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7 Tips for Winning SEO Copywriting

cory — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 23:32:58 +0000

SEO Copywriting is typically not a difficult skill to master. Provided that you have some grasp of how keywords function in your writing and write well without grammatical mistakes, you can usually be sure that the search engine optimization of your writing has already been taken care of for you. However, there are ways that you can take your SEO content to the next level.

Think About the Man AND the Machine. Do not make the mistake of assuming that only the crawlers need to like your SEO Copywriting. You can write pages that earn you a very high rank on Google but, if visitors do not enjoy reading it, they will likely not trust the content or link back to it.
Get Rid of the Fluff.Whenever you complete a sentence, ask yourself what value it gives to the reader. Of course, introductions will have some expository information. However, the remainder of your SEO Copywriting should be good solid facts and information.
Dense Keywords – Not Saturated Keywords. Your main keyword should be situated at the beginning of your article, in the majority of paragraphs in your main body and relatively close to the end. Do not try to overuse keywords in your article. Total keyword saturation should be around 2-3%.
Bringing Words Out With Accents. Save your bold, italic and underlined words for keywords. This will bring keywords not only to the attention of your readers, but to the attention of search engines. However, using these techniques too often, especially when the words are not keywords, can have a detrimental effect on your SEO Copywriting.
Content is King, Lists are Emperors. Today’s Internet readers love lists. If your article cannot be a list, be sure to include a few within your article. Lists are a great way to squeeze some keywords economically into content and are easy to scan.
Frames = Mistakes. It’s very simple. Do not use frames. They will destroy your content and likely prevent it from being recognized properly by search engines. Enough said.
Keep HTML Code Simple. HTML code is a simple tool to help you keep your content organized. However, stick to simple HTML codes when creating content. Paragraph, header and list tags as well as a few strong tags on keywords are all that are needed with good SEO Copywriting.

This is a guest post by Corry Cummings, who enjoys internet marketing and content writing. He runs a custom content creation business.

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How to Write Better Press Release Headlines

Mickie Kennedy — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:26:31 +0000

What’s the most important factor that determines whether your press release gets read by an editor or thrown away? It’s the headline. With editors and journalists receiving hundreds of press releases each day, they typically scan over the headlines to determine which ones seem interesting enough to read fully.

With that in mind, your goal is to write a powerful headline that sucks cynical editors and journalists in, making them want to learn more about your story. This gives your press release the best chance of getting picked up, earning your company valuable coverage.

Here are some tips to write better press release headlines.

Strive for being clear rather than clever—Don’t write your headline to impress other writers by showing how “clever” you are. Editors are only concerned with trying to figure out what your story is about. Your press release headline should clearly reflect what’s covered in the body of your press release. Focus on answering as many of the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions in your headline as possible.

Here’s a little test you can run to determine if your headline is clear enough or not. Send just the headline to several friends. Ask them to describe what they think the rest of the story is about. If they can’t make a decent guess, it’s probably time to rewrite your headline.
Make sure the headline is accurate—Don’t try to trick editors into reading your press release by misleading them in your headline. A misleading headline might grab their attention for a moment, but it will lead to them getting upset when they find out you’ve duped them. This will cause you to lose all credibility, and it will burn any potential relationships you have with the media.
Ditch the hype—Sure, the goal of press release distribution is to build brand awareness and to create a buzz around your brand. However, that doesn’t mean you should treat your press release like an advertisement for your products and services. It’s not. So, your headline shouldn’t sound like Billy Mays (RIP) wrote it. By all means, be interesting, but above all else, be factual and straightforward.
Lists work—There’s no denying it: List headlines just work. You see them on blogs, magazine covers, and in newspapers. The reasons lists work are because they clearly describe what the story is about, are easy to scan through quickly, and can create controversy and debate.
So, when you’re thinking of an angle for your press release, try to find a way to structure it in list form. I think you’ll find it gets a lot more attention than most other headline formats.
Keep it short—If you can’t get the main idea across in about 10 words or less, you don’t have a good enough grasp on what your message really is. Remember, the reporters and editors you’re sending your press release to are in a hurry. They’ll likely only give you a few seconds of their attention, so you need to get your message across quickly. Focus on creating concise headlines that clearly deliver your message. Write several different versions of your headline to find the perfect combination of brevity and clarity.
Include the targeted keyword—Never forget the importance of optimizing your press release. The search engines tend to favor press releases, giving them high rankings for the targeted keywords. Always try to get your main keyword in the headline, and whenever possible, place it toward the front of the headline.

