Writing for Search Engines

Much of the time when we take on a new client, one of our recommendations is that they increase the amount of unique, keyword-targeted, text content on their site. We generally recommend having at least 250 words of content per page, a number that continues to grow as the years go by. Ten years ago our minimum was 75 words. However, as competition on the Web becomes greater, the barrier to entry gets higher as well. Search engines are seeking even more expert content as a way to determine the most relevant sites for a particular keyword.

Conversely, there is no maximum number of words you can put on any one page so long as you are adding quality content. You'll notice that some BruceClay.com pages are over 5000 words. However, before you go after a strategy of building lengthy pages, remember that you want to build depth of content in your site. It's not about saying everything you have to say on one page. While it is possible to rank for a one page site, it is very difficult. It is much easier to establish a site wide theme, supported by depth of content and good internal linking.

Pages should be structured to address customer questions or product information as they become relevant. This can seem to be a daunting task for many people, but it's actually quite manageable as long as you start your copywriting project off in the right direction.

Search engines want to be treated like any other visitor to your site, but while they are coming closer to the ability to mimic human judgment, they're not there yet. Search engines can still have trouble trying to accurately define what a page is about if the content is written in anything but a clear and well-defined style.
To understand what you should be writing, you first need to understand a little bit about the history of the search engines. The first search engines were set up for the people who were using the Internet at the time. Because the population of the early Web was largely researchers, scientists and educators, the focus of search engines was to bring back pages that fit the thesis model. This model persists today in the way Web pages are written: a title, description and some keywords that help define what the focus of the paper or page is.

In order to write effective pages to support your search engine optimization goals there are a few guidelines you should keep in mind. Assuming that you have generated a solid keyword list (See Lisa Barone’s article, Five Steps to Effective SEO Keyword Research, and have assigned the words to pages, your next step should be to brainstorm the best way to represent the keywords in an informative way.

Brainstorming works best if you throw out all your filters. Don't critique any of your ideas, just write them down. The idea is to get out everything--great ideas and garbage alike. At this stage, no idea is too stupid. You can narrow it down later.

If you are writing content for your own Web site, your first response might be to feel frustrated. What on earth are you going to write about? Everyone knows everything that you could possibly tell them and you're not a writer anyway. But that's just the thing, they don't and you are.

Let's pretend that your business is selling cowboy boots. Brainstorm everything you can think of that relates to cowboy boots, even if it's only somewhat related. Once you have all your ideas down, pick a few of the best. For example, you'll want to focus a section of your site on the keyword "buy cowboy boots". Everyone, you think, knows about how to buy boots. It's just a matter of finding the right fit and style. You don't need to explain it to your site's visitors. But it's one of your keywords so you sit down and simply write all the obvious information.

You are an expert in your area. Of course you know how to check the fit of your boots and which styles will work best for which people. It's obvious to you that your jeans should be tucked inside your boots if you're working outside and that you should take certain steps to care for your boots. But for most people, that's not the case. That's why they're coming to your site in the first place. Your expertise is a valuable resource for the development of content. Explaining something that is obvious to you is probably the best way to introduce new customers to your products.

When I write my first draft, I like to keep the keywords that I want to incorporate on the page in mind. I'll tape them to my monitor or put them at the very top of the document. However, I don't worry about densities or forcing them in. If it doesn't sound natural to use the keyword, I don't use it. The first draft is just to get the information out. Use your keywords as a guide for the content.

Once you have a first draft, take a look at the tone of your piece. Are you writing to the right audience? Is your content engaging and informative? Does your content solve a problem or help the customer make a decision? If you're in a highly technical area where your customer isn't likely to know enough to ask intelligent questions, have you educated them enough to feel comfortable?

Revise your draft with these ideas in mind. Knowing your audience means putting in the kinds of words that they will be looking for, the same kinds of words that will help them understand what the best choice of products will be for them.

After your next draft, the best thing to do is ask someone else to read it over for you. The best person for this task is someone who fits the profile of a site visitor. Have them read it to see if it answers their questions in an easy to understand way. If not, revise the content to meet their understanding.

