Don’ts for SEO Copywriting

Top 10 Don’ts for SEO Copywriting

There is no shortage of don’ts when it comes to SEO copywriting. It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade. Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy.

1. Don’t shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible. It’s not about the sheer volume of search terms you include. Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about. Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher’s query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio. When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience.

2. Don’t lose site of balance. If SEO copywriting isn’t about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about? Balance. You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors. But surprisingly, the balance doesn’t come with serving both masters well. The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines. You see, your site visitors always come first. However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won’t see good rankings. If you put too much focus on the engines, you’ll start to lose your target audience. Balance… always balance.

3. Don’t let someone else choose the keywords. If keyword research isn’t a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research. Don’t just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way. Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically. Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy.

4. Don’t sacrifice flow for numbers. This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting. SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don’t work in a normal sentence. An example? “Candies samples free.” Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers. The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, “If you’re looking for candies samples free, you’ve come to the right place!” Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well.

5. Don’t use keyphrases that don’t apply to the page. If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don’t try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic. (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won’t be applicable. (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It’s a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience.

6. Don’t use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page. I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms. However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you’ve got a bunch of typos in the content. It’s just not professional. Some writers will go for the old, “We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town.” I don’t care for that approach. It’s just not natural. Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way? I think not.

7. Don’t use keyphrases the exact same way every time. This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it. (See #4.) There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one. In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use. One way is to break up phrases using punctuation. Since search engines don’t pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: “Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate. Hawaii listings can be…” See? “Real estate” is at the end of the first sentence and “Hawaii” is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there’s no problem.

8. Don’t use all types of search phrases for every situation. There are many ways in which this “don’t” applies. One quick example is that of an ecommerce site. It wouldn’t be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site. They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages. Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page. If you don’t understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you’re likely to have lackluster results.

9. Don’t neglect ALT tags/image attributes. These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link. The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link. Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6.

10. Don’t forget the chain of protocol. There’s a method to the SEO copywriting madness. The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible. Just the opposite, in fact. Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page. The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes. Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.

Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn’t likely to do a lot of good. Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.

When you avoid making common mistakes, you’ll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too.

Keys To Great Email Strategy

The foundations of strategy don’t change, but transferring it to email require a different level of thinking these days.  I was teaching my daughter backgammon and talking about the strategy of the game. She very simply said, “My strategy is to win.”  After laughing, I said “Winning isn’t a strategy, it’s a result.”  But she had a good point; we seem to think very cause and effect in our business.   We either think too narrowly in determining what winning means — or we think so long-term that we lose sight of the strategic things that really worked.

Strategy to me is an evolving thing that includes establishment of goals, objectives, tactics, and an iterative methodology that allows you to create dimensional approaches across many segments, products and channels.

To be successful in email strategy doesn’t start with a communication strategy.  It starts with a framework for how you’ll make decisions.  Here are some elements that should be included in this framework:

1. What are your monetary goals and objectives for your program, and how do they change by segment and/or product mix? This isn’t just a revenue view; it’s a profit view, a cost of reach, direct and indirect value of response, and the variables associated with the cost of running your program.  These are all critical levers you’ll have to make decisions on “in-motion.”
2. What are the consumer actions and motivators that drive a purchase decision?  Not just, why do they buy? But, what motivates them to buy, what type of information do they need in what part of the lifecycle?  How does it evolve by segment?  What type of support does your site, call center, or sales force play in this?  What are the tasks your customer must take to complete a purchase — and how does your operations support those?
3. What competitive considerations are important to your business — and how do they impact the ways your customers make decisions?  This isn’t as simple as saying, we offer a better product or our competitors offer a competitive product cheaper.  You must develop a strategy that can react quickly to market conditions and competitive promotions and adjust to consumer demands.  How will you gather this competitive insight, consumer response and make decisions on this information? It’s critical that you set some business rules upfront for how you will react to competitive considerations.  This includes creating “and/IF” scenarios and outcomes. If you don’t create strategy around this, you will find yourself in reaction mode without well-thought-out plans, ultimately distracted from your program and strategies.
4. How you create customer segments is critical to effective strategy.  You’ll quickly find that if you make it too complex, you’ll never develop a complete strategy that is doable.  It’s critical that you create actionable segments that can be catered to in-program.  Just because you can create dynamically driven segments and event-driven communications doesn’t mean you will have the time or resources to truly optimize all the segments.  Your strategy should define the core primary and secondary segments and prioritize each.  I typically put them into “high value,”  “low value” and “invest” categories, allowing for variations in approaches and techniques.
5. Lastly, your framework should include simple hypothesis-driven testing. Sounds simple: You want to learn something, so you test it and get a result.  But anyone who’s worked in this space long enough knows that test results are rarely “pure” and rarely tell a complete story.  At best they inform direction, not tactics.  Your strategic testing framework should include how often you’ll test, what hypothesis you want to solve, and what are the actions you’ll take once you’ve proven or disproven this thinking. (it may be frequency, it may be price sensitivity, types of communications that drive what actions etc..).  It’s critical that you lay out this framework early in the year.  If you wait till the campaign brief to form thoughts around testing, you’ll end up learning little, creating unneeded complexity and generally confused about what works.

