In today’s blog post at Search Engine Journal, Ann Smarty reveals results indicating that Google penalizes sites with over-optimized internal links.

Specifically, she examined the effect of linking to the Home page using keyword rich anchor text. These results are very instructive (thanks Ann!), and they make a lot of sense. Google is right to penalize sites with over-optimized internal links. Here’s why…

When a visitor first arrives at your site, one of the first things they’re gonna try and do is find the Home page. (Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability) And when they do, they’ll look for a link, menu or button that says “Home” (or they look for a logo at the top left of the page). They won’t look for a link that says, “Computer Spare Parts Home” or “SEO Copywriter Home” or “Red Tennis Shoes Home.”

So by optimizing links to your Home page, you’re certainly not improving usability. Your optimization is purely an SEO tactic with no visitor benefit. (Indeed, if you replace all straight “Home” links with optimized links, you’d be actively undermining usability.)

Why should this affect your ranking? Simple. Google wants quality, helpful sites in its SERPs. If you make your site less usable, that’s not gonna reflect well on Google, so it makes perfect sense that your ranking will drop as a result.

I hate to say it (well… err… no, actually, I don’t ;-)), but Ann’s results reinforce what good SEO copywriters have been saying for years: “never sacrifice readability for searchability.” It’s also what Google’s been saying all along.

And, although Ann’s results relate to Home page links only, the usability message (and maybe even the penalty) applies to all links. Don’t over-optimize them. Here’s just a few reasons why:

1. 79% of users scan; only 16% read word-by-word. (Nielsen: How Users Read on the Web)
2. People look for links when scanning a page. (Nielsen: How Users Read on the Web)
3. Concise copy is 58% more usable, and scannable copy is 47% more usable. (Nielsen: Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web). Over-optimizing links makes them both less concise and less scannable.
4. Low-literacy visitors don’t scan effectively. They tend to read word-for-word. And if the text gets to dense, they look for the next link, often skipping important info in the process. If that link is also dense, they’re more likely to skip it too, resulting in more info skipped. (Nielsen: Lower-Literacy Users)
5. The first two words of scannable items, like links, are vital, because they’re often all the visitor sees. They should be words that carry the most information. (Nielson: Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings, Writing Style for Print vs. Web and Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005) And that generally won’t be your keywords. In most cases, the visitor is already on a page related to your keywords. Starting a link with those same keywords really only tells visitors that the destination page is related to the current page. It doesn’t tell them anything notable about the destination page, so they can decide whether they want to read it. Knowing that it’s related to the current page isn’t enough.
6. People love clicking on links; it’s the Internet’s most used feature. (Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use) So you want to make it easy for them to do what they like, and to find what they’re looking for when they do it.

Maybe Google is already taking all of these usability issues into account, maybe it’s not. One thing’s certain though: your visitors sure are!

I read an interesting blog post today: Low value content is destroying your website.

The guts of the post: most pages of most websites are low value. People hardly ever visit them, and if they do stumble upon them, they tend not to return. Only a handful of pages are visited often. Furthermore, “… what I find… is that the search results are full of links to the press archive and other old, out-of date content. Some of the content is misleading and wrong, talking about, for example, a feature for a product that has long since been replaced.”

This post got me thinking (again!) about the implications of ‘low value content’ for search engine optimization (SEO). (No particularly new thoughts; perhaps I just needed to vent!)

As an SEO copywriter, I’m regularly asked to quote on high-volume SEO copy and SEO articles (for article PR / article marketing). By definition, there’s nothing wrong with these requests. High volume SEO copy and SEO articles can be of a very high quality. And they can be very helpful for SEO.

Unfortunately, however, the prospect’s budget usually indicates that the important part of their request is the ‘high-volume’ bit. They don’t really care how good the copy is, so long as it’s keyword rich, and there’s lots of it. They want it purely to boost their rankings.

I know this is slightly different from the low value content discussed in original post, but the end result is the same: it appears in the search results, and it’s read by prospective customers who immediately identify it as crap and infer a great deal about the company that published it.