Once you have a final draft, incorporate your final product into the destination page and use the SEOToolSet's KDA or any other page rating tool to determine the strength of the document. Tweak it if necessary. Keep in mind what your linking strategies will be and how the content will support the Web site theme as a whole.
The final thing to remember about writing for search engines is that there is no magical formula for writing the perfect copy. It takes work and attention to detail to meet the needs of both the search engines and your human visitors. The best thing to do is start writing and go from there.

About The AuthorSusan Esparza sesparza@bruceclay.com is a senior writer at Bruce Clay, Inc.

Matt Cutts Wages Jihad On Paid Links

Part of Jaimie Sirovich's adventure in SEO

In Google's latest blatant exhibition of ridiculousness, Matt Cutts has now created an informal way to report paid links. Matt, of course, like Mr. Ahmadinejad over in Iran, blames it on the Brits:

"One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically."
Damn those Brits. Damn them to hell!

So here's how to report paid links:

1. Sell your soul.2. Report it just like spam with subject "paidlink."

Matt does claim its only to collect data to dogfood some algorithmic approaches; but I don't buy it. If he wanted to do that, he'd just scrape text-link-ads.com and a few other high profile link brokers. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for detecting paid links algorithmically.

But tell me, Google; are you going to penalize topix.com, Answers.com, Scientific America, Forbes? They all sell paid links (some of them, rather pricey!). Or are you just going to start frustrating the little guy while providing immunity to the worst offenders?

After all, cloaking is A-OK for The New York Times, but would get me nuked …

My take on text links is in my black hat chapter in my SEO Book:

On Buying Links "As a result of the new focus on link-building to acquire relevant links, instead of the historical focus on on-page factors (discussed in Chapter 2), an entire industry of link-buying has sprung up. This is expected, because it is a natural reaction by the search engine marketing industry to facilitate their jobs. It is Matt Cutts’ (of Google) opinion that purchased links should include a rel="nofollow" attribute. However, in practice this has proven to be Matt Cutts’ wishful thinking, because this policy has never been widely adopted for obvious reasons.

We consider buying links completely ethical, so long as the links are semantically related. Realistically, a content provider can reject placing your link on their site if it is not relevant, and if they consider it relevant, there is no reason the authors can think of to include the rel="nofollow" attribute. It is trusted, audited content. Buying links, when done properly, is not a black hat technique in and of itself. When done aggressively and improperly (irrelevent links, identical anchor text, etc.), it may, however, be perceived as spamming by a search engine."

So it's final. You're probably a black hatter. Welcome to the dark side!

A more nefarious idea was proposed by "Jeffrey" on Matt's blog:
"Cool! I will quickly buy some links for my competitors on text link ads and then denounce him. Good idea, thanks Matt."

Cute. Note that this post on Matt's blog, as Carsten Cumbrowski points out is a definite step backwards for Google. Relevant paid links should not raise any red flags — or require a rel,nofollow attribute.

Originally Posted By : http://www.seoegghead.com/blog/seo/matt-cutts-wages-jihad-on-paid-links-p199.html

Tips For Choosing An Internet Marketing Firm

The internet is a great place to sell your products or services, but with so many people doing it, you need to have very effective marketing strategies in place. This will help people recognize your business and be motivated to visit your website. The more traffic you get to your site the more sales you will have as a result of your marketing campaigns.

The investment you make in your marketing strategies is very important. After all, it doesn't matter how great your product or service is if no one knows about it. There are many different internet marketing firms out there. This can make it confusing when you are trying to decide which one to work with. Here are some helpful tips.

First, you need to do your own research and homework. The internet marketing firm that works well for your buddy isn't necessarily the best choice for you. Find out if they have marketed businesses similar to you. Ask them specific questions about how long they have been in business. Ask for references as well as for examples of other marketing campaigns they have been responsible for.

