Dangerous Thinking

Thanks to everyone who came to hear me talk about SEO Copywriting in Brighton last night. It was standing room only in Madgex’s boardroom – thanks guys, and thanks to Rosie Sherry and the SkillSwap team for arranging everything.

I promised to make my presentation available today. A PDF can now be downloaded from the Web Positioning Centre SEO Publications page. I hope you find some of the other articles there useful, too.

I’ve been invited by SkillSwap in Brighton to give a talk on SEO Copywriting next Monday, 1st October.

You can get full details at the SkillSwap site.

I hope to see some Dangerous Thinking readers there.

May I blow my own trumpet a little?

I’ve just noticed that Dangerous Thinking is No 1 on Google.co.uk (Web) for SEO copywriting blog.

Can I lay claim to Dangerous Thinking being the top blog on SEO Copywriting in this country?

Actually, they’re not.

It’s a topic that has come up a few times in meetings recently, as people want to divide their sites up into sections such as http://wensleydale.cheese.com. Nice and keyword-rich, yes, but a real hamper to your organic SEO results. And a fashion in webmaster circles from a few years back.

So where’s the problem? Basically, there are two, both related to link building.

Firstly, if you use directories to build some easy links, you’ll find that many of them refuse to feature links to subdomains. So linking becomes even more time-consuming, and you’ll find yourself with a truncated list of usable directories.

And secondly, links to subdomains don’t give you full leverage on to the main domain (or any other subdomains, for that matter), so that you need more links to attain the same Organic SEO effect as links directly to the main domain (cheese.com).

So please try to avoid using subdomains if you’re interested in natural search results.

Many of the Web sites we look at suffer from key word stuffing. While I mentioned key word stuffing some time ago on Dangerous Thinking, I’ve never talked in depth about the practice and why it’s undesirable.

Let’s start with why you should avoid it – simply, the search engines will penalise you by pushing your site lower down the natural search results if their algorithms identify the practice.

So what is key word stuffing? It’s using key words inappropriately on a Web page. The most common practice we see is a webmaster filling the keyword meta tag with every key phrase they think might be relevant to the site. Not good. Your key phrase meta tag should represent the page’s actual content (themes, if you like), not what you’d like to people to find your site for. Just put in the key phrases you’re optimizing on.

Stuffing key words into meta tags also means they’re making a second mistake, believing that meta tags still have a crucial role to play in SEO – they don’t, and haven’t done for many years. And, indeed, the way I tend to think of meta tags is that if you get them right, you get a small amount of leverage, but get them wrong and you’re in the poo.

Another common way to come a cropper is to use a piece of standard copy – typically, webmasters tend to put it on every page on the site – with a list of products or services, or geographical locations because they want to attract traffic from searches using these words. In practice, you can get away with this sort of thing, but you’re running I risk if you do. It also lowers the overall user experience for visitors to the site, which may really be the downside.

Google’s Matt Cutts wrote last week that we should Avoid Key Word Stuffing. It’s worth a read, although the example he cites is so extreme, you wouldn’t dream of doing anything like that, would you?

The most useful item in the post is a link to Don’t load your page with irrelevant key words. I’ll quote the advice here because Google is being very clear:

“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. (My italics)

Have a look at your page content and meta tags to make sure you’re not breaking Google’s rules – and if you want a quick way to check that you don’t have too much in your meta tags (and a lot more, besides) use our SpiderTest tool.

There is a misapprehension amongst some people – even, disappointingly, in the Web business itself – that carefully commissioned, researched, written, revised and approved optimized copy is just a widget for surreptitiously tweaking the interest of search engines. They want to bury it in small type or in some graphical device, because… well, why would people possibly want to read any copy based on key words?

If the optimized copy is based on proper research, it has actually been developed to appeal to the majority of the visitors to your site. How do we know that? Simply because the key phrases that have been chosen have high volumes of searches.

