Everyone wants “organic” or “free” traffic, but it’s a full time job to try to keep on top of the search engines changing rules. Instead, if you build a good content-rich site and do the things on this list, you’ll get traffic and help your ranking at the same time.

1. Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – Get traffic in an hour with PPC. Google and Overture (now Yahoo). Don’t bother with others until you make these two work. The key to this is to know your visitor value, bid on hundreds of key words and phrases and split test your ads and track each key word, phrase or ad separately.

2. Distribute Your Content – write articles of value to your target market. Distribute that content for other webmasters to use on their sites as long as they keep the link back to you in a “resource box” at the end of each article. Distribute your articles through article directories, ezines, and distribution services. The key to make this work is valuable content.

3. Submit Press Releases – submit electronic press releases frequently with news of interest to the media and your target market. Since press releases are news, if they get picked up, it will be quickly and you may get hundreds of links back to your site this way. Key to make this work: write 300 – 500 word releases, include a link back to you, and have them written and distributed by experts who know how to optimize each release for key words (not typical PR firms).

4. Set Up a Blog with RSS – to be effective, blogs must have frequently updated content. Base yours on information helpful to your customers, not sales pitches. Don’t do it unless you can commit some ongoing time to it. Seth Godin says the keys to a successful blog are: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness (short & to the point), and Controversy. The key to making this work is to make it interesting to your visitors, submit to blog directories, ping the search engines when you post and distribute your content with RSS.

5. Get One-Way Incoming Links – All the previous tips will create incoming, one-way links but you can also buy links from other sites from text link brokers. Don’t do reciprocal linking, it’s dead. Make sure you get links from pages with a Google Page Rank higher than “0″. A site Google rates as “0″ may be because they are penalizing it for some reason. If you link to it, you’ll get penalized too.

The key to making this work: Make sure links have your key words in the anchor text and make sure they are text, not graphical links. Make sure they are from other relevant sites, not link farms or FFA (Free for All) sites. The ideal is links from relevant pages without many other links.

6. Give Other Sites Your Testimonial – let them publish it on their web site as long as they link back to you. This can get you a one-way link from a site that would otherwise not give it to you. The key to make this work: keep it short and to the point.

7. Email Promotions – Advertise in Ezines, place ads in someone else’s email newsletters that reach your target market. The key to make this work: track everything carefully

8. Joint Ventures – Get promoted to your JV partner’s customer database by your JV partner. John Reese sold over $1 Million of his information product in 24 hours exclusively by using joint venture promotions from his partners sending his offer to their customer lists. He paid his partners commissions on sales. The key to make this work: know your visitor value and have a tested and proven sales page that converts well BEFORE you contact JV prospects.

9. Get Affiliates – If selling a product, offer a commission to affiliates to sell for you. Each affiliate’s link to your sales letter conversion page will bring you traffic and a better search engine rank too. The key to making this work is to make it financially attractive to your affiliates and give them everything they need to promote your product or service. Make it brain dead easy for them to do.

10. Buy Other Web Sites – Find web sites that already rank high on your keywords and verify their traffic with the site owner and independent tools. Make sure you get ownership of the domain – you can let them still use their content elsewhere. Check deleteddomains.com to see what domains you can register for a few dollars that their owners have let expire. The key to making this work: Check Google page rank, Alexa rank and the number of back links for any site before you buy a web site.

One marketer I know challenged some SEO experts to see who could get ranked highest on a given term in 24 hours. He won, the techies did a lot of slick things, but the marketer just bought the site that was already # 1.

