SEO copywriting is the glue that brings all your other online marketing efforts together. Without strong glue, everything unravels, and you get no results.

If you aren’t converting visitors into customers, it could be that you’re making one or more of these 7 SEO copywriting mistakes.

1. Targeting the wrong keywords—Just because you’re ranking well doesn’t necessarily mean you’re targeting the right keywords. You want to focus your SEO efforts on keywords that draw in searchers who are in the final stages of the buying cycle. Never guess about which keywords you should be targeting. Do your research. There are several great keyword research tools online you can take advantage of.
2. Stuffing keywords—I can’t believe I still see this mistake, but I do. Amateur SEO copywriters think that repeating the keyword as often as possible increases their chances of ranking well in the SERPs. Even if that was true (and it’s not), this method completely overlooks the fact that you need to actually convert visitors into customers. Keyword-stuffed copy doesn’t convert. Don’t just write for the search engines; write for your ideal customer as well.
3. Making word count a priority—One SEO myth that just won’t die is that there’s some magic word count you have to hit if you want Google to rank your page properly. Some people say that you need at least 250 words; others believe it’s 400 words. The truth? It doesn’t matter. Just search for any phrase, and look at the top results. The word counts are all over the place. Instead of focusing on hitting a certain word count, just focus on writing clear, concise copy, no matter what the length.
4. Not being focused on the consumer—One of my favorite copywriting tools is the We We Calculator. The purpose of this tool is to ensure your web copy is focused on the customer…not you. See, customers are selfish. They only care about how your products and services will benefit them. Your copy needs to use the word “you” as often as possible. Limit the use of “me”, “we”, “us”, etc. because no one really cares about you.
5. Writing copy that’s difficult to scan—Eyetracking studies show that online users tend to scan content rather than read it. They scan in an F-shaped pattern, trying to get the gist of your copy as quickly as possible. This means you need to write copy that’s easy to scan. How can you do this? Use short paragraphs, short sentences, bulleted lists, and bolded text to highlight important information throughout.
6. Having a weak call to action—How can you expect your website visitors to take action if you don’t tell them what action you want them to take? One thing I’ve noticed is that too many copywriters are afraid to sell. They’re constantly demeaning sales-y copy, and they’re always trying to tone down their copy. Look, I’m not saying your copy needs to read like a Billy Mays infomercial script, but let’s cut to the chase, you’re selling products and services. So, sell them! You need to have a clear, strong call to action that motivates visitors to take action now. Keep your call to action brief, and only ask visitors to take one action so you don’t overwhelm them.
7. Not being credible—One of the biggest challenges companies experience when selling online is that customers just don’t trust them. With every word you write, you should be working toward building your credibility. Use statistics whenever possible, and it’s always a good idea to include testimonials on your website.

Take a look at your website copy. Are you making any of these mistakes?

About the Guest Author:

Gagandeep Singh works for a conversion rate optimization company Invesp and blogs about landing page templates, conversion rate optimization, SEO and affiliate marketing.

When it comes to web content, irrespective of whether it’s sales copy, informative writing or random thoughts and musings on a blog, it should be easy reading! Reading online shouldn’t be made a tedious task and for most of us, perusing websites and blogs is a leisurely activity.

Words can be to much of a good thing..

Personally, if an article (no matter how interesting its title) starts like a rocket science manual, I’m out of there! By all means, vary your vocabulary – by the same token I hate to read posts where a blogger evidently doesn’t know another word for ‘good.’ But stretching out a word count by fluffing up the content is annoying. Concise content makes for quick reading, ideal for the busy workaholic society we live in.
Now, I’m exaggerating with the title of this post, in complaining about ten words where one will do. More often than not, my peeve comes where writers use two words in place of one. Of course, sometimes there’s a need for this and child like sentences devoid of adjectives, for example, would make for bland writing. There’s a fine line between ‘concise’ and ‘bland’ content.
So, examples?

Unnecessary adverbs and adjectives

"A Sentence with to many adjectives is like Coffee with to much sugar."

There’s a time and a place for adjectives and sometimes they just sound out of place and long winded when read out loud. Take the sentence, “He was an incredibly intelligent fellow, but had an extreme lack of common sense.” When read out loud is lacks punch and crispness. A revision to, “He was an intelligent fellow, though lacked common sense,” is easier reading. That’s a 14 word sentence versus a nine word one.