Take some time to talk with a representative. Are they interested in your point of view and what you want to convey to potential customers? If not, then look for someone else. Don't work with anyone who is only interested in earning money from you or who continually tells you how much money you will earn. They need to be as concerned with the reputation of your business as you are.

Ask them how they will market to your target market. This is important because you don't want your marketing dollars wasted on volumes of consumers. Instead you want time to be spent identifying a target market and then sending information specifically to them.

Internet marketing is a great way to increase the interest in your products or services. This will also lead to more sales being generated. Take your time to make sure you are using an internet marketing firm that has the same goals and ethics as your own business. This will help ensure communication can be effective as can the marketing campaigns they incorporate for you.

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Article by http://www.rypmarketing.com your source for effective, affordable internet marketing.

What's Up With That? Vol. 3: SEO

As we gear up for this week’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, we thought it timely to discuss the many ways in which feeds and the wonderful world of search engine optimization (SEO) intersect. Increasingly, doing a search at a search engine will result in links to your feed as well as your site.



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What's Up With That? Vol. 3: SEO

As we gear up for this week’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York, we thought it timely to discuss the many ways in which feeds and the wonderful world of search engine optimization (SEO) intersect.

Increasingly, doing a search at a search engine will result in links to your feed as well as your site. This is a result of search engines’ increased use of feeds to help discover and index web sites, and is seen by many as an advantage in that it gives searchers multiple opportunities to find your content. Of course, some site owners want to control how (and when) their feeds show up in search results, as well as influence how the search engines interpret the information they find in the feeds. In order to better understand the issues, we keep in touch with representatives from the major search engines, and we also talk regularly with a number of leading SEO consultants. While a full SEO tutorial is outside the scope of this post, we wanted to at least outline the ways in which you can use FeedBurner to control and optimize your feed’s interaction with search engines.

Redirecting your feed to FeedBurner

In order to take full advantage of FeedBurner’s feed statistics, publishers often redirect requests for their feed to the FeedBurner version of their feed. In some cases, this is accomplished via a setting (TypePad) or a plugin (WordPress, Drupal, others). In other cases, you need to do a little server configuration. Server-based redirects are a powerful tool in a publisher’s toolbox, but publishers should take care to redirect properly. There are two general redirect methods – a “302” (aka “temporary”) redirect and a “301” (aka “permanent”) redirect. The recommended approach is a 302 – that means that your URL remains the authoritative location for the feed. Should you ever decide to move your feed off of FeedBurner, that means that aggregators and search engines will continue to check your URL rather than go directly to FeedBurner.

Autodiscovery

Search engines are smart, but unless you tell them where your feed lives, they’ll have a hard time finding it and adding it to their index. The easiest way to ensure that the search engines find and index your feed is to ensure that your auto-discovery (link) code properly points to your feed. With that pointer in place, whenever a search engine visits your site, it can see that there’s a feed associated with the site and (if appropriate) add the feed to its crawler. Anecdotally, many publishers have reported that this has helped increase the speed with which the search engines index their content. (Obligatory disclaimer: the search engines are always changing how they index content, so this could easily change as they refine how and when they index feeds.) For a backgrounder on auto-discovery, see this Publishter Tips post from last Fall.

My Brand

Publishers who use FeedBurner to manage their feeds receive a feed URL that includes the “feeds.feedburner.com" domain and the majority of publishers stick with this default. You can just as easily choose to not use the default domain if that's your preference. Our MyBrand service (one of our few paid services) allows you to map a subdomain so that your feed URL becomes “feeds.yourdomain.com” instead of “feeds.feedburner.com”. Either option gives you plenty of opportunity to rank well in search results, but publishers looking to have maximum consistency between their feed and site (not to mention publishers who are looking for maximum portability of feed URLs) might consider using MyBrand.

Clickthrough tracking

For years, FeedBurner publishers have had the option of tracking clicks from subscribers in aggregators back to the publisher’s site – this helps publishers better understand how engaged their audience is. The ability to track clicks can be turned on or off from the StandardStats section of the "Analyze" tab.