About the author:

Joe McVoy is a marketing consultant who has had experience starting up & growing businesses. He founded 2 companies selling to Wal-Mart, Target and other retailers, a mail order company and an Internet marketing business. He helps clients with traditional marketing, direct marketing, on-line marketing and has a free newsletter & resources at: http://www.profitablemarketingsystems.com

#1. Bad Title and Meta Tags

My number one pet peeve. A good title for your page is in my opinion the single most important factor when it comes to in-page optimization. The title of your page should not just be “name of your company”. You should have a keyword phrase in the title. For example, if you have a site that sells hand made candles and the name of your company is “ Luminosity” Your home page title should NOT be “ Luminosity”, this is a mistake that 90% of all sites I see make. Title should contain keyword phrase like “Handmade Candles by Luminocity”. Or better ““Handmade Scented Candles and Natural Soy Candles-Luminocity”. Every page on your site should have unique Meta data (title, description and if you feel like it keywords). Your description should weave in the keyword phrase you used in your title and use less than 80 characters in description. . Keywords are virtually meaningless but if you must add them go ahead. If I do use them- I use my top 5 or 6 keywords and I don’t put comma’s in between- I prefer to let search engines figure out the different combos.
Take the time to do this step. If you can only do one thing on this list then do this.

#2. Using Graphics Instead of Viewable Text

I still do come across this. A site this has bulk of its text- embedded into graphics. Having a logo with your name or product description embedded into the graphic instead of using actual text. Spiders and bots cannot “see” images and the words embedded into pictures have no meaning. So have your mission statement embedded into fancy graphic may look great but will not index in any search engine. When using images on your site you should always use ALT tags to describe your image i.e. “blue soy candle” not only for non-sighted users but these are recognized by spiders.

#3. No Standard Navigational Links

These are the links that are on pretty much every page of your site. You will see them most often at the bottom of a page and it will feature links that say things like “Home” and “Site Map”. More and more I am seeing menus and navigational bars that use java script. These are nice but not crawl-able. Make sure you have things links in html format somewhere on you pages- most will sit these in footer or bottom of the page. This is also a good chance to use keywords. Try “Scented Candles” rather than “Our Products”.

#4. Large Image Files

Hard to believe- but this still happening. Potential buyers and clients will abandon their site if it takes too long to load. Most people are still using dial-up and can’t wait for multiple and bulky images to download. Some easy tips- make sure you images are set to 72 pixel resolution. Resolution set higher than that it a waste and unnecessarily large. Most photo editors will allow you to set compression rate. Test different compression rates- you can reduce file size by more than have with no visible difference. If you really need the large images then consider using thumbnails that lead to a separate page. (This has added benefit of creating another page and more text that spiders and bots crave).

#5. Lack of Content

Pages that have little or no text. A photo can always use a description and product can always be more than a name. When you have a bunch of pages that have little or no text sitting on same domain they can look the same to spiders and may get dumped as supplemental results. Go through your site and see if there are opportunities to add content. Elevate your SEO expertise and try using keywords in you copy. There are many excellent articles and resources for keyword research.
Consider adding content that has substance and offers related and valuable information to you products or services. Put up a page that describes all your different scents. List your most popular colours and styles. Tell your readers what candles are best for a dinner party and which are the most hypo-allergenic. Get in the habit of creating content for your site. Commit to writing one new page a week or month. Think in terms of building your site wider rather than digging downwards.

#6. Duplicate Content

Do not cut and paste and pass off other people’s work as your own. It’s not just unethical and illegal- most likely it will be picked up as duplicate content and dumped in supplemental results. This means that the search engines disregard any information on the page and your page may as well not exist. Keep this in mind if you plan on doing something like putting up another site with a different domain and different name and just copy your original web site. I have seen this done by many site owners thinking they have stumbled on the secret weapon to higher rankings. The results can be disastrous. I could write another article on all the bad things that can happen if you do this. Just don’t do it.

#7 No Back Links

By links I mean other sites linking to you. These are called inbound links or backlinks. I have worked on sites that have been up for months and are not indexed anywhere. Your site has to be linked somewhere- anywhere- on the internet to “exist” otherwise it is just a deserted island. Not having any inbound links is like opening up a flower shop in Antarctica and wondering where all the walk-by traffic is. If you have not done so suggest your site to DMOZ. Then look for other relevant directories. Almost every business or service will have niche directories where you can submit your site- most times for free. Visit other sites that are related to your and ask them to link to you. Try and think in terms of traffic and avoid the page rank trap. If a link will bring your site traffic then go for it.

