With content playing such an important part in determining search engine rankings, we take a look at 7 ways a Copywriter can help improve your SEO.
You won’t need me to remind you of just how important content is for the success of your site. It is an informative guide, sales pitch and global marketing strategy all rolled in to one. As such, the Internet is awash with content. Good or bad, in vast or minute quantities, the written word is the universal language that every site shares.
In terms of SEO performance, it isn’t just what you write, but how you do it and where you position it. A natural tone is a must, but so too are anchor text links, keywords and a call to action. It can be a confusing process, which is why you might consider enlisting some additional help. If you need any more convincing, here are 7 areas that a copywriter can help boost your SEO:
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With Google facing an antitrust investigation in Europe, the question of search neutrality has once again raised its ugly head. But can search engines really be regulated?
Google’s alleged fiddling of search engine rankings for Microsoft associates Foundem and Ciao! have landed them in some pretty hot water. With a European antitrust case pending, the issue of search neutrality and monopolising of the search/advertising market is in the spotlight.
On their European Public Policy blog, Google have been quick to defend its actions. Yesterday, under the title of ‘This stuff is tough‘ Amit Singhal (a Google Fellow) explained just how complex it is to regulate and maintain a search engine. This was in response not only to the pending court action, but also an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Adam Raff, co-founder of Foundem.
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Muddled, linear, maddening…heaven? What would the Internet really be without SEO and can we live without it?
You don’t need me to remind you how unpopular SEO is in some circles. Whilst some see it as a great equaliser and an enabler of smaller websites, others see it as a giant leach, slowly sucking the life out of the Internet as we know it. But is the Internet actually for having SEO?
After all, SEO has helped to form the indexes that the search engines now hold. The dark arts once practised by some have also helped to strengthen algorithms and paved the way for the latest developments.
Everything that achieves great success has to have a nemesis. In politics, fiction (although these two aren’t always mutually exclusive) and business everybody has to have a competitor to drive it forward; but some also need a third element.
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People aren’t just accessing your site from their desktop PCs any more. They aren’t even just searching on Google or Bing. The mobile Internet is exploding and is bringing with it whole new ways of accessing and interacting with the web.
In the early days of WAP phones, the mobile Internet was little more than a novelty. Accessible sites were few and far between, bandwidth was lower than dial up and networks charged extortionate rates for using it. Today, all this has changed.
Mobile phones are more popular, more technically advanced and more connective than they have ever been. The development of smartphones – think the iPhone, Nokia N95, Google Nexus One – have kicked off an evolutionary leap in how we interact mobiles and the specification that they can now offer. Now they have greater memory, larger, higher resolution touch screens and internet connectivity.
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As Social Media continues to expand and lure in vast volumes of Internet traffic, where does its fustier, slower (methodical if you will) and more derided website marketing compadre, SEO, now fit in?
Search Engine Optimisation has been saddled with a reputation for being something of a shadowy practice; online alchemy, created to appease the search engine gods. The thing is though, it works. Better still, it continues to work to this day.
Social Media has emerged from the Friends Reunited Petri dish and exploded into a full-grown living organism, consuming everything in its path; or, at least, nearly everything. Facebook has experienced the most meteoric of rises, propelled by the slipstream of fading stars like MySpace, it has slipped seamlessly into the top 3 sites in the world (2nd by some metrics, 3rd in others) and gained itself over 350 million users.
Thanks to Facebook, along with Twitter, YouTube and a whole multitude of bookmarking cohorts, Social Media has got the world communicating in real-time. This free network of conversations has engulfed the Internet and opened the door of opportunity to marketers. Inevitably, when something huge comes to dominate an entity as the Internet, something has to make way; but is that thing SEO?
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The polka dot adorned King of the Mountains jersey in Le Tour de France might be one of the toughest sporting challenges that nature and mankind have conjured, but online it is the summit of the SERPs that is the beguiling and often impossible goal faces a peloton of websites.
For every keyword there can be only one website at the top of the search engine rankings. Invariably there tend to be a fair number of sites jostling for position, attempting to break away from the pack and take first place for themselves. Just as with our analogical cycling counterparts, it takes a great deal of effort, strategy and knowledge to achieve the ultimate prize.
Getting to number one in Google is the ultimate goal of any SEO; but due to the diversity of SERPs, there are other ways to get noticed. Sometimes getting a spread of good performances within search engine rankings, video marketing, social media, PPC and local search results can gain you the fullest exposure, without even necessarily topping the rankings. Consistently exceptional performances will earn you the Search Engine Marketers yellow jersey, opening the floodgates to highly targeted traffic.
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Avoid the fluff and give your visitors more of the good stuff. Plain English is the new ‘keyword optimised’ for online Copywriters, so it’s time to make it easier on yourself and your readers.