This is particularly true of long-tail searches, because high volume, low level content tends to be optimized for quite specific keyword phrases. So when someone searches for something really specific, they’re likely to end up at a low level page. And what sort of customers Google very specific keyword phrases? Those who are ready to buy! Now, although there’s never a good time for a reader to think you’re a crap company, I couldn’t think of a worse time than when they’re ready to buy.

The moral to the story: don’t write crap! SEO copy isn’t some invisible force. It’s content that’s frequently read by prospective customers, often when they’re ready to buy. So crap content may – MAY – help your search ranking, but it’s only ever going to harm your conversion rate.

And the sub-moral (here comes the vent…): If you’re intent on having crap written, don’t ask me to quote on it. I never write this sort of stuff. When I write SEO copy and SEO articles – even high volume – I simply can’t write crap. It goes against the grain. I have to write meaningful, helpful copy, and this takes time. (Which means my prices are usually too high for clients who want volume only, anyway.)

End vent.

Happy writing!

I’m ashamed to say it, but many SEOs are just plain dishonest. They know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an utter mystery to most of their customers, and that nobody outside of Google really, truly knows Google’s ranking rules. So they lie. And they get away with it.

This article lifts the lid on a few of those lies. Hopefully it’ll help you avoid those unscrupulous SEOs and find an SEO company that can really help you. (Rest assured, there are plenty of those about, too.)

Lie 1 – “We have a deal with Google”. Untrue. No SEO provider is in bed with Google. That would totally undermine the relevance of Google’s results. The truth is, we’re all on the outside, looking in. Doing our best to unravel the complex mathematical mystery that is Google’s ranking algorithm. Every SEO provider claims to have an excellent understanding of the algo. But you should always just let their results do the talking.

Lie 2 – Timeframe guarantees. Google’s rankings are automatically determined using incredibly complex mathematical algorithms. They’re Google’s single most valuable asset, and they’re devised by the world’s biggest math brains, who are paid squillions by Google. SEO providers that offer timeframe guarantees are suggesting that they’re: a) privy to Google’s most valuable business secret; and/or b) smarter than all of the world’s biggest math brains combined. The truth is that although good SEO providers have a very good understanding of what tactics result in a high ranking, they derive this understanding through trial-and-error only, and they don’t know 100% how long things will take.

Lie 3 – Unlimited keywords. This one defies logic. To optimize your site for a keyword or keyword phrase, you just use it more often than any other word or phrase. But because your site has only a finite number of words, there’s a limit to the number of keywords you can target. For simplicity’s sake, let’s consider a single page of 100 words. If I optimize that page for “SEO copywriter Australia”, that means I have to include the phrase “SEO copywriter Australia” around three times in the copy (for a ‘keyword density’ of 3% - which is a reasonable target). That’s a total of nine words out of my 100. Not too hard to do. In fact, I could also optimize for “case studies” and “sales letters”, without too much trouble. (I’d then be using 21 out of my 100 words – not easy, but do-able.) If I try really, really hard, I might be able to optimize for “annual reports” and “speeches and scripts”, as well, but that’s about the upper limit, because then I’d be using a total of 33 words out of my 100, just for keywords. Doesn’t leave much for meaningful content. Realistically, the upper limit for optimization is about four to five unique keyword phrases per page. (If you don’t believe me, give it a go. See how meaningful your content ends up if you try to optimize for more than four or five keyword phrases.) Now your SEO provider might argue that they’re going to target a different five keyword phrases on each page, but that’s not such a good idea, either. Then you’d only have one page on each ‘subject’ – not really enough to prove to Google that you’re an authority on any of ‘em!

