Successful copywriting is an art form and a skillful copywriter conveys a brand or product message with wit, creativity, and unequivocal purpose. The task, which seems effortless when conducted by the most talented writers, requires not only a strong understanding of English language mechanics and techniques, but also a foundational background in persuasive marketing communication. The copywriters themselves agonize over proper word use and placement (both within the sentence and aesthetically on the page). Thus, a talented copywriter is an incredible team member, and to elaborate on my earlier assertion, successful copywriting is an art form, which is not to be interfered with…

Enter the Search Engine Optimization Specialist.

Just as every company needs a confident and capable copywriter, the organization could use an equally confident and capable SEO specialist. Unfortunately, while a copywriter considers the form, mechanics, and design of text, an employee trained for proper and efficient SEO is concerned with keywords, relevancy, and page rank. Thus, there is a high potential for miscommunication between these two marketing tacticians.

Therefore, it is important to recognize where on a webpage the skills of a copywriter or the skills of an SEO expert should take priority. Below is a guide on how to best optimize a webpage so both machine and customer are able to read and process the page contents.

Research – Pick a Partner and Stay Together

Both team members (the copywriter and SEO specialist) will conduct intensive research phases before producing any content for the webpage. The copywriter will research the company’s internal marketing materials, both online and offline, as well as the messages of competing brands and products. The SEO specialist will carry out keyword research and build a primary and secondary target keyword list. It is important for both of the experts to keep aware of the other’s research, as it will significantly help in the content creation process.

For example, a thorough understanding of the company’s products along with a quick review of offline marketing materials will aid the SEO specialist in the keyword brainstorming and review session. On the other hand, having keywords in mind before the copywriter’s first draft is a great way to start the SEO process early during content creation.

Content Creation – Give a little, Get a little

The Headline

Lead: SEO Specialist

Teamwork is key, but when writing the headline of the page it is absolutely vital to insert a primary keyword.  Thus, if it comes down to it, a copywriter must sacrifice a clever, eye-catching headline for a strong keyword. While integrating a keyword into a great attention grabbing headline is a plus, I’ll warn copywriters to not fight this battle with the SEO specialist.

Extra Notes:  Use the HTML <H1> tag. While form is important, the <H1> tag is a key indicator for relevance when a search engine crawls your Web page. Also, match the title tag keyword with the H1 tag keyword.

The Content

Lead: Copywriter

For the crawler, keywords are important, but for the human visitor, the page’s message is king. If you haven’t captivated the visitors with a catchy headline, it is essential to get to work early in your page copy. Thus, don’t start pushing keywords if you cannot fit the terms (or phrases) naturally within the page text.

Extra Notes: Incorporating both primary and secondary keywords (maximum of 2-3 terms per page) within page copy is of high importance, especially within the first 100 words. While you do not want to force the terms into the text, do write with keywords in mind. Try using keywords early in sentences and passages to aid in delivering the message.

The Form

Lead: Copywriter

Sentence form implies sentence length and structure in addition to text format (e.g. bold, italics, etc.). For sentence structure, keep your text grammatically sound. In the past, I have found concise sentence structure to provide the best results for two reasons.

1)    Better control of the page message and overall reduction in grammar mistakes.

2)    Easier to insert SEO target keywords at the front of a sentence rather than integrating in the middle or end.

Extra Notes: For search engine optimization purposes, bolding and italicizing keywords does carry a little weight with the search engine crawlers. However, the influence is no where near what it needs to be to forcefully incorporate it to your page copy. It is easy to use this strategy ineffectively, and this method can really make sentences look (and read) awkward for page visitors.

The Page Design

Lead: SEO Specialist

Obviously, a graphic or Web designer should be involved in this process, but beware the pitfalls of beautiful web design. Copywriters and designers produce gorgeous templates for company webpages, but considering SEO is too often an afterthought. Keep SEO in mind through the entire process and I suggest always leading with your page headline and content.

Extra Notes: Be weary of Flash designs and other applications on pages. Never hide an important product or brand message under an image, especially a flash image. While regular, non-flash images contribute to overall page optimizations, page content will deliver the most influence on a search engine results page.