Unimportant Information

If you’re writing an article on Barack Obama’s proposed health reforms, you would want to let your readers know what the changes are, how they would be affected by the changes and the obstacles the President faces. While it’s easy to wander off on a tangent at times, writing about Obama’s educational background or going into too much depth over the history of health in the US fluffs the article up and takes away from its point. After writing, read out loud and be critical. Ask yourself what the point of each sentence is and if you can’t find a purpose of a sentence, delete!

Repeated Information

Sometimes we repeat ourselves without even realizing we’ve done it. Even if you’ve worded it differently, the same point or fact made twice (even at opposite ends of an article) is just more words than necessary!

Squeeze Out More Words

Look for opportunities to crush and squeeze your verbiage. - Photo by Tomf

Once you’ve cleared out everything you think you can, read through again (preferably out loud). Look for opportunities to tighten up your sentences in ways not described above. An example could be changing:
“Whenever the Jones family got news pets, the neighbour’s children always tended to take to them quicker than the Jones boys,” to
“The next door neighbour’s children always took to the Jones’ new pets quicker than the Jones boys did.”

I know I’ve barked on about concise content here, but this should never come at the expense of meaning. The idea of concise content is saying what you need to say as tightly as possible – not about cutting points out in order to shorten a piece. Think punchy, crisp and natural sounding content and you’re well on your way to great copy.

Content creation is one of the most dreaded aspects of existing online for majority of the internet business owners.  High quality content plays a crucial role in creating a successful internet business.   Poorly written content results in poor readership, and thereby, fewer sales.

Here are 3 wickedly effective techniques to create content in a way that instantly establishes the connection between you and the reader:

Start off with what your readers already knows.

Start with the familiar

Expand from there on to what they don’t know.   Milton Erickson, founding president of American society of clinical hypnosis, often lead his patients from what they know to what they didn’t know. This approach of presenting information increases your readers’ receptivity to your information and establishes a sub-conscious rapport between you and your readers.

Draw Out Your Readers

Well written content educates the reader by drawing the information out of readers mind.   Education originated from the Latin word “educare”, which means “drawing out from within”.  A story or a metaphor is perfect medium to let your readers “draws out” the information from their subconscious mind.  When you start telling the story or present a metaphor, the mind lets its defenses down and opens up.

Create “Aha” Moments

Valuable content is the content that creates “aha” moments.  It restructures and interconnects the existing beliefs and concepts.  When these concepts and beliefs integrate with an experience, it creates understanding.  Taking your readers to this point of understanding should be the ultimate goal of content-creation.  If you just leave your readers with insightful ideas, but don’t offer them any examples, their “aha!” moments never fully converge into an understanding.

Frame Your Content Effectively

Frame your Content

When content is presented with a well-designed frame, it becomes potent.   What the content is framed with decides the “stickiness” of the concepts presented in that content.  When you create content based on factors described above, your content draws your readers inside their mind and helps them absorb the information more effectively.

About the Author
Amy  C. is a consultant for a Phoenix Internet Marketing firm, Niche Solutions, LLC.  She is a full time business student as well as an entrepreneur in the niche of Tabletop fountains.  Amy invites you to browse her most recently launched collection of decorative solar fountains

Biggest Take Away

It seemed the best advice of the meeting was actually scheduling a specific time and place to dedicate yourself to the project. Since our meetup was all small business owners, the challenge was placing a website and online work in priority with the rest of the business. it’s important to remember that there are tons of resources for small businesses and opportunities in Local Search that you have to have a physical location to take advantage of online.

Where Do I Put Content First?

Photo by WordRidden

Your online presence should be like an octopus, that reaches out from the most likely place of conversion to draw people in and make them into customers. The most logical place of conversion for most businesses is going to be your “static” website. What I mean by static, is that even if it is built on a WordPress platform in a blog style, it has a large number of pages that remain the same, with the same intent that doesn’t change over time.

You should make sure that you have this central location created and optimized for both search engines and for converting visitors to users. Be sure that you’ve got your contact information easily available, and are using “calls to action” that highlight what action you’d like your users to take.

Your Site Should be a Trusted Source, not an Encyclopedia

Photo by Stewart

You should have information that relates closely to your industry. If you’re a Realtor then you should have information about your communities, and the home market. However, your pages shouldn’t be simple reams of information, (or for that matter copied and pasted from the city website or wikipedia). Yes, writing content takes time!

Variety is the spice of life!