Do you use press releases to spread the word about your business? How have your press release marketing efforts helped your business? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases, the online leader in affordable press release distribution. Grab your free copy of the Big Press Release Book – Press Releases for Every Occasion and Industry here: press release samples

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The Most Effective Approach to Contacting Link Partners for Authoritative Links

Mark Thompson — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:58:20 +0000

There are hundreds, if not thousands of different ways you can acquire links. Every link buildling tactic comes with pros and cons. I have found that the most effective way to build links is by taking the time to build relationships with experts in your industry, than to just dropping a link in a directory or forum. I understand this is a time intensive process and it requires a lot more work, but the end result are highly relevant, authoritative links. Below is a step by step process to effectively approach potential link partners.

Follow this 4 step process:

1. Make a Potential Link Partner List

If you read industry blogs, than you probably have a pretty good idea who the major influencers are in the industry. Start by generating a list of potential experts/bloggers you would like to contact. Take note of their blog (if they have one), what sites they contribute to, and any social media sites they engage in.

2. Start Following Them

Before you even begin contacting anyone, start following them. If they are on Twitter, start following them. Pay attention to what they tweet about, who they tweet about, who they are tweeting with, and pay attention to their style/personality.

If they manage or contribute to a blog, sign up for their RSS feed and being reading recent and upcoming posts. Start to understand their style of writing, how often they blog, and what topics they cover.

If they use social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, start following their bookmarks. See what type of sites interest them. Find out if they have other types of passions besides just the industry you are in. You may be able to connect with someone on a deeper level (similar intersts, location, background, experience).

3. Join their Discussions

Start by retweeting some of your potential link partners tweets. This can help you to indirectly get in front of them and start building the foundation for a relationship. Find recent blog post they have written and start writing comments of value. If you have a relevant link to a resource on your personal site or blog, then provide that as well. This may encourage the person to visit your site and again helps in building the relationship.

4. Contact Them By E-mail

Once you have joined in the discussions, you are ready to contact them personally. By now you should have a pretty good idea of their interests, their online personality, and where they engage online.

When e-mailing them keep it short and to the point. Odds are the person you are contacting gets lots of e-mail pitches a day so don’t waste their time. Hopefully by engaging with them indirectly (tweets, comments, etc..) they will make a connection when they see your e-mail request.

In your e-mail you want to relate to them on a professional or personal level. It may be as simple as telling them how you have been a loyal reader of their blog and hope much you enjoy it. I think this is a good time to say that you should be honest with the people you are contacting. If you geniuenly want to build relationships and make friends in the industry, it will show!

When writing your e-mail, do not just send a generic e-mail template, they will be able to tell right away and will not want to read the rest. Take the time to mention their website, blog, a recent tweet, a speaking engagement, an award they won, a book they wrote, etc…

Keep Components of the E-Mail:

Be Geniune & Honest
Compliment them on their Site/Blog
Mention Something Specific You Like
Briefly Explain Your Expertise and Site (include URL)
Offer Something of Value to Them
Thank Them for their Time

Example:

Dear ‘First Name’,

My name is ‘insert name here’. I am contacting you to tell you what a huge fan and avid reader I am of your ‘Blog Name’ blog. Your ‘specific post name’ post was exteremly helpful in successfully growing my ‘site/blog’.

The reason I am contacting you is because I am interested in building relationships with ‘bloggers/professionals’ in the ‘industry name’ industry. I have been working on promoting my ‘site/blog’ and want to connect with professionals that have the same passions and interests. My blog covers ‘insert topics’.