If you are in a highly competitive market, than I take exception and you should learn how to build quality links or seriously consider hiring some one to do it for you.

Lisa Stewart is professional SEO consultant. Using the advice in this article will help with your web site promotion and getting higher rankings in the search engines in Canada.

2. Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines . To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.

3. Every page should contain the “title” and “description” tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.

4. Try not to use Flash when possible . Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and makes people run away

5. Think twice on how to use graphics . Make them relevant to your content and use an Alt tag containing the relevant keyword(s).

6. Do not only use images to link out . You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.

7. Avoid using frames . Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.

8. Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders . There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.

9. Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster . It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.

10. Use standard HTML . Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than it needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that can’t be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or not index the whole web page. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html.

About the Author
Siuchu Suga specializes in website design and Internet marketing. She is also the webmaster of About-webdesign.com.

Web design and SEO component

Search engine optimisation has been a hot topic for a while.
Many owners understand that without professional SEO service
their investments in websites are likely to fail.

It is typical though to see a professionally designed pages that miss or
ignore the SEO component.

Web designers have plenty of things to take care of or worry about.

Static or dynamic, ASP or PHP, HTML or XHTML, browser compatibility -
this is just a very short list of problems they face.

Being busy with their primary tasks web designers often miss search engine
issues.

That can be a primary reason for many websites and web pages not to appear
in search results at all.

Although SEO should be performed by specialists, some initial
efforts can be applied during the web design stage.

10 Tips for Web Designers

1.Do not miss the Title tag.
Although it is optional, it has a maximum weight for search engines.
SEO specialists spend hours researching and creating good titles.
Do your client a favor – if SEO is not budgeted for make sure that
every page you work on has a meaningful title.

2.Do not miss DESCRIPTION meta tag.
All meta tags are optional. Be aware that description is second important SEO
issue. Try to match it to title.

3.Make sure that title and description are located within HEAD.

4.Do not use dynamic pages if you can.
The project architecture may dictate usage of PHP, ASP etc.
However search engines are reluctant to index them.

5.JScript is fun to use but it makes it harder for search engines to understand
the content of the page. If you need just a menu highlight try to use style instead of
script.

6.Pages with Flash are difficult to optimise for search engines.
How about web sites that are built on Flash?
They impress visitors. However how do visitors find such websites?

7.Utilise style sheets.
Most of modern pages use style sheets. Very few utilise them effectively.
That is why web pages are overloaded with HTML attributes.
That makes them heavier and slower in load.

8.Search engine look for text – not images. If possible use text rather than image.

9.Text of the page should be at least 250 words. Search engines do not score pages
with just a few sentences.

10.Text of the page shouldn’t be very lengthy. To make search engines happy
stick with the page size of 15KB – including images.

About the Author
RKD is the founder of http://www.internet-marketing-australia.com. He is the author of IMOR/SEOR methodology for search engine analysis of web sites.

But one has to realize there is more to web designing then knowing how to write a few HTML codes or use one of the many commercially available programs. While teaching you how to code or code correctly for that matter is not the objective of this article, I would be giving you some tips that distinguish the real web designer from the rest of the pack.

1. I will strictly ask you to not to use lots of flash contents if you want to be at the top of the search engine. Yes, I know it looks awesome but it does nothing more than hindering your all search engine optimization strategies. You don’t need to provide your visitors an eye candy, dude just provide them some helpful content.

2. Always remember to use navigation menu at the right side of each page of your site, why? because search engines count the first few phrases appearing on the page, this way you would provide the search engines the content first.

3. Make your pages cross browser compatible. Though this is very difficult even for the most experienced among us, TRY!

4. Time your page for its loading speeds. Remember, though a graphic image looks really good on your site, its hateful if your visitors have to wait hours for it to load. You may be using a high speed connection, the whole world doesn’t. Your page has to be quick to load.

