short sentences.

Tutti Frutti Juice Drink.  Fruit Punch flavor. 100% juice.  8 oz. bottles.  Buy now!

Winner: Traditional marketing copywriters!

That concludes our 3-part series with traditional marketing copywriters winning 2:1.  If you can think of any other teachers vs. writers examples, continue the battle in the Comments section!