Lie 4 – Package deals, like ‘Economy’ or ‘Professional’. Huh?! You either rank well or you don’t! Does an ‘Economy’ package get you to page 5, whereas a ‘Professional’ package gets you to page 1? What’s the difference? Or do they mean they’ll only target one keyword phrase for ‘Economy’ customers? That’s not much use to anyone! Or, in fact, do they mean they’ll target an unlimited number of keywords for ‘Professional’ customers? If so, I’d refer you to Lie 3 above…

Lie 5 – Displaying logos for big-name clients. Some SEO companies falsely claim – or imply – they’ve done SEO work for big-name clients. Sometimes they’ve done some other sort of work for that client (who knows… maybe data entry, maybe gardening!), and sometimes they’ve never done any work for that client, at all. For example, I heard of an SEO company that claimed a MAJOR bank as a client, when all they had ever done for that bank was SEM – not SEO – for a single keyword, once, long ago. So always be sure to ask exactly what your SEO provider has done for each client it claims. And if you’re still in doubt, ask for references.

Lie 6 – Submitting your site to thousands of search engines, over and over, will get you a high ranking. It doesn’t. In fact, I’m amazed this one’s still going around. The truth is, you usually don’t have to submit your site at all. Search engines are, after all, created to FIND and INDEX websites. So theoretically, they should be able to find and index yours without any help from you! Of course, it never hurts to be on the safe side. So if you want some peace of mind, you can certainly submit your site to Google. But you can forget the others. And you should never pay someone else to submit your site to Google. It’s easy and free. Just go to http://www.google.com.au/addurl and type in your URL. That’s all there is to it. (Note that if take up one of those offers to submit your site to thousands of search engines, all you’ll do is increase the amount of email spam you get!)

Lie 7 – Spend a lot on Google AdWords, and you’ll automatically get a high ranking. Absolute rubbish! Although Google (and most of the other search engines) offer PPC ads, those ads are absolutely independent of your site’s natural ranking. Google’s success relies on its ability to deliver relevant results. The moment it took money in return for natural search ranking, its reputation for relevance would be justifiably ruined. It’ll never happen.

So there you have it. All things considered, it’s hardly surprising that many business owners and marketing managers are a little daunted by the prospect of SEO. But it’s not all doom and gloom. The trick is to know a little about SEO BEFORE you engage an SEO provider. That way, you won’t just have to take their word for everything!

I’ll be releasing V2.0 of my SEO ebook soon. SUBSTANTIALLY updated. If you want to be notified when it’s released, please email me at glenn@divinewrite.com or bookmark the ebook sales page.

Happy SEO-ing!

Which do you use? US or British (Australian) English in your web copy?

Your website is globally accessible, so your readers could come from anywhere. It may seem a trivial consideration, but many readers really care. British readers, for instance, tend to have a strong preference for British English. US readers tend to prefer US English. (Australian readers prefer British English, but will usually tolerate both.)

What’s more, it’s not just a question of pleasing readers when they’re actually reading your copy. You may also have to consider the search engines. e.g. What do you do if half your target audience Googles “search engine optimisation” (with an “s) to find you, and the other half Googles “search engine optimization” (with a “z”)? Although Google is smart enough to know that “search engine optimization” is the same as “search engine optimisation”, if someone searches for “search engine optimization” (with a “z”), most of the results will be about “search engine optimization” with a “z”. And the opposite applies when someone searches for “search engine optimisation” (with an “s”).

So in reality, your primary concern should be the search engines. Whatever choice you make could significantly impact the traffic you actually attract, not just how that traffic reacts to your copy.

Fortunately, for most businesses, it’s not the quandry it might first appear to be. To answer the question, just think about your target audience. Unless your business is truly global, you’ll probably be most interested in customers from a particular country. That being the case, just use whatever version of English they use. If your target audience is American, use US English. If Australian or British, use British English.

It only becomes tricky if you’re juggling audiences. If you’re a multinational, there’s a very simple answer: create localised versions of your site (one for US, one for Australia, one for Britain, etc.). You’ll probably have non-language reasons for doing this anyway; things like currency, legal and product versions.

However, if you’re a small business, you have to make compromises. You can either figure out which of your audiences delivers the best revenue and write for them, or you can try to write for both audiences (i.e. sometimes use US English, and sometimes use British English). The problem with the latter approach is that many readers will notice the inconsistency, and thus pay more attention to your choice of language. The other problem is that you’ll be diluting your keyword density for both the US version of your keyword and the British version, so you may, in fact, harm your search engine ranking for both audiences. (But that’s a discussion for another day…)

Just a quick post this time… I quite often find myself recommending tools or specific applications of tools for copywriting and SEO copywriting. So I thought I’d cut out the middle-man and simply publish my list and a few comments on each tool.