Strategy is something that needs investment and fresh perspective.   I’ve seen lots of tactics, some that worked and some that didn’t — but I’ve seen very few strategic plans that were set up properly for email marketing or eCRM.   With a well-planned strategy, you’ll see fewer and fewer obstacles.   “Obstacles are those fearful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals” — and goals begin with a foundational strategy.

People Are Using Google Reader

As we expected, the new “like” functionality in Google Reader seems like it’s seeing some good usage. Certainly, given that “likes” are fully public, we’re seeing much more social activity on feed items than previously with Google Reader’s “share” or “share with note” functionality. And that’s good. In a world of Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook, where social sharing is very easy, Google Reader needs to become more social, more alive, if it’s to continue growing.

But quite a few people don’t like the functionality — at all. A search of “Google Reader Likes” on Twitter returns results that are nearly evenly mixed between people curious about the feature, and those that wish it would go away. Says one user on Twitter, “Hating the new “like” feature in Google Reader. I don’t want to see Likes from the Unwashed Masses. Anyone know if I can disable or filter?” That seems inline with what many are saying. They don’t care who liked a story, and want a way to turn the feature off. And one user has already created a script to do so.

Personally, what I think what the feature needs is more options. There definitely should be one to turn it off, but there should also be something that lets you sort items in any feed by the number of likes it has. While some people hate the idea of only reading what someone else likes, for popular feeds, it’s actually a somewhat useful filter in determining the most interesting articles. (But again, only in feeds that are popular enough to have many likes to begin with.)

The ease of “liking” an item is good. And I like that it’s not right next to the “star” at the top of an item so users have to at least pretend they looked at an article to “like” it. From what I’m seeing, since Google Reader implemented this feature and the search for users functionality, the number of requests for people to follow my public Google Reader shared items feed has gone through the roof. Again, that’s a good thing to keep the service moving in the direction of social.

But there is one very key flaw to the idea of Google Reader “likes” — if you read news as it comes in, you’re likely to read it before anyone is even able to “like” it. To take that idea further, the longer you wait to read your feeds, the more useful the “likes” are as a social feature. That rewards reading stories late, which is pretty much the opposite of the real-time sharing that Twitter and the like offer.

And unlike FriendFeed, where someone “liking” an item often brings it to the top of the stream, once you read an item in Google Reader, the likelihood that you’re ever going to read that item again is small. The whole concept seems to work against itself, presently. Now, this could change when Google Reader “likes” have their own API, and third-parties can do interesting things with them. But for now it seems to be encouraging RSS reading — already a slow medium through feed readers — to be done even slower.

Hopefully, Google’s ultimate goal here is to create some sort of “Best of” feeds area which you can visit at any time and see what hot items are across Google Reader. It really should have been doing this from the beginning with the “shared” functionality, but it never implemented it. Instead, Digg has owned this area, and now others like Bit.ly are about to enter that game in a big way.

And so Google’s social strategy remains flawed. There are an increasing number of pieces there, but no one can yet put them in place.

New Yahoo Home Page Tomorrow

Remember that new Yahoo home page we previewed waaaay back in September 2008? Tomorrow it will go live for many U.S. users, and it will eventually roll out to everyone who uses Yahoo around the world. France, India and the UK are next up after the U.S.

The final version looks a little more like one of the test pages we caught in the wild in March, without the dark background coloring on the left sidebar. But it has evolved further from that bucket test page, too.

The main difference from the current Yahoo home page is that users can now customize the page with widgets/apps from third parties. Some apps have been pre-created by Yahoo and others. And others can be added as well, Yahoo will make the app based on the URL you supply (they don’t say it needs RSS, although I’m not sure how they create it on the fly without it).

