I just watched the ‘Rank is Dead’ video interview of Bruce Clay over at WebProNews. Very interesting and, above all, entertaining!

Bruce made some very interesting points, but ‘cmon, everyone has to recognize that he’s just beating up some buzz!

His claims that sites with ‘engagement objects’ (e.g. videos) will outrank sites without, simply because of those objects, is ridiculous. And he knows it. Video can be crap too, and even the best vidoes aren’t scannable the way text copy is. What’s more, Google’s ability to ‘read’ video is still in its infancy, whereas its ability to read text copy is well advanced. So, even if it’s just playing safe, Google will give quality text the benefit of the doubt for a long time to come.

Also, all this hype about SEOs needing to consider traffic and conversions and analytics, etc. Another beatup. Those things have always been important, and always will be. Some companies increase your rankings, some monitor and address analytics and conversions. Some do both. Those companies that just work on rankings will always be important. No matter how the rankings are determined, someone will always have to work on that aspect.

Don’t let Bruce suck you in!

That said, it’s all good food for thought, and I’m sure it’ll all contribute to some degree to the future of SEO.

What’s more, the comments, alone, were worth the read. So thanks WebProNews!

Although I try to blog about copywriting most of the time, I just couldn’t help myself with this one. Strictly speaking, it’s not really copywriting related. Having said that, I think most copywriters would find this tool useful. But then again, I think most computer users would!

If you’re anything like me, your desktop is awash with shortcuts. I don’t mean a mess, I mean a mass. Everything has its place, and you use them all regularly; the trouble is, you’re running out of space. And the more it spreads, the less usable it becomes. No matter how often you use it, or how logically you position them all, you start taking longer and longer to find the one you’re after.

To make matters worse, the shortcut for displaying the desktop (the Show Desktop button in the Quick Launch bar) reverses the z-order of your open applications. So if you have 10 programs running, and you’re currently editing a document in Word, you click the Show Desktop button, everything’s minimised, but when you go to Alt-Tab to return to your Word document, you find it’s right at the end of the list, so you have to Alt-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab-Tab… You get the picture.

Well, if that’s you, then I have some good news for you. A month or two ago, I finally decided to do something about my own overwhelmed (and overwhelming) desktop. I figured there must be a way of managing it better. So I did a bit of a search, and whatdyaknow? There is!

In fact, there are more desktop management tools and desktop supplements than you can poke a shortcut at! I trialled a few (including Google’s sidebar desktop, and a few others that were so bad I can’t even remember their names), and finally settled on one called FSL Launcher. There are two versions: one free (http://fsl.sytes.net/launcher.html) and one paid. (To get the paid, you just make a donation of any amount (at http://fsl.sytes.net/privileged.html) and they send you a password that you can use to download the premium version. It takes them a few days to send it, but they eventually do.) I trialled the freeware one first, and loved it so much that I decided to go the whole hog and ‘buy’ the paid version, which is more powerful.

Here’s a rundown of what FSL Launcher does:

1. Instead of placing all your shortcuts on your desktop, you place them in FSL Launcher.
2. Then, instead of clicking the Show Desktop button (and reversing the z-order), you simply invoke the launcher by moving your mouse to the top left corner of your monitor and holding it there for a second. (You can set how long the delay is. And with the paid version, you can set a shortcut key to use instead.)
3. The launcher displays (wherever you want, whatever size you want) and, hey-presto, there are all your shortcuts, all neatly organised into tabs (again, which you define, e.g. Computer, Finance, Web, etc.). You can even assign icons to each of your short cuts!
4. I’ve set mine so that I only have to single-click the shortcuts to launch their programs. (You can also set it up so that it switches between the tabs when you mouse-over them, but I found this too sensitive. I prefer to click the tab.)
5. Once you’ve launched the program you want from it, FSL Launcher simply hides itself again. (Although you can set it to be always open, underneath your other programs.)
6. And with the paid version, you can launch all of the shortcuts within a particular tab, with a single click. This can come in very handy.

Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge):

I used the desktop for years, and this is HEAPS better. Love it! Of course, I had to break the habit of clicking the Show Desktop button, but that didn’t take as long as I thought it would.

The only downside I’ve discovered so far (and I use it dozens, maybe hundreds, of times a day), is that when it auto-hides, it takes the focus from the program that you’re currently using. So if you use it to open a Word document and you start typing immediately when the doc opens, 5 seconds later, FSL Launcher steals the focus and your words no longer make it onto the Word page. I think this can be overcome by simply setting FSL Launcher to always display (under your other programs), but I haven’t tested this fully yet. Haven’t had time.

EDIT: I’ve since learned from the FSL Launcher Support Team that the above problem with the focus seems to be unique to my computer. They’ve tested on seven other Windows XP PCs and have been unable to reproduce the problem. (Better support than that offered by any of the other products I use!) Also, I’ve been able to work around it by setting FSL Launcher to permanently display (behind other programs). I suspected this would work, and it does. So that’s good enough for me!

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.