Consider the Rest – Bits to leave you with

- External Copy – While this post has only discussed online page content, it is good practice to make keyword insertion a uniform procedure across all marketing materials (e.g. print materials, social media, etc). Therefore, if an offline, print catalogue should ever need to be reproduced on the company website, much of the content will already be optimized for page rank.

- Localize – If you run a small, local business, use the name of your city often in your SEO keywords and website ad text. Not only will this aid in your page rank, but also the incoming SEO traffic will be significantly more targeted and relevant.

- Update your copy – Today’s Internet is personalized, instant, and fresh. Blogs, Twitter, and Facebook are leading the way for instant communication, and this new way to process information isn’t lost on the major search engines. Fresh, relevant content is king!

-   What’s Next? – This is never a question a webpage visitor should be asking. Thus, when writing copy or worrying about SEO, always force another action from your visitor. Moreover, make that action valuable for both the visitor and for your business.

Hopefully, this guide will help to balance our practical SEO mindsets with our appetites for creativity. Do you have any web copy best practices I didn’t mention? Let me know in the comments.

…beatbox outro…

Why is copy important to SEO?

Basically, search engine can easily read and attribute your copy to page relevancy on any number of topics. Your copy generally contains the highest amount of “readable” content within your page. Search engines aren’t as sharp when it comes to reading relevancy into images or multimedia as they are at reading text. While they are getting better in these other areas, copy is still king. Think about it like this, if you pick up a newspaper article and only look at the photo, you don’t always know what the topic of the article is. If you read the caption, you’d have a better idea but you still wouldn’t have all the info until you read the article. If you only had the article, reading it would still get you to the point of understanding without the need of images. Search engines operate much the same way. If you have a photo that is properly tagged than great, but search engines can get most of the way there with your copy alone.

What do I do with all these keywords?

If you read part one of this series, you should have a sound keyword list that has been sorted into silos of 2-3 keywords per page. When finalizing copy for your page, it is essential to incorporate these keywords. You want to accomplish this by adding your keywords into your copy as naturally as possible. This can be done by writing for your customers first. Honestly, take your first pass at copy without any consideration for SEO. Write what you think your customers would want to hear. More often than not, this first run won’t be too far from your finished product.

Once you have your rough draft, you should start looking for ways to include the words from your keyword list. You don’t want to go nuts as oversaturation can hurt your rankings, but you should be able to find some sections that can be adjusted slightly to accommodate a keyword. Look for synonyms or words that can be interchanged in your writing.

For example: If you sell computers, with “computers” being a focus keyword on your page, you may find that you’ve written the term PCs into your “natural” run. Simply replacing PCs with Computers can help focus your copy on the SEO keyword strategy you’ve already developed. Look for the small changes you can make rather than trying to build copy from the ground up around a keyword list. You’ll find that it’s easier, takes less time, and sounds more natural when reading the end result.

There is no real formula for keyword density (at least no publicly known formula) and I’m of the opinion that keeping things natural is more important than coming up with a science for keyword insertion. If you are more of a numbers person, check out this article on keyword stuffing. It’s a little dated but gives a great “by the numbers” perspective to using keywords in copy. Also, if you’re interested in checking your keyword density on an existing page, here’s a great tool to do so.

Why does my copy have to be unique?

Writing unique copy is extremely important to your SEO efforts. You should never borrow copy, outside of a slogan or tagline, from other areas of your website. Even more important, you don’t want to copy information from other sources. Search engines can easily recognize duplicate copy and when they do, it will hurt your rankings. You should start every single piece of copy with a clean slate and write from scratch. Even if you’re talking about two very similar products, it’s important to keep the description of each unique. You can say the same thing two different ways and you want to take every opportunity to do so.

The other bonus of writing unique copy on your pages is that, well, it’s unique. Your users will appreciate the fact that they haven’t seen your content somewhere else. It keeps your site fresh and separates you from your competition.

How often should I update copy?