I would love to share my expertise by having the opportunity to write a guest post for your blog. Also, I thought you may be interested in an ‘ebook/whitepaper/article’ I wrote ‘Insert link here’ that normally I charge for, but would like to offer you a free copy.

If interested, I would love to talk more about how I could help provide valuable content for your blog and readership, while also helping to spread the word about my ‘site/blog’. Thanks for your time and I hope to hear back soon.

Feel free to contact me via email, phone, or twitter.

‘Insert Name’

‘Insert Twitter Handle’

‘Insert Blog URL’

‘Insert Phone #’

Of course you may need to customize the email based on who you are contacting. Instead of offering a free ebook, you may be able to give them a free trial of your product or offer a discount on your product to the persons readers.

Even if you do not end up receiving a link from their site or the opportunity to contribute to their site/blog, at least you made them aware of who you are. At a minimum they may sign up for your RSS feed or start following you on Twitter. Down the road they may remember that you contacted them a while back and they may contacting you to ask if you are still interested in writing a guest post.

About The Author

Mark is the Internet Marketing Manager for Atlantic BT, a full-service Web Design & Marketing company, located in Raleigh, North Carolina. He also is the creator of StayOnSearch, a search marketing blog dedicated to SEO’s and Internet Marketing professionals.

Follow Mark on Twitter (@m_thompson)

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When SEO Advice Goes Wrong

Gerald Weber — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:03:07 +0000

Before I start this post, I want to make it clear that I like the SEO Hosting Blog. In addition to being a regular reader and commenter, I also have a professional relationship with two of the SEO Hosting writers. However, with that being said, I have to admit that I was quite disappointed with a post that I came across on Wednesday.

The post that caught my attention was titled “Why Does a Blog Help SEO?,” and was written by Garry Conn. Since I am a blogger and own an SEO company, I thought this post was going to be right up my alley. However, my opinion of this post changed once I reached the second half of it. In the spirit of fairness, I’m going to quote the entire section of the post that I have an issue with:

“Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.

Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.

This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well.”

Simply put, this is incorrect SEO advice. While blogging can be a very powerful tool for attracting inbound links and improving your rankings, this isn’t how you go about accomplishing this at all. In fact, this is the opposite of what you should do if you want to start blogging to attract more links. You should put your blog at YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG! The reason is because each time another blog or website links to your blog or one of the posts on your blog, that link is going to add to the authority of your domain. And as any competent SEO will tell you, having a large amount of trustworthy links from a variety of sources is a major search engine ranking factor.

However, if you decided to follow the advice in this post, instead of attracting links from a variety of sources, the only links you would attract are from the one, two or three external blogs that you created. And speaking of having multiple external blogs, this is the other part of this post that really bothered me. When you start setting up multiple blogs for the purpose of pointing links back to your site, it’s not going to encourage you to write great content. Instead, you’re probably going to set the blog up, throw up a few posts with links back to your site, and then move on. And this means that those links are not going to have any more value than the links from splog (spam blog) networks that people in webmaster forums are willing to create for a very small amount of money (because they don’t have much value).

To avoid turning this into a rant, I’m going to wrap this post up, but the two key takeaways I want you to get from this post are:

Blogging can attract a lot of inbound links for your website when you do it from your domain and focus on publishing quality content and establishing real relationships with other bloggers,

and

There has always been and will continue to be bad advice given on SEO blogs, so while you can learn a lot from reading them, make sure you don’t automatically take everything you read at face value and instead think about if what you’re reading actually makes sense.

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StumbleUpon Essential Basics, A Beginners Guide

Ann Smarty — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:10:29 +0000

What is a discovery?

You discover a page when you are the first to submit it to StumbleUpon. You can see the member who discovered the page as well as the date when it was discovered to the right of the submission page (http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/url-of-the-submitted-page):

What is a category?

A page is discovered in one of the multiple categories. The category the page is submitted to determines who will see it. StumbleUpon is based on the relevance mechanism: each member is categorized based on his interests – these interests are determined based on the preferences specified by him and also based on the member’s browsing behavior (topics of the articles the member usually stumbles and reviews).

What is a thumb up?