The key change, besides personalized content, is the removal of the tons of links to scores of Yahoo services. Most people only use a handful of those services, says Yahoo, so it’s better to let users decide which ones are present and take up screen real estate.

Yahoo also says they will be letting users sync up the customizations between their mobile and desktop versions of Yahoo starting soon.

Adobe Unveils New Open Source Initiatives

Adobe has rolled out two new open source initiatives aimed specifically towards developers for media companies and publishers. Adobe’s Open Source Media Framework lets developers build more robust, feature-rich media players optimized specifically for the Adobe Flash Platform. The second initiative, the Text Layout Framework (TLF), will help developers create sophisticated typography capabilities to Web applications.

OSMF basically lets developers easily build media players for the Adobe Flash Platform. Adobe says the structure of OSMF lets developers leverage plug-ins for advertising, reporting metrics and content delivery along with standard video player features such as playback controls, video navigation, buffering and Dynamic Streaming. The OSMF source code and software components are available under the Mozilla Public License. Adobe is also partnering with content delivery service Akamai to create a cohesive standard to support Adobe media players that support Flash.

TLF lets developers layout text on web applications with support for complex languages, bidirectional text, multi-columns and other advanced typographical features and controls. TLF is an ActionScript library built on top of the text engine in Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5 software. Similar to OSMF, TLF is available as open source under the Mozilla Public License.

Adobe’s product manager for Flash, Tom Barclay, says that these new initiatives are mainly targeted towards media companies who want to leverage typography technologies and rich media players off of the Flash and Adobe AIR platforms. The New York Times TimesReader 2.0 and The Boston Globe’s GlobeReader are both powered by TLF, and leverage the typography features of the open source code. Barclay says that Adobe saw an opportunity to open code to Flash applications that could prove to make interactive rich media applications. In the past, Adobe has also opened up the Flex Platform and launched the Open Screen Project.

Google Wave Begins To Swell With Developers

Google Wave, the search giant’s incredibly ambitious new Email/IM hybrid that was announced in May, is quickly picking up steam. As of last week the service was open to around 6,000 developers (most of whom had attended conferences like I/O), and Google is planning to send out an additional 20,000 invites over the next month. It looks like a big batch of them just went out, as we’ve received a number of tips about new invitations, and Twitter is currently abuzz with excited developers thrilled to finally get in on the action.

One other piece of news that will be very interesting to non-developers eagerly waiting to try out the service: Google is planning to release Wave to 100,000 users beginning on September 30th, using the service’s main wave.google.com hub rather than the developer site (we can likely expect a Gmail-like limited invitation system). By this time we can likely expect there to be a rich variety of Wave widgets — the site already boasts plenty of them, including a RickRoll widget and more practical things like a weather forecast — but you can’t try them out without a Developer Sandbox account.

Elance Hit By Security Breach

We’ve just gotten word that development-outsourcing site Elance has suffered a security breach, compromising some user information that included names, addresses, phone numbers, and location (no financial information was taken).

Multiple users have received the following letter:

It has recently come to our attention that certain Elance user information was accessed without authorization, including potentially yours. The data accessed was contact information — specifically name, email address, telephone number, city location and Elance login information. This incident did not involve any credit card, bank account, social security or tax ID numbers.

We have remedied the cause of the breach, and are working with appropriate authorities. In the meantime, please take extra precautions in protecting your Elance account. For example, do not provide your login information on any site that is not http://www.elance.com, and NEVER give out passwords by email, over the telephone or on websites that are not the Elance site.

We sincerely regret any inconvenience or disruption this may cause.

For more details and ongoing information about this, please visit this page in our Trust & Safety center: http://www.elance.com/p/trust/account_security.html

Michael Culver
Vice President
Elance

Elance’s security alert site reveals that the data was taken by hackers who discovered a security hole on the site:

The hackers discovered a security hole on an unprotected page that enabled them to access a data table that contained contact information including name, email address, telephone number, city location, and username, and that contained protected versions of user passwords, in an unreadable format called a one-way hash. Their attack did not access personal financial information such as credit card, bank account, social security or tax ID numbers.

In a bizarre twist Elance’s security site says that some of the stolen user data is now appearing on OutsourcingRoom.com, a competing service. Elance writes that it is working to have the data removed.

This is only the latest in a recent string of security breaches on major web services. It’s obviously nearly impossible to guard against every kind of online threat, but if we’re going to become comfortable having our entire computing experience in the cloud, things need to change.