Dangerous Thinking

We find it’s always desirable to place optimized content as high up in the site plan as we can – ie as few clicks away from the Home page as possible. While the search engine spiders will find the content if the site is set up correctly, the indexer may decide that the content isn’t very important because you’ve placed in a hard-to-get-at location. The result is that the page ranks more poorly than expected.

So, in such a situation, hard work spent optimizing may well not bring the returns you’re looking for.

Recently, we’ve found another wrinkle. If the pages between the Home page and the page(s) with the optimized content do not contain a reasonable amount of spiderable content (eg they contain graphics or Flash and/or little HTML-based copy), the search engines seem even more likely to ignore the optimized content located further in the site.

All this is yet another argument for planning sites with the SEO in mind. You really need to make sure all your important copy is presented in the right way to the search engines.

My Twitter pal and SEO Copywriter A Charlotte Riley took up my post Writing SEO Copy is Different and ran with it. Her views on writing for the Web are worth quoting, alone:

Traditional media uses communication as a bullhorn, but when writing for the Web we have the ability (and obligation) to turn it around completely. To paraphrase Danny Sullivan, search engines are reverse broadcast marketing.

Perhaps a more eloquent summary of one of the themes that runs through much of my writing here at Dangerous Thinking.

But the real meat of Great copy IS user experience is as follows:

Web copy is an equal partner in user experience design.

Just as the design, typography and other visual elements add to a user-centered experience, so do the words that are shared and join us together. The content is the journey.

The piece is well worth a read.

When writing most marketing or advertising copy you make assumptions. You make propositions built on those assumptions. And produce the most interesting and engaging copy you can.

With SEO copy you start from a different place. That place is key phrase research, and while it provides everyone involved with a Web site with priceless information about its customers and competitor weaknesses, often it throws up surprises about how people think about a product or service.

By their very nature, these surprise findings often do not fit in with the client’s expectations, or carefullly developed proposition. Or perhaps you discover factors you or your client have already discounted as being irrelevant or somehow not interesting enough.

That means sometimes you need to make something interesting that the client just doesn’t see merits talking about. Your key phrase research tells you otherwise, so it’s up to you, as an SEO Copywriter to reconcile the over-familiarity of the client with the expressed needs of the marketplace.

You need to find something compelling to say about what may seem mundane. Or you may need to find something new to say about something you think you may have covered already. Whatever is the case, you need to demonstrate this at-first unappealing starting point will work under all the rules and aims of good copywriting.

Making web site content work in this way, is what good SEO Copywriting is. It’s what we get paid for. And it’s one of the areas that make SEO copywriting a discipline all of its own.

Someone asked me earlier this month about how SEO copywriting differs from ordinary copywriting. We ended up talking about how sometimes the SEO copywriter ends up working on much less promising material than our advertising cousins.

The following post attempts to make sense of of what we covered in that discussion. I’ve been tweaking it on and off for several weeks, but I’ve never been totally happy with its clarity.

Today is the last day of the month, so to hell with it. I’m going to press the button and publish.

Let me know what you think.

Please bear with me on this one. Most of my posts here are practical or seek to answer questions that have come up when I’m talking to clients, prospects or colleagues. This one is a little more, shall I say, theoretical – about the nature and process of writing.

Triggered by a Tweet by fellow SEO copywriter michellereno that asked what inspires (copy)writers to write. I believe she has also posted a blog entry.

I’m not sure inspiration is really at the core of my writing – see the third paragraph on this page of my personal blog.

And here’s another angle on the same thing. Some years ago, I found a quote attributed to composer Igor Stravinsky:

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Although some people disagree with my interpretation, what he’s getting at seems so obvious. It’s about having a routine, a process that nails down the trivia and frees you up to produce what matters.

I believe in process for copywriting. Not only does it deliver when it needs to, but by going through briefing, research, key phrase selection, copy plan, drafts and revisions I have the process under control. I move forward in manageable stages sure that what I’m doing is correct.

The solid grounding gives me confidence to produce good copy.

Update: You can find Michelle on inspiration for writing on her blog.

If you’ve been following Dangerous Thinking’s Twitter feed, you would probably have noticed last week that I’d been pondering a Meatball Sundae.