It depends on the type of site you are but the more often you can update your copy the better. There are some situations where daily or weekly copy updates are important, for example, in a blog. Other times, copy updates won’t take place as often. An example of this might be for a car company. Obviously they would update copy with new model years but it might not be that necessary to rewrite the book on the current model every month. Generally speaking, if there is information you can add or update on your site that will add value, do it. Search engines love new information. On top of keeping your users informed with the most up-to-date information, the search engines know your material is fresh and therefore that the site is active. Just remember, when you do add copy, be sure it’s optimized.

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Hopefully this gives you some ideas on how to integrate some basic strategies for writing copy into your SEO strategy. Remember, you want to keep your SEO efforts organized and optimizing your copy is just part of the equation. The most important factor when considering your copy is that if it doesn’t work for your customer, it doesn’t do you any good. Use your keyword strategy in your copy but be mindful of stuffing keywords in places where they don’t read naturally. If you’ve optimized copy for keywords and it still reads naturally, you’ve succeeded.

“Isn’t that what copy is?” and other excuses of the like will flood your ears like dissidence.

Let those go. Don’t get mad. Naivete still runs rampant in the industry.

Roll with it. Smile. Rewrite it. Document resources. Get paid.

As Seth Godin would probably suggest, “ship” it and move on.

But then there will be those who claimed to have written their own copy, but a few long tail Google searches reveals that either:

1) there’s a cosmic coincidence in writing styles

or more likely

2) they scraped it from another site.
3) they “templated” the content from their competitor’s website, swapping out a few words along the way to make it appear, “original.”

Situations like these are dicey. Money is always good, but search engines like integrity, especially if you’re doubling as their web hosting. And in SEO, integrity – especially with web-savvy clients – is everything.

Here are a few things I’d recommend in situations where the client is trying to pass of scraped content as there own.

Let me know if you’d do otherwise.

1) Offer to write the copy in a more “web-focused, keyword-rich,” format.
2) Do keyword research. There’s a great chance that your research doesn’t align with their content because the data is ever-changing.
3) Point out that such similar content will hurt branding because it will not allow you to stand out.

If they get persistent, try these couple tricks:
1) Argue the styling. Let them know the style is not in their best interest. (“Who uses passive voice anyway?”)
2) Offer to A/B test the copy against other landing pages.

If that doesn’t work, then you have a choice to make.
1) Keep with the client.
2) Let the client go.

If you keep the client and you know the client is scraped, then I would recommend the following:

1) Switch their web hosting to a generic, cheap, 3rd party provider. And let the client know why you prefer this method
2) Take your branding offer the footer (if you designed it)
3) Pretend it never happened.

When stuck in such cases of blatant content scraping, would you do different?

(photo credit:  Torley via Flickr)

Wait, let’s look.

Sorry:  the new, new corporate blog has 7 posts.

Anyway, in his haste to promote a good charity event, he rushed to post the event on both blogs.

Care to guess why I called him about the posts?

He said, “The content is slightly different.”
I asked, “The content is so subtle in difference that I don’t notice it.”
“Well,” he concluded, “One is two paragraphs and the other is three.”
“Yeah. One ‘P’ tag ain’t gonna do it.”

And then I almost said it:

“If you have to, at least use an article spinner.”

It was on the tip of my tongue. I was just talking to my old boss about article spinners, (BTW, congrats on your PubCon speaking invite, Adam) when my friend’s duplicate content situation arose.

But it gave me pause to think about it.

What Are Article Spinners

From the brilliant minds of affiliate marketers (presumed), article spinners are like Mad Lib generators. Pop your article into an article spinner and it will rewrite your content for you. Other names for this type of service are “auto content generator” or “…script”… An article spinner is pretty much a thesaurus and grammar check program rewired into an algorithm to come up with different words to say what you’re saying. One article will be in active voice; one will be in passive…

The articles read like outsourced customer service operators are scribbling them down while they’re painting their nails, but they are “fresh.” You can almost smell the polish(ed…writing).

