Divine Write Copywriting Blog

I’m working on an SEO copy job for a natural therapist, at the moment. They’re doing their own keyword analysis (with a little help from me along the way). Over the weekend, they spent a lot of time thinking about and researching their keywords. Having never done any keyword analysis before, they found this process fairly confusing, and they came to me for some advice this morning. I thought I’d post their question and my answers. Hopefully someone will find the exchange useful.

Client: Using SEOBook’s Keyword Tool, we came up with a list of possible keywords:

• “Digestive system” - 3336 hits from google
• “Digestive disorders” - 74
• “Natural health” - 205
• “Step by step” - 391
• “Naturopath” – 158
• “Naturopaths” – 61
• “Natural therapy” – 30
• Specific words - ailments and conditions - got higher hits and may be included on a specific page. E.g.: Autism, ADHD, Coeliac disease, Irritable bowel.

My Response:

1. I can combine “digestive system” and “digestive disorder” into “digestive system disorders”. Google is smart enough to recognise this combination, and would index you in searches for both. (Note that all things being equal, a site that targets the exact phrase “digestive disorder” will outrank you, but all things are rarely equal! This sort of approach makes very little difference to your overall SEO presence.)
2. I wouldn’t target “step by step” at all. Not in isolation, anyway. People who search for “step by step” could be searching for anything; if you managed to rank no.1 in the world for that phrase, the vast majority of your visitors wouldn’t be interested in natural therapies at all. They’d be interested in all sorts of things. However, because we still use “step by step” in the copy naturally, you’ll be indexed in searches for “digestive system disorders step by step”, and things like that.
3. I’d recommend targeting “naturopaths” over “naturopath” (see reasoning for combinations discussed in point 1 above). You’ll notice if you search for either, there are results for all sorts of similar words, including “naturopathy” and “naturopathic”. This shows you that Google is smart enough to find relevant sites even if the word isn’t EXACTLY what the user searched for. The only time it isn’t is when the user actually includes the quotes in their search. This would happen very rarely.
4. With only 30 searches reported, “natural therapy” might not be a very good phrase to target. There is a lot of competition for it. Do a worldwide search and you’ll see there are approx 10.5 million results. That means you’d have to work quite hard to rank for it, and you’d only get a very small reward (’cos not many people are searching for it).
5. Specific conditions - I’d recommend targeting only the ones that you’re really keen to win work from. i.e. If you really want to attract a lot of the traffic that’s searching for “autism”, then by all means target it. But if it’s only incidental, I’d think twice. There would be HEAPS of competition for this word. Probably for most specific conditions. So only choose the ones you really want. You can include the others, of course, but don’t make them your primary or secondary keyword phrases. Concentrate on the phrases that will bring you the most qualified traffic.
6. A note on using targeting specific words on specific pages… Generally speaking, targeting words or phrases on one page only will be pretty ineffective. Normally you need to have a lot of content related to the keywords you’re targeting – a lot more than just one page If google sees a lot of content, it assumes there must be something useful in there.

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Just read some very interesting statistics presented by one of my favourite writers, Gerry McGovern. (The statistcis weren’t from his research; he was just discussing them.)

According to a February 2008 study published by the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research, “Sixty-two percent of marketers believe traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past two years… [and] Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they intended to spend more ad dollars on the Internet in 2008.”

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

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‘Link baiting’ may just be a fancy name for ‘good web content’, but it’s a handy reminder that content is critical to a high search engine ranking. Simply put, it’s about making your site content so good that people can’t help but link to it. They feel they’d be doing their own visitors a disservice by not linking.

Of course, I’m not talking just copy here; I’m talking about ALL of the content on your site. Copy, videos, downloads, games, forums, survey results, articles… Anything that makes your site helpful and informative. (Think of it as reverse viral marketing.)

By way of example, take the Partner4Real online dating site. They originally engaged an SEO company to get them a high ranking for a number of terms, including “online dating”, “dating”, “personals”, “singles” and “free dating”. While this went ok, they’re now doing better by themselves, simply by focussing on link baiting. They have very helpful web content and a weekly video from a doctor of herbal medicine. For “online dating” they rank no.2 in the world when you search from Australia. Not bad considering the site’s only very new…

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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.

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One of the best ways to build the link popularity of your site (thereby increasing your search engine rank) is to check where your competitors’ links are coming from, and try to get links from those sites yourself. (You’ll be surprised where some of their links come from.)

Yes, it’s a simple idea, but when you actually try to do it, it takes time and you need to be organised. Below is a guide that’ll help you complete the task efficiently and effectively.

