Dangerous Thinking

I’ve written a few days ago about the importance of choosing the right key phrases for SEO copy and the halo effect from the chosen key phrases.

But why do we work with key phrases rather than key words? Surely ‘cheese’ is a more desirable target for optimization than ‘farmhouse cheddar cheese’? More people will be making searches containing ‘cheese’ than phrases containing ‘cheese’ and one or more other words.

Well, it may have made sense, many years ago when there were far fewer sites on the Web, but these days targeting ‘cheese’ to get a first page position would take a long time and a huge budget.

So the clever money goes for niches, targeted using key phrases rather than words.

Although there’s another reason for targeting key phrases that many people miss. If you try for a reasonable density of key words on your page, you’ll almost certainly end up with a page that screams that it’s optimized and will be very difficult to read. Try using a three-word key phrase and notice that you need to use it far fewer times in the copy.

In the old days of SEO, people used to cram every keyword they thought they wanted to target into the appropriate Meta tag. It’s a practice that the search engines don’t much like these days – hands up if you’re still keyword stuffing – and the most savvy SEO practitioners are focused where the search engines focus, on the page content.

At Web Positioning Centre, we optimize pages on three carefully selected key phrases, a practice that sometimes leads to a client feeling short-changed. “What about ‘caerphilly cheese’ and ‘caerphilly cheese makers’?”, they say, when we show our analysis that indicates that ‘caerphilly cheese making’ is the most effective niche for their online dairy outlet.

The answer is that we’re not excluding related key phrases, and we will get some traction on them, because the interaction beween our optimized copy and the search engines is much broader than just on the selected key phrases – the search engines read and analyze all the content, and they go a step further, too.

Their ‘understanding’ of the copy means they’ll associate the page with other related searches, too. OK, there won’t be such an exact fit with these other key phrases, but they’re key phrases we’ve rejected because they don’t fit the site as well as the alternatives, or they’re just too much like hard work – and high budgets!

But you will get a spread (a ‘halo effect’) around your key phrases. So don’t worry that you’ll be losing out.

This one comes up every so often. And I suppose it’s a misunderstanding that’s largely the result of pitches by SEOs. People say that they’ve had some SEO done on their site, and although traffic is increasing, their bottom line is looking worse because they are not making any more sales.

The thing is, increased traffic doesn’t necessarily lead to more business, and it definitely is possible to increase traffic to a site without making any impact on turnover.

In cases like this, the problem usually lies in one of two places:

1. You’ve already farmed your niche – it may be that you were already successfully targeting just about everyone who’s going to buy your product online, and the extra traffic being generated by the SEO just doesn’t fit. Unlikely, but it does happen

2. The copy on the site is not doing everything it should do – as I’ve said before on this blog, copy needs to do more than just provide fodder for search engine spiders. It must be designed to sell and it must take a clear view of the logical way to direct prospects towards your order form (or other outcome)

In short, SEO must be embedded in your overall site and marketing strategies to get the maximum return.

1. Raw power – How many searches?

2. Low hanging fruit – Low competition

3. Expectation – Is the person using this search likely to be looking for what your site is offering?

4. Is the phrase English? – If it isn’t, neither will your copy be!

5. Can you write good, readable, copy with it? – something like ‘Waterloo Bridge London UK’ is acceptable English, but will be just about impossible to weave into readable copy

6. Is it what you want to say? – Is it a good fit with your products, services, company, marketing plan, business plan and so on?

Traditionally, SEO has been technical. SEO companies have changed code, constructed extra pages of one sort or another, plugged sites into link exchanges and so on.

You can see why. About a decade or so ago, the first search engines weren’t equipped to read the page content – their programming was rudimentary and the hardware wasn’t up to the task in hand. And because early search engines only read the meta tags and header information, there’s still the lingering misapprehension amongst an alarming number of people that all SEO consists of is ‘doing the meta tags’.

These days, the search engines are far more sophisticated, and read and analyse the actual copy in the body of the page – and because meta tags are still often stuffed with junk, the meta tags are largely just ignored. So it’s the copy itself that you need to use to communicate with both the search engines and your human readers. Search engines like to be given a hand by weighting the copy through subtle use of key phrases – and for the benefit of your human audience, make sure your copy also obeys all the rules of good copywriting.

When we’re asked to make strategic recommendations for Web sites, the copy usually fails in a number of ways. It’s non-existent or too short. Or doesn’t communicate the key phrases the client is interested in. Or sometimes the content is so packed with key words that the site is being downgraded by the search engines and given up on by human readers.