A thumb up aims to mean two important things:

A thumb-up is a vote: it promotes a post and allows more members to see the post;
A thumb-up shows SU what you like and encourages the machine to show you more stories of the kind.

What is a thumb-down?

Like a thumb-up, a thumb-down is called to accomplish two important roles:

It votes against the story (the member doesn’t want more users to see it);
It tells the algorithm that you don’t want to see similar stories any more.

What is a review?

You can post your comment on the page and this comment will appear on the submission page.

What is a tag?

You can tag each page based on its topics – like the category it was submitted to, tags determine who sees the page.

Building Relationships

Like with all other social communities, connections are everything at StumbleUpon – they determine:

Your member’s score: the more friends you have, the higher your authority as a member is.
Your influence: The more friends you have, the more people you can share the story is.

So building connection on StumbleUpon is an essential step to becoming a power member. Most effective methods to do that are:

Initiate friendship: send friend requests. A friend request may be also followed by a personal message detailing why it would be a good idea to be friends (similar interests, similar stories, location, etc);
Give testimonials: generously review other members’ profiles and give real, detailed feedback: not just "good stumbles" but why they are good and how they are different from other members’ stumbles.

Sharing stories with friends:

You can share your finds on StumbleUpon using two tools:

Toolbar share: allows to send a page one friend at a time (with a short message);
Web share (accessed from "Your Favorites" page when you hover over the page thumbnail): allows to share the story with all/many friends in a bulk (add a short message along with it).

Your friends will be able to see your share twice:

Toolbar notification: your share will be displayed on your friend’s toolbar
Email notification: unless your friend unsubscibes from email notification, your share will come to his email address.

StumbleUpon Mathematics

What determines the popularity of each page on StumbleUpon? How to predict the page popularity and traffic? There is no official answers to these questions but there are some educated theories and assumptions that will help you understand StumbleUpon algorithm.

Each time a story has been discovered it ranks on a 0-5 stars scale which makes up the submission score. The submission score is determined by a number of factors, most important of them are supposed to be:

The reviewers’ and stumblers’ score: each member of StumbleUpon is ranked based on his authority: the number of thumbs-up he gave and reviews he made, the number of testimonials he received, the number of subscribers and friends, his age as SU member, the diversity and consistency of topics he stumbles (diversity in domains and consistency of topics: how many stories from various domains but similar topics he has stumbled so far).
The rate at which the story is thumbed up: if you keep the momentum, the story might go hot.
The source of the thumb: I am pretty sure that if the story is only thumbed/up reviewed from the page itself, it might look suspicious. Random thumbers clicking the StumbleUpon button should thumb it up and review as well.
The submission category: some categories are so unpopular, that the page won’t get much traffic no matter how many reviews and thumbs it may receive – there are simply not enough people interested in that topic to see the submission.
The submission tags: the more related tags are added to the submission, the broader public will see the page. Besides, like with the category, this also depends on the tags popularity itself.
The diversity of the stumblers: it looks unnatural if same people stumble same domain again and again.

StumbleUpon represents the page popularity by stars used within Google search engine results page and also on the submission page:

The exact algorithm behind the stars is unclear. It appears to depend on the category and thumb-up rate and members’ diversity.

Find more on StumbleUpon maths here.

Promoting a story on StumbleUpon

How StumbleUpon is different from other social voting sites? The best thing about SU is that it is able to send huge amounts of traffic even to pages that never went hot. Therefore knowing how to promote your site properly there is both essential and useful.

Based on the essential basics outlined above as well on general observations and experiences, here are some tactics you should consider when promoting a story or a site on StumbleUpon:

Diversifying the discoveries: it is essential to make sure different members discover all posts from your domain;
Diversifying the reviews: like with discoveries, each post should be reviewed by different members;
Relevant category: make sure the page is submitted to the most relevant category – this will ensure that people are most likely to like the story and want to share it.
A lot of relevant tags: apart from preserving the submission relevancy, tags ensure that your post is found using the search feature.

By Ann Smarty, an Internet marketer and social media expert maintaining an SEO consulting blog.

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