So here’s my list of copywriting tools and SEO copywriting tools. If you have any extras or any comments, please feel free to reply to the thread.

Whether you’re an SEO copywriter or not, you’ve probably heard plenty of rules (accurate and otherwise) regarding how many words you need on each page of your website. Chances are, the loudest voices in the clamor are those advocating HEAPS of copy. But remember, the person with the loudest voice isn’t always right…

While I definitely agree that ‘content is king’, there is no need to write volumes. You can reach the top of the search engines with a page wordcount of between on most pages. As a rule of thumb, below 100 is probably too little for the search engines, whereas above 1000 is definitely too much for your visitors.

Don’t be intimidated into writing pages and pages of copy for your home page (or any other page where short, succinct copy is required). When it comes down to it, Google and the other search engines don’t count your number of words and strike you off the list if you’re too high or too low. They’re only interested in your word count insofar as it’s an indication of the helpfulness of your website. Typically a helpful website will have a lot of words and an unhelpful website will have very few. (It’s a very limited way of looking at the world, but you have to remember that search engines aren’t as good at assessing the relevance and usefulness of a website as humans are. Also, remember that they use other rules to help them decide what sites should rank highly.)

When it comes down to it, the one and only thing that you should absolutely do is write for your visitors first. After all, they may buy from you; there’s absolutely no chance the search engines will!

The short answer is no.

The long answer follows…

As soon as you start optimizing your web copy, you’ll realise that it’s quite difficult to repeat your keyword again and again, without your copy becoming very unfriendly to readers.

This is particularly problematic when you’re targeting very specific keyword phrases. For example, for me, targeting “copywriter” is quite easy, but targeting “SEO website copywriter Australia” is a lot more difficult. If my web page has 200 words, my keyword has to appear six times for a keyword density of 3%. That’s fine if it’s a single word, because there’ll still be 194 words of normal copy left. The keyword won’t be so noticeable to readers. But if there are four words in the keyword phrase, there’ll only be 176 words left. That would make the keyword phrase a lot more noticeable.

What’s more, exact keyword phrases are difficult to incorporate into your copy in a natural way.

Fortunately, however, you don’t have to actually target the exact phrase. You can simply target the individual words. So instead of me repeating the exact phrase “SEO website copywriter Australia” six times, I’d simply repeat “SEO” six times, “website” six times, “copywriter” six times, and “Australia” six times. These individual repetitions could appear anywhere on the page.

Using this approach, I can achieve the density I’m after without sacrificing readability.

I will qualify this: it’s my understanding that when someone searches for “SEO website copywriter Australia”, all things being equal, a website that targets the exact string “SEO website copywriter Australia” will rank higher than a website that targets just the individual words. But when are all things ever equal?

As always, the important thing to remember is that human visitors are more important than search engines. What’s more, keyword density is not the be-all-and-end-all of SEO. (Please see my previous post on keyword density in your SEO copy.)

If you’re targeting exact strings in your SEO copy, you’ll find it difficult to effectively target more than 2 keyword phrases per page. This is particularly true if you’re targeting very specific keyword phrases.

For example, let’s say you want your tennis clothing page to rank well when a customer searches for the following phrases (i.e. they type EXACTLY what you see below).

• “blue tennis shoes in California”
• “green tennis skirts on the West Coast”
• “purple tennis hats”
• “fastest tennis shoes in the world”

Let’s also assume your tennis clothing page can’t exceed 400 words before it becomes too text-heavy (and looks like a spam site).

Now, if you try to optimize your web copy for ALL of these exact strings, you’ll find that it becomes very difficult to read. Assuming you’re aiming for a keyword density of 3%, you’d need to include each of the above phrases more than 10 times. That would mean approx half of the copy on your page would be keyword strings!