Auto content generators / article spinners are starting to make more headway as article marketing becomes a more persistent niche. It plays upon the fact that most people are so bombarded by content everyday that they just end up reading for what they’ll looking for and nothing else and don’t notice the quality of the writing.

It’s sad, really…but the pictures are charming.

As Douglas Karr would say,

“Nobody reads copy anymore.”

It’s a way of looking at copy as a template.

Would You Use Article Spinners?

I ask myself this right now. And I have to say that I don’t know if I ever would use an article spinner. But this is coming from someone who wants to be published (when the editing is done) and is up at 2am blasting an old Allman Brothers contest from WolfgangsVault.com because I just like writing.

But if I was doing affiliate marketing, or in an SEO fight for keywords and content generation needs to be quick and painless, I can’t say I wouldn’t at least be tempted by the dark side – just a little.

But not as tempted as I am to buy a Mad Libs right now.

(photo by Urban Don via Flickr)

By osmosis, I suppose, I actually learned a couple things in that morning class- and actually enjoyed the writing exercises.

I still use them – what I can remember of them – when performing SEO Copywriting. Especially this one exercise where we would get in groups of threes. One would come up with 3 nouns. One would come up with 3 adjectives. One would come up with 3 verbs. Then we’d huddled together and try to write an essay out of it. Very Mad Libs-ish, but brilliant. Though I’d always get mad when we got docked for using one of our “nouns” as verbs – and I think the teacher had a vendetta against Shel Silverstein.

How Do I use those lessons in SEO copywriting?

Hopefully, once you get to the copywriting stage you’ve already performed keyword and competitor research. Because then you have to take the words from that research and write, succinct, fluid, readable content based off this data. And when you start, you’ll have to write with words based from three lists:

• branded terms / phrases
• industry terms / phrases
• customer search terms / phrases

Should I Try SEO Copywriting?

I’ve seen arguments before and against attempting SEO Copywriting. Those in favor treat it like an art form. Those who don’t usually say, “write for the readers.” Being one in favor of SEO Copywriting, I will still admit that I support the argument, “write for the readers,” because that’s the key to all writing.

Not that I qualify, but I just those who favor SEO Copywriting have less of a vendetta against Shel Silverstein

Tips on SEO Copywriting

As I’ve said before, SEO Copywriting is an art form. And like all art forms, SEO Copywriting takes time to get going in the right direction.

Here’s what I try to focus on

1)Use Active voice - Search engines read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Writing in active voice (direct action: “I kicked the ball.”) usually helps you get your keywords in earlier in the sentence.

2) Why Use a Pronoun when you can use a keyword? – Don’t go too crazy, but consider which spots you can sub out a pronoun and use another variation of the keyword.

3) Short, sweet sentences – Many marketers are often taught to to write at a 3rd grade level. It’s typically not because people only read that level, but because you don’t have much time to catch readers attention. Make it short and sweet.

And, don’t be afraid to be brilliant!

(photo credit: kevindooley via Flickr)

Thinking like an outsider to your industry strips away the layers of jargon and gets to the root of what you should optimize for. Writing your website by using industry terms will most likely get your site ranked for those inside your industry and that’s not necesarily a good thing.

One client in the heating and cooling business built their site around “HVAC.” In doing some research on what people thought HVAC meant, some thought it was a vacuum mold type of machine. Others thought it meant Home VACuum. Those whole house vacuum systems that are in the walls. Industry speak for HVAC pronounces it H-V-A-C. One letter at a time. In fact, I was told that anyone who calls it H-VAC is spotted as an outsider. I told them “well, that’s one way to get on the right track!”

For the most part, the HVAC company understood that people need to find answers fast online when their furnace breaks, but the majority in their area use a heat pump matched with an air handler. It was willing to wadger that people associated the outdoor unit as the air conditioner and the indoor unit as the furnace. I ditched terms such as HVAC, air handler and R-12 in the most prominant places and replaced them with Air conditioner, furnace and freon.