Not anything to do with my interest in food and cooking, you will understand, and certainly not a recipe from my food blog, but Seth Godin’s latest piece of wisdom on marketing.

Although I’m quoting Godin out of context, this quote resonated strongly with me:

Google and the other search engines have broken the world into little tiny bits. No one visits a Web site’s home page anymore – they walk in the back door, to just the place Google sent them. Seth’s Blog

Yet so many people in the Web industry still worry about the number of words we, as SEOs, want to put on the Home page, arguing that people will look at the page and go off somewhere else. Or that the home page has to be different visually. That’s old media thinking – a world where books and magazines need their covers designed in a specific way so they leap off the shelf.

This thinking, then, leads to the thought that the Web is a collection of books.

As SEOs, we optimize copy on a whole range of pages to target selected key phrases. People who search for content arrive at the optimized page, not the Home page, simply because that content matches their search more closely – it’s more relevant. As search engines become more effective and site owners and their SEOs become better at working with them, the concept of the Home page as a magazine or book cover cover will become weaker and weaker.

Still not wholly convinced? Think about PPC. Earlier this year Google changed the rules to stop advertisers directing traffic to the home page (or any generic landing page); instead we must have relevant, good quality, landing pages.

So both Organic and PPC/SEM traffic is coming at the site from an indeterminate angle. Or as Godin put it:

No one visits a Web site’s home page anymore – they walk in the back door, to just the place Google sent them.

So forget about a door for your site. Just make sure everyone is welcomed with the information they’re looking for.

(BTW, I know I’m over-compensating by aligning myself with Godin. I know that lots of traffic is directed to the Home page.)

Writing for search engines is very like writing for people – or is it the other way round?

One of the things we get asked is about headings – like at our presentation at Start-up Day recently – and how they work with HTML’s tags. The rules boil down to common sense if you’re a writer, but they’re still worth listing:

1. You should only have one headline on a page because it’s at the top of the your copy hierarchy – use just one heading enclosed in h1 tags. The second and succeeding headings are ignored by the search engines

2. Put your most important proposition in the headline because that’s good copywriting practice (it speaks loudly to people) – search engines put most emphasis on headlines, so include one of your key phrases (the one you want to get the most leverage for, if it makes sense within the story you want to tell on the page)

3. Break your copy up using subheads. Use those subheads to tell the reader what the page is about and entice them in to read – try to work your other key phrases into subheads between h2 tags.

While search engines are reputed to put some extra weight on a heading between h3 tags, I hardly ever use them. There’s only so much interruption I can tolerate to the flow of my copy. I like simply structured pages.

I’ve added the last chapter to the Google localisation story – for the moment, anyway.

See the Edit towards the end of the post.

Questions about duplicate content are probably the most common of all I get asked. For example:

Can I use the same content across two sites on two different domains?

Can I use the same content in my meta tags across all the pages on my site?

Is it all right to use the same Title on all my pages?

Out comes one of Rosam’s SEO Rules of Thumb. The one that says if it’s lazy, the search engines will probably skewer you for it.

Honestly, the search engines will either penalise you or ignore your efforts. So why bother?

Create some real value in your site and everyone will love you.

Sure. Frequent updates to a site are A GOOD THING SEO-wise. Let’s get that out of the way now. And they’re an excellent way to encourage people to make a return visit.

But they’re not necessary if you’re focused on getting top page positions on natural search. There are plenty of wholly static sites we’ve worked on for clients that perform really well on the search engines. Sometimes just with a concentrated burst of off-site activities after I’ve written some good SEO copy, sometimes with ongoing off-site promotion.

An annual content refresh can be enough, if the other measures are effective and properly executed.

Why is this important? Well, I’ve seen many companies getting their knickers in a twist about how they’re going to produce regular content, or whether they should have a blog on their site because they’ve read that they need to do this to get those high SE positions.

Instead, a good SEO supplier will be able to take the whole task off their hands, so they may not need to make a continuous commitment to working on the site, or to having an out-of-house writer contributing day in, day out.

So think about what you want to achieve and your resources before committing to produce often-updated content.