Electron SEO Blog – Search Engine Optimization News, Articles, and Tips

SEO is a great engine for getting results if you know what you are doing. But what fuels that engine? What is it that drives the great mechanical beast that is Search Engine Optimization? The answer is simple: Content. I ran across a great series of articles by Brian Clark over at Copyblogger about what has been successful for him in his SEO endeavors. Hit the jump and check it out. More than that–his articles are the inspiration for this post.

SEO Copywriting like I said previously, is far from an exact science. There is, however, one aspect in which you have total control: The SEO content. Gone are the days of B.S. content, shameless (and pointless) keywording for the almighty click. One of the overarching themes that we see with Clark’s article is the necessity of not just SEO content, but solid, relevant SEO content. Clark uses the term, “Cornerstone,” which I enjoy. Cornerstone content, according to Clark is,

“A cornerstone is something that is basic, essential, indispensable, and the chief foundation upon which something is constructed or developed. It’s what people need to know to make use of your website and do business with you.”

Phenomenal definition, and kudos to Clark on this. What we see here are the underpinnings of great writing in general–just with an SEO twist. What I am going to focus on is the “essential, indispensable” aspects of his definition.

So, we want content that is Essential and Indispensable. This breaks from the origins of SEO content and copywriting because what we saw back then there smatterings of keywords, random linking, keywords with nothing to do with the topic of the page. Now, we need essential. We need indispensable. Great. What do those mean?

Essential and indispensable; we, as copywriters want our SEO content to be essential and indispensable. Actually, when you think about it, we want all our content to be essential and indispensable. So, take a random keyphrase, Tapioca Pudding Wars. If we were writing SEO content about Tapioca Pudding Wars (TPWs), we would want every person who was interested in TPWs to not only want to look at us, but need to look at us because we are relevant and indispensable.

Because we are relevant, our page fills a need for the searcher. We offer something about TPWs that no one else does. What we say is important. Important enough that Bob doing research for his blog about the TPWs finds our information so profound, that he links back to us. Now, not only does Bob know that we are a great source of information about TPWs, but everyone who reads Bob’s Blog will, in theory, also find our information essential and indispensable. Then, one of Bob’s friends, Bertha finds our page about TPWs through Bob, thinks our content is great as well and also links back to us. So on and so on and so on.

One of the points that Clark makes is that shoddy content isn’t going to do it anymore because search engine crawlers take into account social medias; how many people link to your page, how many views you get a day; have you been Dugg?; etc. The advent of web 2.0 completely changed the game with SEO content writing, in a good way. Now, those people who are expert B.Sers but aren’t don’t actually fill a need are out of the picture, because they won’t get the consumer push because there is no reason for a searcher to go to their site because the B.S. in fact, does nothing. In order to be successful at SEO content and copywriting, you must prove yourself to be reputable, essential, and indispensable. Without that, you will fall off the radar because you didn’t provide a service or fill a need.

You want people to forget that they have a back button on their browser when they hit your site. Solid SEO content does just that because on a base level, it delivers what it promises. It’s not fluff, it’s not pointless, and it wasn’t just a trick to get you to the website. It’s actually pertinent to what the searcher wants.

It seems like this should be pretty self-evident, but even today we find that actually locating something pertinent on the web can be challenging amongst all the drivel. So while it presents itself as common-sense–the evidence is to the contrary. It’s refreshing to know that to those who are willing to put the effort into their sites, and tweak a little bit for keyphrases, they could see themselves on that almighty first results page.

Great SEO content is like the fuel for the engine of your SEO campaign–it doesn’t look like it does much on the surface but without it, you can’t go anywhere.

Till we meet again…

/end Transmission

SEO copywriting is a relatively new, almost universally poorly done enterprise. Not due to lack of talent, but rather a distinct lack of anything resembling experience in writing for search engines. Writing for a machine has a different feel to it than writing for a human audience. This requires those of us writing for SEO to adapt. Here are the top three things I have done to help me with my own SEO Copywriting.

SWIPE FILE

A swipe file is exactly what it sounds like and more is the single most important thing you can do to improve not only your SEO copywriting, but your writing as a whole. A ‘swipe file’ is a file of materials that you ’swipe’ from other people. From headlines, articles, keywords, layouts, basically anything that you see that catches your eye. If it catches your eye, chances are it’ll catch someone else’s too (or in this, bump us up on the results page). A swipe file can be electronic, hard copy, or a combination of the two. It doesn’t really matter what form it’s in, as long as it serves its purpose.

And what purpose would that be, you ask? Why, to help you brainstorm. The whole purpose of a swipe file is like standing on the shoulders of giants. You develop ideas, creative concepts, forms, layouts that you normally wouldn’t have even dreamed of because you used someone else for inspiration—simple but profound concept. The biggest thing for you to remember to avoid the IP police is to never, ever use anything in your swipe file directly. It should only be used as an inspirational material to help you generate ideas. You risk violating more laws than I can count on 2 hands if you use direct material. “Plagiarizer” is a term no one wants to be labeled with.

DO YOUR RESEARCH

Pick a series of keywords–between 15-20. It doesn’t really matter what the keywords are–topic is irrelevant. Then look at the top unsponsored results for each of those keywords as well as a result in the middle, and a result at the bottom. Look over each page for specific wording and verbiage–how many times is the keyword or phrase used on that page? How many words are on that page? What is the general layout of the page? Then, you want to look for common thread between those sites at the top. Because SEO and SEO copywriting is far from an exact science, I could do this exercise and wind up with vastly different results from everyone else. As such, it is very important to try to keep up with what changes and try to figure out why. You should use the same keywords each time so that you can better track those changes.

Then, take those examples that you think are the best–because of layout, keyword placement, keyword count, or just word count in general—and add them to your swipe file. It’s amazing how convenient that is. Since you should have a pool of up to three hundred pages to pull from–an initial file of about 15-20 would be a good start.

You also want to be checking out what’s not working as well, i.e. – someone lower on the search results. Try to highlight the differences between the page which is higher on the list versus lower on the list. This has a very empirical feel to it because it is very empirical. These results could change as much as daily, and so the more you run comparisons and add to your swipe file, the more comprehensive your understanding of SEO copywriting will be.

A GOOD PLACE TO START

So, a good place to start is getting accustomed to writing keyword articles. For those of you who have limited experience in web content, a keyword article is typically a short article, five hundred or less words, about a given topic designed to generate hits on that topic. They do this through “key words,” a word or phrase that repeats itself again and again throughout the article. Keyword articles are a bit challenging at first because they typically require that keyword itself make a specific number of appearances in the article. A standard for when I wrote keyword articles was that the keyword or phrase had to be used at least seven times in the article, be mentioned in the title, and the article at least five hundred words long.

It’s important to realize that keyword articles do not translate into an effective SEO copywriting technique. It has a similar idea, but SEO is vastly more complex than just how many times the keywords appear on a page. Want to have some fun? Count how many times I mention SEO copywriting in this post. Then, consider my motivations for adding that last sentence.

Three tips for getting your feet wet with SEO copywriting. More to come as it becomes available.