Nobody wants to sit and read through 28 paragraphs of stale dull content. Even if your subject is interesting, it’s difficult to engage users online with large chunks of content. So make the content interesting! Be sure to spice up your huge paragraphs of text with things to keep people interested in your writing. Use interesting pictures that line up with concepts or ideas from each paragraph. Perhaps use bullet points to recap if you’ve touched on a number of topics. You can also use quotes to augment your content with authority sources or humor.

Video is Content Too

Don’t forget that if you take the time to create a video for your business, to make sure that it will return the best value to you. For example, if you were making video testimonials, make sure that you’ve got a custom Youtube channel setup. When you create your video listing, be sure to use your full URL in the description, and if you can be sure to edit it into the video itself as well in case it’s syndicated.

Thanks again for all of you who made it out today!

Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren’t distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.

Randy K. Milholland

When you own a website, sometimes it can feel like a very insular project, where your website is an island. I’ll be hosting a meetup for site owners in the Riverside, California area to discuss content writing advice and SEO strategies for business owners,  Internet marketers and site owners.

The meetup will be held at Back to the Grind, in Downtown Riverside California on Saturday 7/25/2009 at 10:00 Am.  Please bring your laptops to the meeting if posible!

Pay attention to the bones of your Site: File Names

Well, I just went back and checked in to my Google webmaster tools account and discovered something very strange for this real estate and local centric website for La Quinta, CA…

I was totally confused why this site had so many different terms that it ranked for for “Skeleton”… Well I did some digging and realized that when I built the site, I had added the background image with the file name “images/skeleton.gif”. The rest of the site has NOTHING to do with skeletons but here Google is giving rankings for a wide mix of terms related to the main content of the page, as well as for terms related to skeletons! For example Google webmaster tools showed me ranking 48 for [Jack Skeleton] from Nightmare Before Christmas, as well as [skeleton in desert] which seemed to have used the geographic context along with the filename. The lesson here for your site is that filen ames are one of the many factors in how Google understands your website, so do everything you can to name them appropriately!

Context is Everything

Google hopes to  enhance the search experience by better understanding user intent. First up, a new technology has been deployed to understand the associations of a given search phrase. Google offered up the example of “principles of physics.” With the new technology, Google now understands that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “Quantum Mechanic” are all related terms, and will alter SERP behavior accordingly. This is important to bear in mind as you write your content that you need to focus on a broader range of related keywords, because Google isn’t looking just at how many times a single keyword is appearing, it’s looking contextually. Therefore you need to provide a broader context for your content in order for you to show your relevance to that set of related keywords.

Sorry Guys, but Google Says Longer is Better

When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page.

Sounds great right? Well, you need to look at this a little bit harder to see how this could impact your search engine optimization of your website. In the past, the limit of approx 140-160 characters for your description was  pretty standard, because that’s what would actually display on the serp. However, this question comes to mind:

Is the expanded Snippet the Meta description or text from the page to provide “context”?

Now I had previously done some research on how Google uses DMOZ information in their snippet results. So I started with that URL to provide a historical sample so we could compare.

Well here’s a query for [http://www.pathaddad.com]

and here’s a much longer query

[Indianapolis real estate services and homes for sale in Carmel, Noblesville, Fishers, Westfield, Geist, Morse, Zionsville and other Hamilton County areas]

From this example we can see that this snippet extension will, for longer query terms, increase the size of viewed characters in the meta description as well as pull in contextual text bits separated by an ellipse. The length can be more double and triple the previous 140 character limit. The good news is that in context it may uncover extra details from a long description, but I would still say that it would be best to provide a 140 character limit meta title and let Google grab extra snippett description from the page to provide content.

The Take Away

It is interesting that Google is taking steps to encourage long tail searches. With the release of the Google suggest, we saw an increase in “Fat Belly” terms…but this change while focused o nthe user experience, shows Google is interested in serving long tail queries more effectively. You need to provide a broader context for your content, and it will lend itself to supporting long tail queries.

Optimizing Blog and Brochure Content for Search Engines and People

If you’re like most online copywriters, you spend your time writing copy for static marketing pages and also stay busy keeping blogs up-to-date. As you already know, the content for brochure pages and blog entries is usually very different. Whereas brochure copy usually resides on static pages that rarely change, blog entries are created more frequently, take a different tone, and can be subject to frequent updates.

Optimizing Brochure Content

The part of the site that focuses on the marketing message and rarely changes is generally called the brochure. An online brochure is essentially a series of static pages that rarely change. It’s also the first place potential customers go to learn about products and services.