To check on the links of your competitors:

STEP 1) Go to Google and search for your target keyword.
STEP 2) Make a note of the top 5 competitors who appear (write down their domain name).
STEP 3) Return to Google and search for the first domain name in the list (i.e. type “www.competitorsdomainname.com” in the search field, including the quotes).
STEP 4) Google will display all the pages it can find that contain the string, www.competitorsdomainname.com. In most cases, these instances will be actual links to your competitor’s website. (TIP: If there are many results, bookmark the search results page as this process will take a long time – possibly months.)
STEP 5) Visit each page (TIP: Right click on the first result and select “Open in New Window”. By opening a separate window to see the page, you won’t lose your search results page.)
STEP 6) Try to think of a way to get a link to your website on the same page (TIP: Avoid sending them an email as webmaster receive a lot of SPAM and your email will likely go unnoticed. Try calling them instead.)
STEP 7) Repeat for each of your top 5 ranking competitors.

TIP: In the list of results, the sites which appear high up in the list of results are likely to have a higher Google PageRank (PR – see Glossary) than the sites which appear toward the end of the list. You should be more interested in obtaining links to sites with a high PR (assuming they’re also relevant).

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Probably the most well known method of generating inbound links is to look for link partners. This is done in a variety of ways:

• ask customers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
• ask suppliers to link to your site (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
• look for relevant high ranking sites and ask them to link to you (possibly in return for a link to theirs)
• buy SEO software which locates high ranking sites and automatically emails their owners asking them to link to you (possibly in return for a link to theirs)

In my opinion, though, link partners is one of the least effective method of increasing your search engine ranking because:

1. It’s normally done via email and, unfortunately, webmasters of high ranking sites receive many link partner requests each day (not to mention hundreds of other SPAM emails). They’re normally automated and irrelevant. As a result, most email-initiated link partner requests are deleted.
2. Most link partner requests are sent by webmasters of low PR sites to webmasters of high PR sites. Although the link would be very beneficial to the low PR site, it wouldn’t help the high PR site at all.
3. Even if you offer a reciprocal link (a link back to their website), most webmasters of high PR sites will not be interested because it’s extra work. What’s more, they won’t want to obscure the purpose of their site with hundreds of links (relevant or not, they don’t want to look like a directory to their customers).
4. Reciprocal links are of questionable value, unless the sites are closely related.

TIP: If you decide to manually look for link partners, one way of assessing a site’s importance is to look at their Google PageRank (PR). PR is how Google scores importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10. Any site with a PR of 4 or above is generally considered a worthy link partner. By downloading the Google Toolbar, you can view the PR of any site you visit.

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There are many possible ways to generate links. Some are dubious (like auto-generation software, and sites set up by webmasters simply to host links to their other sites) and I won’t be discussing them here. Others, like those discussed below, are legitimate.

NOTE: Link generation is an ongoing (often tedious) task. You need to be dedicated and systematic. In other words, you need a strategy. Take a look through the link generation alternatives discussed below to see what suits you best. Then put your thinking cap on and get creative. It’s a new and very exciting field; there are undoubtedly many undiscovered ways to generate links. This chapter is just a starting point.

The six main ways to generate inbound links these days are:

1. Add your site to DMOZ & Yahoo Directories
2. Get your business partners to link to you
3. Swap links
4. Find out who links to your competitors
5. Article PR
6. Simply have great content on your site

Over the coming days, I’ll cover each of these methods in a little more detail. Today, I’ll address just the first.

Add your site to DMOZ & Yahoo Directories

The search engines regularly crawl these directories in search of new links, and they value these links quite highly (largely because the directories are human-edited).

Here’s how you add your site:

• DMOZ Open Directory Project – “…the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” DMOZ does not charge for submissions. NOTE: This is the same as the Google Directory.
• Yahoo Directory – Yahoo charges for submissions (last time I checked, the submission fee was USD$299).

Stay tuned for further details on the other link generation methods.

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Sorry for my long delay in posting. For the first time in history, I had a long break over Christmas. Only fully back on board today. Now back to business…

What gives you a high ranking in the search engine? Well, assuming you’ve completed step one (i.e. you’ve optimized your website for your target keywords), there’s really only one thing left to do: Get lots of links pointing to your site.

Links are the single most important aspect of SEO. Generally speaking, the more links you have back to your site, the higher your ranking will be.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple. There are links, and there are links. Before launching into a discussion about the best ways to generate links (I’ll address that issue in a post in the near future), let’s first discuss what kind of links you should be trying to generate.