Oh, and back to the technical aspects of SEO. Even Paul Silver, our Head of Technical SEO at Web Positioning Centre, had to agree with my pitch to a prospective client that technical SEO, while it’s vitally important, is there to provide a solid platform for the content.

Some people I talk to are suprised when I recommend that key phrases are used in headings on their Web site – from a pure SEO point of view, it makes sense, of course, because the search engines attach more weighting to copy in headings.

But some people seem unconvinced that human readers want to see key phrases in headings. I’ll try to explain why your site visitors almost certainly do.

Think about how any copy should work. How it should anticipate what the reader is looking for, and supply the answers they seek – the ‘where’s the pain?’ approach, where you identify and bear in mind that pain when you’re writing. You show how whatever you’re supplying or able to do alleviates the pain.

If you’ve done your key phrase research correctly, you should be confident that you understand the nature of the pain for your visitors – it’s what the greater numbers of them are searching on, the volume key phrases. You know that significant numbers of people are going to be arriving at your site looking for, say, ‘environmentally friendly nappies’, so why not make it easy for them by flagging up the benefits of your environmentally friendly nappies as soon as they hit the site?

The logic is simple. It’s one of the core reasons why properly written optimized copy is good copy.

When I’m asked to assess copy on a client’s Web site, here are some of the most important things I look for:

1. Does it read well? Obvious, but vital, when so much content is patently rubbish!

2. Does it accurately reflect the client’s products, services and strategy?

3. Are the benefits clearly expressed? Or, more fundamentally, do I understand what the site is about?

4. Is there enough copy for SEO purposes? 200-300 words on a page is a sensible amount.

5. Does the copy support the site’s SEO strategy? Has it been constructed to give leverage to the chosen key phrases?

6. Does the copy keep the visitor on the site? Have a look at the site logs and see where the exit (bounce) points are. How many pages are visited on each visit?

How does yours measure up?

I bet you’re already groaning at the naivety of Emerson’s words. Back when I was foetus copywriter, it was one of the great un-truisms of the industry. Of course you need to let the world know about about their wonderful new mousetrap, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?

So why do so many companies (even large ones) invest so heavily in their better mousetrap and keep schtum about it? I’m talking, of course, about the money poured into Web sites, corporate identity and so on. Yet somehow at the same time, omitting to plan for a realistic budget for promoting the thing.

If you build it, the chances are they won’t come. There’s so much competition out there for both organic (natural) search and PPC (pay per click) that just about any site – established or new – needs to invest seriously in SEO/SEM, or few people will ever find their way there. And low traffic means low profits.

Internet marketing is as serious an undertaking as any other part of the marketing mix, and in an increasing number of cases requires a similar level of investment.

Unwelcome news? Maybe. But if businesses are going to be successful on the Net, they must understand the extreme competitiveness of the online marketplace. I’m afraid too many are simply failing to face up to reality when they put their plans and budgets together.

In this month’s issue of The Marketing Leaders email magazine, I give an overview of the core issues in SEO in 2006.

In retail, position and passing trade are critical. On the Web, search engine positions and the traffic resulting from searches are equally so. There are two effective ways you can attract traffic to your Web site:

• Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) – sometimes called Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and carried out through services like Google Adwords

[more]

My last post talked about some some optimized copy that didn’t appear to be working because it was buried under a heap of HTML, right at the bottom of the page.

Today, I wonder if I’ve stumbled unwittingly into that hoary old question of where optimized copy should sit on the page. I’ve read all sorts of theories of page layout and where you should locate your key words.

Frankly, they’re barmy!

There’s a basic misunderstanding inherent in the kind of misguided advice I’ve seen – that optimized copy is there as a component of a web page concocted to leverage the search engines. Some people even argue that this chunk of copy should be placed on the left hand side of the page, at the end of Worthing Pier of somewhere else equally bizarre. Nope.

As I’ve said here before, optimized copy – SEO copywriting – must work equally for two audiences. People and search engines. That means all the content needs to be optimized on your chosen page or pages.

And, if you have the time or the budget, and you believe you have some excellent key phrases to target, all your pages should contain optimized content.

So where should your optimized content appear? Exactly where the page layout says it should! A properly constructed CSS/XHTML-based site, with careful handling of JavaScript and similar components, will let the search engine spiders have all the access they need to the content.