SEO Copywriting Articles

Partially indexed, poorly ranked, penalized and possibly banned: such is the unpleasant fate of a Web site that’s not duly optimized for the search engines.

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Many consider search engine optimization (SEO) - the process of enhancing your Web site’s visibility in the search engines through ways other than paid search ads - a sort of black box. But once the essential features of a search-engine-optimal Web site are laid out in a concise list, SEO is not nearly as mystifying.

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A workshop featuring practical tips and solutions for integrating the latest email marketing and search engine optimization technologies into your marketing mix.

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“…pleased (and surprised) at how much I learned from Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on how to optimize and generate more revenue and bring more traffic to my sites.”

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Google and Yahoo! have become much more aggressive in their crawling behavior, going deeper into dynamic, database-driven websites than ever before. A closer look, however, reveals that some bad news is mixed in with the good…

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Do you use Google every day? Mastering Google’s powerful search refinement operators and lesser known features could, over a years time, save you days scouring over irrelevant results. Even more enticing is the promise of elusive nuggets of market research and competitive intelligence out there waiting to be discovered.

Learn how you too can become a Google expert searcher and extract invaluable data about your competitors and about the market like never before - with laser-like accuracy and extreme efficiency.

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Seek and ye shall find. But not always.

According to an IDC (International Data Corporation) report from last year, knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their day searching for information. What’s worse, more than half of their online searches fail.

That doesn’t bode well for us, does it? Hopefully, this series has gone a long way to help you make the invisibly rich Internet more visible. We close this series by tapping into the wisdom and experience of two renowned Google experts—Nancy Blachman and Tara Calishain—who share some of their favorite tips, tools, insights, and search strategies for researching with Google.

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There’s a brand new meta search engine on the block called Jux2. Its premise is to find the overlap between the top 10 results across two major search engines. So far I’m really impressed with it. It even has a toolbar for Mozilla FireFox.

Jux2 conducted some tests to determine just how much overlap there is in the top search results on Google versus Yahoo! The results of their tests are very interesting. Such as:

• Analysis of Google and Yahoo! search results on the 500 most popular search terms found that, on average, Google and Yahoo! shared only 3.8 of their top 10 results. Furthermore, 30% of the search terms had 2 or fewer overlapping terms, and only 17% had 6 or more overlapping results among the top 10.
• The overlapping set of top 10 results between Google and Ask Jeeves was even smaller: 3.4 out of 10. And between Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, smaller yet: 3.1 out of 10.
• Analysis of 91 random searches on Google and Yahoo! found that the two engines share only 23% of their top 100 results. Furthermore, only 4.8 of Google’s top 10 results even made Yahoo’s top 100. And only 5.4 of Yahoo’s top 10 made Google’s top 100.

For me, Jux2’s findings were a good reminder that the algorithms of the major search engines are markedly different, more so than one might imagine. So a metasearch engine that compares and contrasts two partially overlapping sets of search results makes a lot of sense. I think I’ll try Jux2 for a while and report back on my experiences.

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Today I had the pleasure to hear web content guru Gerry McGovern speak at a full-day workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. He’s got to be one of the very best speakers I’ve ever heard! His course material, his sense of humor, his thought-provoking insights, and especially his Irish accent — had everyone in the audience mesmerized. Here’s a sampling of the day’s take-aways:

• Action vs. reaction: If a site visitor’s action results in a reaction from your web site that has a wait time exceeding that of the action, the visitor will become frustrated. That frustration will build as more . For example, clicking on the File menu tab only takes a second, so the time it takes for the menubar to appear underneath should take no more than a second.
• 80/20 rule of content: For many sites, less than 20% of the site content accounts for over 80% of the pageviews. With Microsoft.com it was 1% of their content accounted for 99% of the pageviews. In fact, 35% of their pages had never been viewed! That’s well over a million pages of content that people at Microsoft worked hard to write ? for nothing. Focus your efforts on the copy that will be read, not on the copy that won’t.
• Columns: Readers use their peripheral vision to keep track of the beginning of the next line down while they are reading across a line. So with text that has a long linewidth, it becomes difficult to read. Gerry recommends a three column format, with 20% or so of the width going to the first column (use this column for navigation), 60% or so dedicated to the middle column, and another 20% or so for the right hand column.
• Call for action: Always end your pages with a clear action for the reader to take. Never leave the reader hanging, wondering what to do next. The center column at the end of the body copy is a critical piece of real estate for these calls for action.
• Links in copy: According to Gerry, links in the middle of body copy distracts the readers making it difficult for them to read the paragraph, and it connotes “hey, click on me… the rest of this text is really boring!” Instead of embedding links within the body copy, consider using the right hand column for the related links. If there are important links there that take the reader to the “next step,” also repeat them at underneath the body copy in the center column.
• Simplicity: Einstein purportedly was quoted as saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Apply this idea to your web copy. Keep your copy as short and simple as possible. People tend not to read long copy on the web. With a 300 word page, 50% will read it to the end; 500 words, 20%; 1000 words, 5%. Gerry recommends headings of 4 to 8 words, summaries of 30 to 50 words, sentences of 15 to 20 words, and paragraphs of 40 to 70 words.
• “Kill your darlings”: William Faulkner once said this. If there’s a particular expression or way of saying something that you’re particularly fond of, delete it from your copy, because you’re probably overusing it.

Gerry covered so much more than this, but it would take a book to cover it all. Oh, wait a minute… there is a book covering it all. Buy Gerry’s book, Content Critical.

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