At the local level, different keyword tools didn’t have enough information and I have tried to rank based on national terms, but I decided to go with my gut. It paid off. The website copy helped educate on the industry terms, but the common knowledge out there in the public helped bring in traffic.

Don’t be vague

One web client I helped had the following copy on the website “This Company is designed to provide solutions that will enhance communication through privatized web properties.” The power of vague works in politics, not in SEO. People don’t speak in vague terms, and when they do, it’s so obvious it’s annoying. Their mindset is that they didn’t want to limit their potential with whoever came to their site. What happened was that no one could understand what it is what they did, so they didn’t bother.

Think like an outsider. Imagine that the person who needs your service is in an elevator with you and you have only a short amount of time to make it click in their mind. If there is one thing that I’m thankful for Twitter, it’s forcing people to think and communicate in shorter sentences. Stay away from vague knowns and ambiguous adjectives. Once you start nailing down your “Outsider” language, you’ll start to see keywords that speak to your potential customers. After all, it’s all about creating stylized synergistic appropriations.

Get submerged in the world of internet marketing long enough and you forget that other people don’t always know what you’re talking about when it comes to techniques and strategies.

Or worse, you forget that not everybody is aware of basic SEO fundamentals.

While doing some competitor research for a client in the realty industry, I came across some classic, old school SEO copywriting keyword techniques.

You know, the ones where you run different spacings on the word as if the search engines still can’t tell the difference between…

“key word” & “keyword”

Or even better…

“…key. Word…”

- that technique is still my favorite. Yep, I still use it.

The one I can’t believe I still see is the one where people still redundantly reuse the same keyword in such redundant fashion with the hopes the by continuing to repeat the keyword with such patterned redundancy that they’ll be destined to rank well for the keyword – or key word. Or even the key.

Word!

I don’t care what key you put it in, if you write like this:

“I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh!
I want your love and
All your lovers’ revenge
You and me could write a bad romance

“Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oh-oh!
Want your bad romance
(Caught in a bad romance)
Want your bad romance”

Then you better have a multi-million dollar promotion machine with recording studios, HD videos, models, distribution networks, and a top tier ad agency promoting an entertainer whose beauty comes from Mount Olympus before you dare think this redundant drivel is going to get you anywhere.

As Matt Cutts often points out, the way to get the rankings you desire is to write engaging content that people want to read, revisit, and link to is better than any offsite techniques one would want to implement.

And though there is some truth to the rumor that repetition of a keyword will better enhance your optimization for the term, but there’s no point to do it if it reads like a third grader’s hiccup.

Search engines have gotten much better at derivative searches.

Google has a wonder wheel that will let you see how their searches are related. Think of it like an SEO Thesaurus. SEM Rush, Google AdWords keyword research, and even Keyword Discovery can give you a bevy of phrases that will let you say what you’re targeting without having to be so redundantly redundant about it.

Try the keyword tools.

Use a little originality. Otherwise your copy will look like a bad romance.

A bad romance…

Here’s to hoping this ranks for the phrase “bad romance.”

(photo credit by Freedoms Fences via flickr. “Bad Romance” lyrics by Lada Gaga)

Some things we’ll like. Some things we’ll wish we’ve done better. Some things we’ll just as soon forget.

And for some internet marketers, the end of January brings around a traditional debate:

“High-Traffic or Long Tail Keywords”

It took me a few years, but eventually I backed into my answer for this question:

“Yes.”

Why?

Because when I first started SEO copy writing I was afraid to go after the high-traffic keywords Keyword Discovery and AdWords Keyword told me I desired. So what I’d do to combat my fear was to wrap the keywords I craved inside long tail phrases that could give me better quality traffic along the way. I wasn’t doing it to be aggressive. I was doing it because I wasn’t sure of my skills, yet. I admit it.

But as I backed into my strategy, I realized how effective it was and tried to apply it to everything.

That’s where the “Maybe” comes in

After a few months, I actually made the keyword goals I one thought unattainable, but they didn’t get me the traffic I coveted.