Brochures require a well thought out information architecture (IA) with lots of attention given to how the navigation and URL naming scheme will be configured. The content for those pages should then be highly focused on the area of the website and the keywords specified in the page URL. When writing for brochure pages, it’s important to consider the following optimization methods:

• Page titles should be concise and keyword centric.
• Hierarchal headers should be used liberally and there should be less focus on lists.
• A keyword analysis tool, like Raven’s Keyword Analyzer, should be used to make sure copy is properly saturated with targeted terms for search engines.
• Focus should be more on internal linking and less on external linking.
• Copy length for pages should exceed 400 words.

Optimizing Blog Content

Unlike brochure pages, blogs provide an extension of a company’s personality to the public. It can also serve as an excellent source of frequent and targeted traffic. However, similar to brochure pages, attention to keywords is important.

Blogs provide the opportunity to capture long-tail search traffic that typical brochure pages can’t. Entries should range from industry opinion pieces to tutorials on how to do a particular task. Less emphasis should be placed on the perfect keyword saturation, while more emphasis should be placed on making the content fresh and interesting to the target audience. When writing blog entries, it’s important to consider the following optimization methods:

• Focus should be put on incorporating words like “How to” and “Review” in entry titles.
• Hierarchal headers and lists should be used liberally, because it helps blog readers scan and skim.
• You should write frequent entries with less words or less frequent entries with more words. Both approaches will instill a sense of expertise and passion about your blog’s subject.
• Target keywords should be incorporated within the title and copy of an entry, but don’t worry about keyword saturation. Instead, focus more on making the title and copy interesting.
• Images should be used as often as possible. They can make an entry more visually pleasing and interesting to a reader.
• You should blog about other bloggers and link to them liberally within your copy.

Quick Reference Guide for Blog and Brochure Optimization

About Jon Henshaw

Jon Henshaw is the Product Manager and Chief Socializer for Raven’s Internet Marketing Tools. Before focusing solely on Raven, he was an Internet Strategist for Sitening, a performance based Internet marketing firm.

If you’re starting a static website(Vs. a blog), do you think it’s best to wait until you can start with a full compliment of pages, or to launch sooner and then build up over time?

I’m a firm believer that you should launch as soon as possible. The worst thing that can happen is that your site will be the worst site to ever exist. It might/probably will/most assuredly will be. But there are a million things you might have to do before it stops sucking. We learn more from failure than success, so get the failing/sucking over quickly. I mean, come on, you’re not the type to pull a band-aid off slowly, in other words, a total baby? Of course not! So start early, be humble, learn, grow, get feedback and develop from there.

My site is not even 6 months old, but I’ve had the best progress from commenting on others’ sites who I admire, building up relationships and learning from them. The key is that these communications need to be genuine, and then already established individuals are happy to help you out. I also found interesting/helpful content on www.problogger.com, www.menwithpens.com and www.becomeablogger.com, the last one which has video tutorials.

It would be good to look into where your niche goes. I heard Sphinn is a good place for bloggers, Digg and StumbleUpon is very wide and general. I participate on facebook, Twitter, and am branching out to develop my LinkedIn profile, as well as StumbleUpon (:)based on your recommendation). At first I found social platforms a little overwhelming and scary, but I’m finding a terrific crowd on Twitter. It’s really simple, good for a lot of info and some laughs.

Be hilarious. Or just not stuffy. The web is an impersonal medium, so letting personality shine through like the glorious rays of the sun parting the clouds is good. Letting your humorous anecdotes split forth into the internet like the Earth does in The Land Before Time. Let all readers bow in gratitude and good spirits, like gracious dinosaurs on the ridge of the paradise that is your site.

Update: Found a really great related post about new bloggers driving traffic to their site.

Don’t let your Images become a messy pile

Utilizing Images to Enhance your website content

There are many different types of content that people could be looking for online. People looking for the same subject are often going to be searching differently if they want to see different types of site content. With Google’s Universal Search playing a larger and larger role to accomodate these different types of searches, you need to make sure that you are incorporating media properly in your page content. In the Google Webmaster chat about Optimizing Images for Search it became clear that the context of the image is used to help determine it’s relevance to a keyword. So, as you add content to your site, make sure your images aren’t just piled up, and thrown willy nilly about the page. Your images should align with the content to further the message. No one wants to read through blocks of text with no relief. Additionally, that content you’re adding has it’s Alt text(title) description, so that Google can see how that image lines up with the information being conveyed in the text itself.
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