What fewer publishers know is that they can control which kind of clickthroughs FeedBurner implements on their behalf, as part of our TotalStats offering (our other paid service). You can use either a 302 (aka “temporary”) redirect or a 301 (“permanent”) redirect. A 301 redirect is likely appropriate to eliminate any possibility of duplicating content in the search index, as it’s an instruction to the search engine that the only authoritative location for the item is on your site. Additional explanation about configuring 302/301 is available on our site.

NoIndex

Several months ago, we added an option to the “Publicize” tab called NoIndex. If you’d prefer that your feed not be indexed by the search engines or Yahoo! Pipes, you can activate this option with a click. Note, however, that “noindex” is not universally supported (currently, Yahoo! is alone among the major search engines in supporting this feature). Should additional search engines update their handling of the ‘noindex’ flag, we’ll let you know. Update: Noindex is supported by both Yahoo! and Google for their web search engines.

Pingshot

One element of leveraging the search engines is to ensure that your content is indexed as quickly as possible. PingShot is designed to do exactly that: select the ping servers you wish to notify, and we will send a ping their way as soon as you have new content. (One advantage of this approach: many search engines watch their companion ping servers, so pinging one server can result in multiple places updating your content.)

Feed/SEO Appetizer

This is just a taste of what could easily become a very detailed feed/SEO discussion. There are obviously other aspects of feed/SEO that we haven’t addressed. Feel free to leave your questions in the comments or drop us a line and we’ll provide additional information as we can. See you at SES and I hope you'll join me for my sessions on Podcast & Audio Search Optimization and SEO Through Blogs & Feeds.

Originally Posted by : http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2007/04/whats_up_with_that_vol_3_seo_1.php

Choosing a SEO Company

After you have been dealing for some time with SEO on your own, you discover that no matter how hard you try, your site does not rank well or that your site ranks well but optimizing it for search engines takes all your time and all your other tasks lag behind. If this is the case with you, maybe it is better to consider hiring a SEO company to do the work for you. With so many SEO companies out there, you can't complain that you have no choice. Or is it just the opposite – so many companies but few reliable?

It is stretching the truth to say that there are no reliable SEO companies. Yes, there might be many scam SEO companies but if you know what to look for when selecting a SEO company, the risk of hiring fraudsters is reduced. It is much better if you yourself have a substantial knowledge of SEO and can easily decide if they promise you the starts in the sky or their goals are realistic but even if you are not quite familiar with SEO practices, here is a list with some points to watch for when choosing a SEO company:

• Do they promise to guarantee #1 ranking? If they do, you have a serious reason to doubt their competencies. As the Google SEO selection tips say, no one can guarantee a #1 ranking in Google. This is true even for not so competitive words.
• Get recommendation from friends, business partners, etc. Word of mouth is very important for the credibility of a company. For instance, we do not perform SEO services but despite that we constantly receive e-mails asking for SEO services. We always direct these inquiries to Blackwood Productions because we have worked with this company for a long time and we know that they are competent and reliable.
• Ask in forums. There are many reputable Web master forums, so if you can't find somebody who can recommend you a SEO company right away, consider asking in Web master forums. However, beware that not all forum posters are honest people, so take their opinion (no matter if positive or negative) with a grain of salt. Forums are not such a reliable source of information as in-person contact.
• Google the company name. If the company is a known fraudster, chances are that you will find a lot of information about it on the Web. However, lack of negative publicity does not mean automatically that the company is great, nor do some subjective negative opinions mean that the company is a scammer.
• Ask for examples of sites they have optimized. Happy customers are the best form of promotion, so feel free to ask your potential SEO company about sites they have optimized and references from clients. If you get a rejection because of confidentiality reasons, this must ring a bell about the credibility of the SEO company - former customers are not supposed to be a secret.
• Check the PR of their own site. If they can't optimize their site well enough to get a good PR (over 4-5), they are not worth hiring.
• Ask them what keywords their site ranks for. Similarly to the page rank factor, if they don't rank well for the keywords of their choice, they are hardly as professional as they are pretending to be.
• Do they use automated submissions? If they do, stay away from them. Automated submissions can get you banned from search engines.
• Do they use any black hat SEO tricks? You need to know in advance what black hat SEO is in order to judge them, so getting familiar with the most important black hat SEO tricks is worth before you go and start cross-examining them.
• Where do they collect backlinks from? Backlinks are very, very important for SEO success but if they come from link farms and other similar sites, this can cause a lot of trouble. So, make sure the SEO firm collects links from reputable sites only.
• Get some personal impressions, if possible. Gut instinct and impressions from meetings are also a way to judge a company, though sometimes it is not difficult to get mislead, so use this approach with caution.
• High price does not guarantee high quality. If you are eager to pay more, this does not mean that you will get more. Just because a firm costs more DOES NOT make them better SEO's. There are many reasons for high prices and high quality is only one of them. For instance, the company might work inefficiently and this is the reason for their ridiculously high costs, not the quality of their work.
• Cheap is more expensive. This is also true. If you think you can pay peanuts for a professional SEO campaign, then you need to think again. Professional SEO companies offer realistic prices.
• Use tricky questions. Using tricky questions is a double-edged sword, especially if you are not an expert. But there are several easy questions that can help you. For instance, you might ask them how many search engines they will automatically submit your site to. If they are scammers, they will try to impress you with big numbers. But in this case, the best answer would be "no automatic submissions".
• Another tricky question is to ask them if they will place in you top 10 for some competitive keywords of your choice. The trap here is that it is them, not you, who chooses the words that are best for your site. It is not that probable that they will choose exactly the same words as you suggest, so if they tell you that you just give them the words and they push you to the top, tell them “Goodbye”.
• Do they offer subscription services? SEO is a constant process and if you want to rank well and keep on like that, efforts are necessary all the time. Because of this, it is better to select a company that includes post-optimization maintenance, than get a company that pushes your site to the top and then leaves you in the wild on your own.

We tried to mention some of the most important issues in selecting a SEO company. Of course, there are many other factors to consider and each case is different, so give it some thought, before you sign the contract for hiring a SEO company.

Originally Posted by: http://www.webconfs.com/choosing-a-seo-company-article-21.php

SEO Article, Search Engine Optimization Tips, Google News

SEO Article, Search Engine Optimization Tips, SEO News, Google News, SEM services tips



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Does Google SEO success ’suck’?

Rich Skrenta has a love-hate relationship with Google, and the traffic it drives to the company he leads, Topix.

Skrenta decried to the Wall Street Journal just weeks ago that as Topix is 45% dependent upon Google for its visitors, moves by the number one search engine can yield “catastrophic” impacts on Topix revenues resulting from potentially lower Google SERP rankings.
In Skrenta vs. King Google, sometimes last week, I discussed how Skrenta has been all over the Google map this first quarter 2007.

Skrenta followed up on my analysis of his Google stance with his own post citing my reporting of his “apparent inconsistenencies” in his blog posts over the past four months, saying:
Credit to Donna for actually noticing and calling me on it.

The Skrenta-Google SEO dance continues. Skrenta headlines his explanation for the just announced “reinvention” of Topix “What do you do when your success…sucks?” and begins:
We took a hard look at ourselves at Topix last year. We had built up a strong local audience on the site, but a lot of it was SEO, and while users were clearly getting some value out of our product, we hadn't made something that people really cared about.

Why is Topix reinventing itself now? Skrenta on key insights gleaned:

The first was that users arriving at our site had no idea who we were or what the site was about. "Who the fuck are you guys?" was the question our site needed to answer for vistors, according to the brandologists. In person, and even on our corporate blog, we apparently came across as passionate about what we were doing. But none of this showed through on the site itself. "News untouched by human hands" was what we were actually delivering, and it wasn't working.
The second problem was sort of a structural flaw with our news pages. They didn't conform to any standard web page metaphor.

Google SEO lessons learned translation? While appealing, SEO fueled “free” Google search traffic does not a sustainable business make on its own.
Skrenta and his team engaged in “therapy sessions with brandologists” to pinpoint ways to improve the Topix user experience in order to develop more branded, direct destination traffic with repeat visit loyalty.