There’s no mystery to producing good copy. First of all you need an understanding of your audience. Next you need to have a reasonable vocabulary to communicate your message. Finally you need a way to instantly engage with the visiting public.
The last of these can sometimes be the most challenging though. What are they looking for? How can you write in such a way to entice them to explore your site further? More often than not the answer is to keep it simple and succinct.
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As a part of our new SEO Tools section, Impact Media are pleased to be able to offer our Lead Tracker application.
This simple tool has been designed to help you find out a little more about where your conversions originated from. Using a straightforward piece of coding embedded within your site, you can log where a converting visitor came from and even what they were searching for to find you.
This is a fully automated system that will deliver reports directly to your inbox as and when a conversion occurs. The Lead Tracker will ensure that you are kept right up to date with all your website’s conversions, whilst also giving you valuable information for your future SEO work.
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See your website from a search engine’s point of view with Impact Media’s Website Analyser.
This brand new SEO tool with give you a fantastic insight into how your website is shaping up. With information on your domain, the link profile and the on page SEO work you’ve performed, the Website Analyser covers the full spectrum in one compact package.
As with all of our SEO Tools, the Website Analyser is completely free and there are no obligations attached. To take advantage of this great feature all you need to do is enter your website’s URL or domain name and a few seconds later you’ll have your full, automated report.
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The Impact Media site now offers a fantastic new SEO Tools area. Here you’ll find a selection of complimentary applications to help you make the most out of your Search Engine Optimisation efforts.
We currently feature three applications:
- Website Analyser
- Lead Tracker
- Video Skin
All of these are free to use for anybody and come with absolutely no obligation, so take a look and see what you can do for your site today.
The Website Analyser will provide you with an instant report on the state of your site. It pulls in information from a number of sources to provide a comprehensive overview of where your website is functioning well and where improvements could perhaps be made. This is a great resource to monitor your progress, so feel free to keep checking back and seeing how your SEO campaign is progressing.
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The Internet is strewn with very well articulated blog posts. By all accounts they are good, indeed some are excellent, but somehow they fall shy of perfection. So what is it that makes a perfect blog post?
First and foremost, the success of a blog post is ordinarily measured in the amount of attention it receives. Whether this is through the media, social networking or swollen traffic numbers, cold hard statistics tend to be a determining factor in the success of a blog.
Not always though, at least not independently at any rate. Occasionally there are posts written to provoke action, reaction and change. When writing with a purpose, the success can only be charted in the post’s ability to effect the intended change, whether through a single post or creating a movement amongst its readership.
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Have we become too open to the idea of sharing information and what can be done to safeguard Internet users from an avalanche of spam in the future?
The Internet as it stands is acting much like the human heart. Whilst continuing to provide a lifeline for millions of individual cells, the arteries that feed it are becoming increasingly clogged by sediments of spam and useless information. If this allowed to continue, could it be on the verge of a fatal cardiac arrest?
Potential avenues of profitability have opened the doors to the scurrilous and the entrepreneurial; although with more emphasis sadly on the former. The Internet is now rife with automated content, worthless websites and endless empty conversations, all of which are combining to create a monstrous jumble. One of the biggest meeting points for the real world and Internet sharks is on social media sites. More…
Still in the formative days of this new year, we look ahead at the 7 ways you can help your website get the level of attention you deserve in 2010.
Making bold predictions to cover a 365 day period, you can easily set yourself up for a fairly monumental fall. However, with this very much in mind, I have put together a straightforward guide to promoting your website in 2010.
As anybody who has spent a day or more working amongst websites will no doubt already understand, there are a fair few avenues for you to explore when it comes to promoting your site, brand and company. As any company with limited resources will have no doubt also have discovered, targeting the most effective techniques in the efficient fashion is not always straightforward.
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Why Does Fresh Content Help SEO?
SEO professionals are forever extolling the virtues of fresh content when it comes to improving the ranking of a site within search engines. The reason for this is simple, indexing of pages or, more importantly, the frequent indexing of your pages.
Whenever we update a website we give search engine crawlers fresh information to index. The more they visit your site, the greater your chances of improving your ranking for the all-important keywords on each individual pages. By improving linking structure, both externally and internally, we provide an easier passage for the spiders to crawl a site all of which goes to improve your ranking opportunities.
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Why Does Website Content Need To Be Unique
There are a number of reasons for why you should write unique content for each page of your website. Duplicated copy, whether plagiarised from another site or from your own pages, can do more damage than good; particularly when it comes to visitor perception and search engine rankings.
Simply copying and pasting content from one page/site to another may provide a quick and easy solution, but it won’t benefit your website. Each page of a site ought to be fundamentally unique, therefore it needs to be treated as an individual entity; this includes having its own body copy, Meta and headings.
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