That’s when I turned to Analytics and Closed Loop Marketing

Analytics told me what the quality traffic was using to get to the site. Closed loop marketing was telling me what inbound marketing efforts were most profitable. Couple those with the PPC efforts and analysis and not only was I able to find better keywords for my site, I was able to use keywords that were better for my site.

And because I had a year’s worth of content on terms that were couple close cranks on the Google Wonder Wheel, it only took a few mods and tweaks on a key posts to help transform my site and increase my relevant traffic.

So if you’ve found the keywords you want, wrapping them around long tail phrases so you can optimize for more than one term is smart. It’s always smart. Why optimize for one phrase when you can use the same space to optimize for multiple terms – so long as the content is fluid, makes sense, and engaging. Yes, SEO Copywriting is an art form.

But take the time to do a closed loop analysis. See what phrases people are using in places Google can’t reach. There’s always a good chance that you’ll find phrases you would have otherwise never considered.

Next week, I’ll go into greater detail about why closed loop analysis is so important.

301 Permanent Redirects

Using permanent 301 redirects is the best practice for duplicate content. Google recommends using 301 redirects whenever possible, even if you have to call your webhost to set up the redirects for you. Amber has also written a post regarding the benefits of 301 redirects. But, when that option isn’t available, what is the next best practice? Or, what if you know that the content is a duplication, but you’d like to keep the page(s) live?

Robots.txt

If you are unfamiliar with a robots.txt file, Pat wrote a great article that dissects each part of a robots.txt. If you’d like to keep your content live, this was one option that you would have. You can essentially tell the search engines to not index or not allow a search engine bot to look at the page. This option keeps the page live, but it also removes the page from a search engine’s index. Well, what if you’d like to have the best of both worlds; keep a page live and indexed by the search engines?

Canonical Link Tag

Your content may not be unique for any number of reasons. There are also endless reasons why you may not be able to use 301 redirects or a roboots.txt file. The important thing is that there is a third option.

Last February, Google and other search engines created rules regarding canonical tags and how you can use them. Basically, if you can’t at all use redirects to eliminate duplicate content, you can use the link tag rel=”canonical” to mark duplicate content (ex. <link rel=”canonical” href=”…../index.html”> in the <head> of the duplicate pages. There’s been additional clarification on this subject, stating that you can add the link tag to the <head> of the original page, as well as the duplicate pages.

I should state that the first two options are always preferred. Don’t get carried away with creating duplicate content and canonical tagging those pages. It’s more or less a last option, just like the order of this article. Google has a nice summary of cross-domain duplicate content options available to you. You have the tools to clean your site’s duplicate content up, now go do it!

Seasonal Updates

Creating a seasonal schedule to update your site, including the themes you would like to use, can go a long way in making sure that your website has new content for each season. Being able to reword a few sentences on each page with some seasonal language can go a long way in showing your users that you ARE updating your site frequently. Search engines will see that your content has been updated on that page as well, which can help your rankings and position. Updating the Description meta tag can immediately show users that you are up-to-date as it is also displayed in your search result listing.

Market Updates

Most SMBs are constantly watching their market for information on what type of economic swings might affect their business. Small businesses are especially susceptible to changes in the market that might cause their business to be hurt drastically or even put them out of business altogether. Writing about your market as a whole can put your users in touch with what your business is going through. They’ll be able to know what you’re feeling about the state of your market, where you think the market is headed, and see a more personal side to your business.

Technology Updates

Not all SMBs may be providing products or services that involve technology, but new and innovative ideas are happening for the majority of businesses. Even if you don’t plan to adapt a new technology, reporting on it can show your users that your business is keeping an eye on technology that can help makes your products or services better as well as less expensive to them. As users are searching for information on these new technologies, your site may have enough clout to rank in the search results, giving you exposure to users who may not have come across your business otherwise.

If you decide to use a blog to make these types of content updates to your site, you’ll also want to read Amber’s post on blogging for small businesses. She’ll help you get the most benefit from operating a blog for your business. If you’re going to make these content updates directly to your site, check out Eric’s post regarding some guidelines for updating website copy. His points will make your website content updating even more efficient.