Topix Reinvention, as of April 2, 2007, as described by Skrenta:

1) The part of our site that was growing like a weed were the locally-oriented forums. Our new product would emphasize people over the machine.

2) Fix the local pages by making them work like community-edited blogs. Strictly obey the blog metaphor, with chronological posts, and all of the associated visual cues which tell you that you're on a blog, and not on, say, a Google news search result.

3) We would run the show just like DMOZ, although borrowing some subsequent innovations from Wikipedia. This was a reliable model, we had done this before with 75,000 volunteers, but no one had done it for news yet. We needed to build an editorial system that could provide a umbrella quality filter around thousands of daily contributors.

4) Anthropomorphize our existing technology into the roboblogger. It simultaneously solves three problems: a Booting up a new city — you need posting activity to draw the first editors. The roboblogger would give us that. But he is shy and gets out of the way if humans show up and take over a page. b) If the community editors go on vacation, the roboblogger can step back in and take over while they're gone. c) People know when a robot is editing the page vs. a human. His profile icon is a picture of a little tin-can robot.

5) Kill the home page. It should be an "enter your ZIP code" box. Putting national news on this page created too much confusion with our main mission, which has always been local.

6) Streamline the experience. Most our users are not bloggers, they're not fans of some Silicon Valley Web 2.0 startup. They just want to talk to people in their town. We had to make the experience simple for them.

The official Topix corporate position on its “reinvention”:

Readers reboot local news with Topix

Topix, the largest news community on the Web, today unveiled a new site that gives its established community of millions the power to find, report and edit local news. Topix’s pioneering platform addresses the pent up demand for local news in towns and cities across the country where traditional news media alone can’t cover enough of the hyper-local events and issues that matter most to neighbors.

As part of the launch, Topix also moved its domain to Topix.com to support its continued growth as a major Web destination.

The Topix.com move follows a $1 million purchase of its .com domain.

Topix equity investors Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune upped their financial comittment to Topix by $15 million late last year.

While Google SEO traffic is theoretically "free," Topix is betting its future, and its sharholders' millions, that greater ROI will be had from branded, direct navigation.

ALSO: Google, LookSmart power Ask.com advertising and Google: Sergey Brin on ad revenue knob and Google's Ten Commandments

CMS Systems With SEO In Mind. Yooter InterActive Now Does Both.

April 2, 2007; 04:24 AMIn the early days, Yooter InterActive, LLC ( http://www.yooter.com ) focused on improving rankings and customer service. "How do we give the clients exactly what they are looking for?" Well, today this is no different. Due to the expanding and ever changing economy and demands of the customers, Yooter InterActive, a Search Engine Optimization firm, is yet again excelling with their level of customer services.

Yooter already offers services ranging from standard SEO service such as coding issues and blogging to Online Crisis Management and Web Development Assistance. Among their already existing skills, Yooter now offers an Open Source Content Management System. CMS development may seem financially and task-oriented intimidating for some, or an everyday option for others. With Yooter, however, there are very important differences between what they provide relative to the competition. Just a few of the unique differences that Yooter InterActive promise include:

100% open source. This means you pay us a one time fee for creating your CMS. That's it. No annual fees, no granting permissions, no ties. Once the CMS is created, it is yours to update as you please, even give access to your own web team with no extra fees or hassles.

The CMS is created with Search Engines in mind. Yooter's core business has always been as an InterActive Search Marketing Agency. This is what they do everyday. So you can trust that not only will your CMS be created to your specifications, it will be rankable as well.

Once your Content Management System is created, you may choose to outsource its maintenance and updates. Or perhaps you will only have a few questions in the future. Lucky for you, Yooter specializes in SEO consulting and reporting.

Yooter InterActive's commitment to superior customer service is what makes them excel at their present rate. The majority of Yooter's clients are directed to them via word of mouth advertising. They stand behind their products and services, constantly striving to think outside the box and seek further improvements.

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