When deciding whether to display your site in its search results, a search engine looks to see if you’re part of a credible network of related sites. This means that the ideal kind of links are those that:

• come from relevant sites (sites which use the same keywords);
• come from important sites (have a high ranking);
• include your keyword as part of the visible link text;
• include varying link text (not the same link text each time); and
• come from a page that links to few other sites.

When a search engine sees a link which satisfies most or all of these conditions, it says, “Hey, this site must be credible and important, because others in the same industry are pointing to it.”

So now that you know what kind of links you’re after, you just need to figure out how to get them. Stay tuned for more info on this…

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Within the HTML code behind your page, there are things called ‘meta tags’. These are short notes within the header of the code which describe some aspects of your page to the search engines. Although there is some debate over how important meta tags are when it comes to SEO, it’s generally agreed that they shouldn’t be ignored.

Whether you’re building your website yourself, or you’re getting a web designer to do it, it’s a good idea to understand the basics. There are four main meta tags you need to consider:

1. Title
2. Keywords
3. Description
4. Alt

Following is a bit of discussion of how these meta tags should look and a few tips for writing them.

Title - e.g. <title>Cheap second hand computers – Widget Computers</title>

The title is the most important of the meta tags. Try to use your keyword at least once in the title, preferably towards the beginning. Also, it’s not just important for your ranking; it also has the biggest impact on your Click Thru Rate (CTR). The text you put in the title will appear as the link text in your Google listing – the bit that people will read first and click on. Think of it as an ad headline – the better it is, the more people will click on it.

TIP: Google only displays 66 characters in the clickable part of your listing. So try to keep your Title text to a max of 66 characters.

Keywords - e.g. <meta name="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="cheap second hand computers" />

Search engines used to look only at this tag to identify a site’s subject material. This isn’t really the case any more, but some search engines still give it quite a bit of weight (such as Yahoo). There are various ‘rules’ about how many characters you should include in this tag. The most recent I’ve been working to is 300 characters (including spaces). I’ve never been too strict about enforcing it though.

IMPORTANT: The most important detail about the Keywords tags is that Yahoo pays quite a bit of attention to it. If you do it wrong, you’ll be penalized. I learned this the hard way. You need to ensure that your Keywords tag is aligned with your web copy. By that, I mean that you shouldn’t include keywords that don’t appear in your copywriting. And I’m not talking about arbitrary stuffing or spamming here. I’m talking about legit keywords. For instance, I used to use my suburb, Bateau Bay, as a keyword for every page of my site. However, “Bateau Bay” hardly appeared at all in my web copy. There were quite a few other examples like this, too, like my state (NSW), and some of my neighboring suburbs. After ranking really highly in Google for about a year, I couldn’t understand why I was ranking so poorly in Yahoo. Turns out, this was the reason. I made the change, and my ranking shot up about 60 positions!!! And I don’t mean from position 1000 to position 940 (that wouldn’t be noteworthy at all). I mean I shot up from about 80 to about 20 (then gradually moved onto the first page).

Description - e.g. <meta name="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Cheap second hand computers for sale – keeping your business running efficiently without breaking the bank." />

The search engines pay some attention to this text when identifying your site’s subject material, so make sure you include your keyword at least once in the Description. Also, most search engines use this text as their description of your site (i.e. it’s the site snapshot that follows your link in the search results). Make sure it’s informative and compelling. Think of it as the copy for an ad.

TIP: Google only displays about 160 characters including spaces. So keep your Description text to a max of 160 characters.

Alt - e.g. <img xsrc="filename.gif" alt="Cheap second hand computer in use" title="Cheap second hand computer in use">

The Alt tag is designed to help visually impaired people use the World Wide Web (WWW). They use software to read out loud the content of your website. When the software encounters a picture, it looks for the Alt text to learn what the picture is, then reads that text out loud. The Alt tag is relatively important to search engines because they assume that your pictures have something to do with the subject material of your site. But like the visual aid software, they can’t actually see the picture, so they look at the Alt text as well. Try to include your keyword at least once in your Alt text.

Summary

You can use the same meta tags on each page, or you can make them unique. It all depends on how many keywords you’re targeting. If you’re targeting a different keyword in the copy of each page, your meta tags for each page will be unique (i.e. you’ll target that page’s keyword within these meta tags).

TIP: If you have any high ranking competitors, take a look at the way they’ve done their meta tags, and follow their lead. You already know they rank highly, so chances are they’ve done a good job.

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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.

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