So when the search engine ranks you highly for those key phrases, naturally you’ll get high volumes of visitors. And it’s not much of a jump to see how the key phrase framework the copy has been built on helps the page be more relevant to those visitors. The copy is automatically more relevant because you’ve included the very words your visitors are searching for – or something very similar.

Now comes the important bit. If your SEO copywriter is any good, no-one will know it’s been written to appeal to search engines as well, and you’ll see both traffic and conversions increase.

The Google Webmaster Blog summarises them:

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don’t send automated queries to Google.
* Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
* Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
* Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

I think they can be summarised by saying ‘don’t be dishonest, and don’t load your site with junk’. I’d say they were excellent principles to get your site to perform well on just about any major search engine.

In a word, no. Consider the nature of the battlefield. Google is king of the Web – more than 70% of searches worldwide are on Google. And, in the B2B sphere, probably more.

Google actually prefers older, established sites – it even largely ignores new sites by ’sandboxing’ them for 9 to 12 months. The big hitters have been there for 10 years or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. They’re the kind of sites that will be entrenched in the top positions on popular searches.

Now do you want to take them on? Do you have the budget, stamina and time? Or will you find a better way?

Read the full article Only pick a fight you can win – the first rule of successful Web marketing at Web Positioning Centre.

The role of landing pages continues to be a bit of a mystery to many people who run PPC campaigns.

Until recently, I hadn’t realised quite how much of a gotcha they can become for some people. You see, as someone trained as a direct marketing copywriter, I naturally think in terms of how a person will make their way from initial contact through to sale.

When you use PPC, the route looks something like this:

SEARCH ON KEY PHRASE -> CLICK ON PPC AD -> LANDING PAGE -> BASKET/ORDERING SCREENS -> CHECKOUT

The landing page can be the home page, but it’s just as likely not to be. If you’ve developed enough content to properly match up with the interests of your visitors – sell to your prospects – you should have some copy that matches with the key phrases you’re buying traffic on. If you find yourself directing traffic from all your ads to the home page (or any other catch-all page), you should be asking yourself why there isn’t any copy to satisfy those specific interests.

Without that fit between search and landing page, you’ll be causing yourself two problems. Firstly you’ll be failing to manage your visitors’ expectations effectively, and they’ll be very likely to just go back to the search page because they cannot see what they’re looking for. You’ll have paid for a click and not done anything profitable with it, so pushing up your cost per conversion and having a disastrous impact on your ROI.

Secondly, you’ll be running the risk of attracting the wrath of the Google Adwords system (and if my reading of Yahoo Search Marketing’s latest rules is correct, most of these points also apply to advertising on YSM). If Adwords believes the landing page is not relevant to the key phrase traffic being bought, it will just refuse to run your ad; if it believes the landing page content is marginally relevant, then you’ll end up paying more for your clicks. So you may be blocked from buying the traffic you need, or your ROI may end up being affected through paying more for clicks – even if you do manage to move the visitor on from a less-than-relevant landing page through to purchase.

Another implication is that PPC has become less of a standalone add-on, something you can just fire up and point at your home page. Many of the marketplaces I look at are getting more and more difficult to make good margins in because costs per click (CPCs) are regularly hitting £1 plus. So that means you have to do everything you possibly can to buy traffic at as low a CPC as you can, and then engage with your visitors as effectively as you can.

Proper landing pages can help with both these issues.

The other day I wrote about ‘What’s in it for me?’ and hot prospects. It led to an interesting conversation, which in turn, led me to realising I should have spun the benefits out a little further.

The point I found myself making was as follows. You must let go of your prejudices about what your prospective customers are expecting. Your key phrase discoveries are acting as very valuable market research. They’re telling you what people are looking for in your market segment.

So if the findings are not wholly in line with your expectations, you should listen closely to what people are telling you about their needs through the searches they’re actually making.

Follow what your potential customers are telling you and you’ll get a better, more effective Web site.