Thank you for coming out, it was nice to get some fresh opinions and share ideas on exactly what content you should be writing for your site.
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!
Recently I’ve been talking a lot with Jon Henshaw of Raven SEO, and he has kindly agreed to write up a guest post on a topic I’ve been juggling for the past year. I’ve been thinking about how writing for a blog differs from a static website, and Jon was kind enough to tackle this subject and offer some excellent content writing advice and a handy guide on how to write brochure type information for static websites and how to alter your approach when you change over to your blog.
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
Blog vs. Brochure Optimization Comparison Chart
Website Element
Blog
Brochure
Page Title & Slug
Long-Tail Keyword Focus
Short-Tail Keyword Focus
Page Content
Occasionally Reference Services
Always Reference Services
Content Voice
Casual Tone
Formal Tone
Content Length
200-600 Words (Depends on Freq.)
400 Words or More
External Links
Frequently Link Out
Rarely Link Out
Internal Links
Occasionally Link In
Frequently Link In
Keyword Analysis
Unnecessary
Important for All Pages
Readability
Liberal Use of Headers and Lists
Use Headers and Occasional Lists
Tagging & Categorization
Keep Tags and Categories to a Minimum
Dependent On IA
Images
Enhances Quality of Content
Helpful for Showcasing Products
Press Releases
Rewrite to Conversational Tone
Can Remain Intact
Link Lists
Yes, in the Form of Blogrolls
No “Links” Pages!
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.
It’s been a while since I went back to the fundamentals on my blog and talked about certain principles of content writing that I find to be fundamental advice for every site builder to follow.
Be Centered:
Kung Fu is about finding your center…I just have very large center- Sammo Hung
Like kung fu, your website is something that should be built over time, with patience and dedication. Find that central theme to keep your site tied together and keep practicing the fundamentals. Use your header tags properly, create proper meta titles and descriptions, and actually use your keywords correctly in context on the page.
From the lips of Matt Cutt himself in an interview with Wired Magazine, answering a question about what a start up web business should do right out of the gate.
“[MattCutts]: First, I would create great content. That’s a fantastic way to get a head start.”
Hail to the king baby! Content is back! SO make sure you are providing quality unique content out there kiddies! It is he most important part of your site, it’s the reason they are there in the first place
“Then you need to promote it — that can be done free using webmaster tools.”
The webmaster tools suite within Google are the perfect ammunition to target your audience.
“Third, tweak snippets. [Snippets are brief descriptions of web pages that appear in certain search results.] Changing meta description tags can increase your traffic.”
The Meta Content of your site is crucial to your success because it is you “advertisement” in the search engines. Through the Adwords program, you can place your add at the top of a keyword, and depending on the popularity of that keyword you can easily burn through 800-8,000 a DAY in advertising costs! There is a whole art form to subtly changing one word or two in the tiny Pay Per click advertisements. When you “organically” rank for a keyword you get 3 to 4 times more text space to advertise! You are getting some very costly advertising space so put some thought into what you say in you “ad”!
Fourth, tweak your text. Look at existing search logs to see how people find you now. It’s the easiest way to increase your conversions. “
Once you have put your content out here, look at your statistics. Make small adjustments to your text and content. If you use Google Analytics, you can actually setup several tests to determine if one version of your page is more successful than another. Remember that nothing is perfect, and small improvements and tinkering can have a positive impact on your rankings.
When you are generating the content for a specific page, or in general for your website, you are always going to need to have good references. The most difficult approach to writing a whole new page is by starting with a completely blank page. This forces you to pull all of your creative ideas from your mental archive of information. For some people this comes easily, but for most it is very difficult to start from scratch.
Find Inspiration
Writing is a process, and well designed content is meant to be informed and informative. It is difficult to know something about a subject you haven’t studied. My first recommendation is to look at the subject matter of your page and look for existing information to digest. This could be in a traditional sense, with a trip to the local library( I know, it might be painful to actually go out into the sunlight!), or you can do a quick search to find online resources.
Using Vs Exploiting Resources
I recently read a black hat guide to content writing which talked about “manually scraping” content from other sites by replacing a few letters or words here and there in the content. While it is a great idea to find resources I personally feel that you should respect the integrity of the original work. I would hate it if someone jacked my content and just changed three or four words around. I would encourage you to visit several resource pages, print them out or book mark them, and then come up with your own unique direction, theme and development. Use the original pages as a knowledge base of facts and come up with your own exciting copy. The truth is, if you are just regurgitating someone else’s work and replacing 1 or two words, then you are going to hit a wall.
Google gets wise to Near duplicate content
Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea, keeps an eye on current patent applications coming from the major search engines. While his writing give me a headache sometimes trying to understand all of the technical aspects of the patents, the reality is that Google is implementing more ways of detecting duplicate and NEAR DUPLICATE CONTENT. The reality is that Google is keenly interested in refining search to relevant results, and if your content is near duplicate, and not unique, it’s not even worth Google’s time to display.
…and he most likely doesn’t even realize that he did rank for that term…
Actually, I know that this is a temporary spot in a long standing race for ranking in the term Content Writing Advice, and I would like to give due credit to the blogger who started the friendly little seo competition surrounding the content writing advice keywords. It has brought a large measure of inspiration and direction to this blog, and has often inspired and spurred me on to be far more active in my content writing.
When you are content writing for you site, you do need to keep in mind the user freindliness of your website. I read this great article about usability that gave an analogy of a restaurant that did tons of advertising but didn’t reap the benefits because their restaurant wasn’t quality.
Write the content for your website in a way that is going to satisfy the people who read it. Filling pages with empty words that happen to match with your keywords will be much less successful than useful information that is relevant to your clients needs.
Don’t focus on your rankings because you will become obsessed, checking other peoples sites and wondering why they are ranking higher. Take that energy and devote it to writing relevant website content! When you have quality information that converts visitors it is far more valuable than just sheer numbers.
Most people don’t realize that every page they have gives a description of the content of the page to the Search engines, and that is used for the “Snippets” that appear on their results. It’s ironic because it’s actually one of the few things that should be straight forward…I’m talking about your “Meta-Description”. The reason that most people forget about their meta descriptions is because they do not appear to the regular visitor to the page. They only appear when that page gets indexed by a search engine and then it will display as a snippet under your Meta-Title.
My advice when writing this meta content, is to keep it simple. If you look at the snippets in Google, you’ll see that it only reads so many characters before it gets cut off. Be sure that your snippet accurately describes the page, in a different way from the meta title. This is a very important step because you will only be doing yourself a disservice by duplicating the title.
It is important to note that this strategy will definitely assist in getting more click through on your snippets. A well thought out description can attract traffic that might have just passed you by if you hadn’t provided a description and the search engine generated one from random text pulled from the page.