There are two ways to work around this:

1. Don’t target exact strings – Instead, target the unique words from the phrases, not the phrases themselves. In the above example, the unique (and meaningful words) would be: blue, tennis, shoes, California, green, skirts, West, Coast, purple, hats, fastest, world. (Notice that I didn’t include “tennis” or “shoes” more than once, and I also didn’t include words like “in” or “on”.) If you include each of these words approx 10 times anywhere in your copy, you’ll achieve much the same result as if you had targeted each exact string. (I say “much the same” because when someone searches for “purple tennis hats”, all things being equal, a website that targets the exact string “purple tennis hats” will rank higher than a website that targets “purple” and “tennis” and “hats”.) But even if you do this, you’ll still find it difficult to make the copy readable because over a quarter of your page will be keywords!
2. Create additional pages – This is normally the best way to go. Just make your pages more specific. Have one page for “blue tennis shoes in California”, one for “green tennis skirts on the West Coast”, one for “purple tennis hats”, etc. This way, you only around 10% of your copy will be dedicated to keywords. This results in much more readable, natural-looking pages. And in the above example, it would also result in a much more logically structured site; a well structured site typically wouldn’t discuss all of the above items on the same page.

NOTE: When thinking about keyword density, please bear in mind my previous entries on keyword density in SEO copy.

Although you shouldn’t get too hung up on keyword density (see my previous post on SEO copy keyword density for an explanation), if you’re aiming for a density of around 2-3%, you’ll find that this isn’t easy to achieve, without compromising the readability of your copy.

The easiest way to do it is to be specific. (In fact, in most cases, this is the only rule you’ll need to follow.) As you write every sentence, ask yourself, “Could I be more specific?”  For example, don’t just say “our computers” or “our products”; ask yourself if you can get away with saying “our cheap second hand computers” (assuming, of course, that that’s your keyword phrase). Similarly, don’t say things like “with our help”; instead, say “with the help of our cheap second hand computers”. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find there are more than enough opportunities to replace a generic term with your keyword phrase.

Obviously, there’s a bit of an art to it. Sometimes it ends up just sounding like you’re repeating your keyword phrase over and over again. If this happens, you may just need to restructure the sentence or paragraph.

The most important thing to remember is, your site reflects the quality of your product or service. If your site is hard to read, people will infer a lot about your offering… Readability is all-important to visitors. And after all, it’s the visitors who buy your product or service, not the search engines.

One of the most important aspects of optimizing your site for search engines (SEO) is your web copy. Google and the other search engines read the words on your page to figure out what your site is about and which searches they should display it in.

But they don’t read like humans. We actually make sense of the individual words and their combinations, (phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages, page hierarchies, etc). We even take visual design and aural elements into account.
Search engines aren’t that sophisticated (even Google!). In fact, they don’t really process meaning at all; they categorize a site’s subject matter based on the words that are used most often in the body copy, headings, links, etc. The logic behind this behavior is that if a site is about widgets, the word “widgets” - and similar words - will naturally appear in these places at quite a high frequency. (That’s a little simplistic, but it’s about as much as most of us need to know about how search engines work. Their indexing algorithms involve incredibly complex maths - more than my little brain can handle! Learn more about how search engines evaluate content.)

So if you want your site to appear in the search results for “cheap glazier”, then you’d use that phrase relatively often throughout your site. This is known as ‘keyword density’. Simply put, keyword density is a measure of the number of times your keyword appears on a page expressed as a percentage of the total wordcount of that page. For example, if your page has 100 words, and your keyword phrase appears 5 times, its density is 5%. (Here’s an easy-to-use keyword density calculator.)

Keyword density is a particularly problematic concept, mostly because people place great emphasis on it, when, in fact, the search engines don’t measure density like that at all. So when you hear all the rules about what density you should be aiming for, always bear that in mind. Don’t start thinking that the search engines are looking for a density of 5% or 3% or 10%; they’re not. Just use density calculations as a yardstick. A density of 3% will give you a page with plenty of instances of your keyword. If you can’t get a density that high without impacting readability, settle for a lower density. The important thing is that you use your keywords more often than any other single word or phrase.