5. Too many images have exactly the opposite effect then they are meant to have. So, do everything in proportion… including putting in graphics and animations.

6. Colour combinations matter. Your text has to be readable & as importantly if not more, worth reading.

7. Always work on a good navigation structure… Remember if a client cant find your contact info or order link, you’d miss on a sale.

8. Make your site search engine friendly. Its no use having the best site in the world which no one can find. And for every one’s sake don’t mess around with hidden layers to get a high listing on the engines. It is JUST NOT worth the risk!

9. If you have ad banners, place them with a little thought. Too many of those little pop ups are the most annoying thing on the web and more often then not deter visitors from sticking onto your site rather than earn you some extra cash.

10. Lastly… you never know everything. Over the years and after designing a dozen sites, I still learn something new from ever project that I undertake. Guys you can never be perfect when it comes to coding… And if you are… then there is always room to improve perfection.

Akash Kumar an seo expert and the founder of vistadivine.com – an
economical search engine
optimization firm

I get asked for specific SEO tips for WordPress very often. Basically all the ‘usual’ SEO stuff is also applicable for WordPress.
But besides that, there are a few tips for WordPress I’d like to share with you.
Here it goes:

1. Use Permalinks
Be sure to use Permalinks on your blog.
By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. These links are hard to spider for search engines, and therefor your postings aren’t indexed as fast and as good as you want to.
WordPress offers you the ability however, to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives.
You can find this option in your Admin panel. Choose ‘Options’ in the menu and there ‘Permalinks’.
This brings us immediately to Tip 2:

2. Place your titles up front in your URLs
In the Permalinks section you can choose for the ‘Date and name based’ option. This will place the year, month, day and post title in your URL.
For SEO purposes it’s better to have your post title up front. So instead you should choose for the ‘Custom’ option and put in something like:
/%postname%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/

This will give you an URL like this:
http://www.seo-portal.com/section-targeting-for-adsense/2006/07/06/

3. Tags
Tags are a great SEO addition to your blog. They enable search engines to crawl your website more easily and in addition to that, create specific pages for your tags/keywords.
You can install the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin on your WordPress blog. Get the plugin here: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/

4. Page Titles
Make sure you set good titles on your pages. We discussed putting the post title up front in your URL. You should do the same thing for your Titles.
You can do this by changing the < title > tag in your header.php (located in wp-content/themes/your theme/)
You can use the following code in order to get your post title in front, followed by your blog name:

< title >< ? php wp_title(); ? > : < ? php bloginfo('name'); ? > < /title >

5. Choose your Post Titles carefully
Your Post Titles should be as clear as possible. Don’t stuff your titles with keywords you are targeting with your whole blog.
Choose your keywords carefully per posting, and get those words in your Post Title.

6. Autolinks
Cross link to your own posts and pages in your own content. Do this by linking your keywords to the relevant postings.
To facilitate this work, you can install the SH-Autolink plugin.
http://www.rockschtar.de/wp-plugin-sh-autolink/

7. Related Posts
Put links to related posts under your postings. This helps search engines crawling your site and indexing all your postings.
You can get a plugin for this here: http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/

8. Ping Services
Everytime you post or edit a posting or page, your WordPress blog can notify lots of sites that you updated your blog.
Be sure to use this feature!
You can set up this feature in Options >> Writing. You can find a list of sites to ping on the WordPress site:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services

9. Google Sitemaps
Google has a tool for webmasters called Google Sitemaps(http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/). This will help Google index your website, and let’s you tell Google which pages
are most important. If you make use of this feature, you will be able to see for what searches your site was shown in the results.
This helps you optimizing your appearance in Google.
You can use this plugin to automatically create a sitemap for your WordPress blog:

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final

10. Categories
Categories help you organize your content. If you have the permalinks turned on, the category names will appear in your URL.
This is why it is also very important to name your categories carefully; Try to use keywords to name your categories and don’t be afraid to make a load.
WordPress enables you to make use of subcategories and sub-subcategories etc. etc. This way you can narrow down your focus on certain keyword phrases.
Consider the following example:
You have a website about selling photocamera’s. You could organize your articles/postings like this:
fotocamera’s >> Digital camera’s >> SLR >> Nikon
If a user would be searching for “digital SLR camera nikon” the deepest nested category would have a good optimized url for this search as the url would be something like this
www.yoursite.com/fotocameras/digital-cameras/SLR/nikon/

You can make use of the King Categories Widget to organize your categories:
http://www.blog.mediaprojekte.de/cms-systeme/wordpress/wordpress-widget-king-categories/

Chris writes daily SEO postings on his weblog SEO Portal on http://www.seo-portal.com

Here are 10 tricks that will increase your visibility in search engines and eventually drive more traffic to your blog.

1) Use keywords in your blog post titles – This is a given for SEO. Most blogging software uses the post title as the url so take advantage of it.

Example: “10 SEO Tricks to Attract More Traffic to your Blog – Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Journal is included on every blog post title tag automatically.

2) Optimize your blog categories – When you create categories for your blog, be sure to use keywords in the titles. When you post, be sure to default to a general category that is relevant no matter what the post is about. Choose multiple categories on each post when appropriate. This will create a “SEO-friendly” url for each post you make.

3) Syndicate your blog – Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog. Sign-up with a free service like Feedburner and then create a “syndication” area on your site.

4) Offer RSS to email – Anywhere from 10% to 40% of your blog traffic can come from individuals that perfer to read blog posts via email. RSS readers and aggregators can be confusing. Adding email services to your blog isn’t. There are several free services available for this including: FeedBlitz, Squeet, and Zookoda.

5) Ping blog search engines – This can be configured with blog software such as Movable Type or WordPress to work automatically. If you’re using Blogger.com, then you can do this manually with Pingomatic.com or Pingoat.com.

6) Make comments on other blogs – Your name will be linked to the blog url that you enter. Don’t make comments that offer no value to the blog post. Don’t use keywords in the field for your name, use your name or blog name.

7) Submit your blog directories – Also submit the blog to regular directories such as (DMOZ, JoeAnt, GoGuides, Google Blog Search, etc) that have categories for blogs.

Targeted advertising – Now this doesn’t really drive traffic to your site but will make you money. It’s possible by using Google AdSense to display highly targeted ads on your blog. Once you’ve setup an account and placed the ads on your site, just sit back and watch the cash come in. Cha-ching.

9) Snatch up hot keywords – Now before you place ads on your blog, be sure your keyword density is good for the right terms. A VERY helpful tool to improve your traffic for high-paying keywords is called Keyword Elite (http://www.seojuice.com).

10) Use track backs – If there is a blog that you refer to or quote and it is highly relevant to your subject, leave a track back. It increases your link popularity and may even score a few interested readers from the linked site. A TrackBack is a mechanism used in a blog to show, around an entry, a list of other blogs that refer to it.

Summary

The important thing to remember is that no matter how many optimization tactics you employ with a blog, there is no substitute for quality content. Blog optimization is only as effective as the quality and usefulness of the content you’re optimizing. So do not limit yourself to tips and lists. Use your imagination and you will come up with thousands of ways to drive traffic to your blog!

Author: David Cowgill
http://www.istockblog.com

There is a lot of conflicting information out there when it comes to advice about choosing which SEO Company is right for you. After all, if you are like me, your Internet business is your livelihood; you can’t afford to trust its success to just anyone! Additionally, as you may have already learned, time is not on your side. Every day that you struggle with optimizing your website is another day without sufficient income and another day that your competitors have a chance to get the jump on you.

To eliminate some of the confusion, below I have listed the top ten things that you should look for when choosing a SEO company. Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to find an effective, efficient and affordable Search Engine Optimization Company!

1. Size. A good SEO company should include different price points for all business sizes. It should be able to effectively optimize websites with pages from 1 to 1000.

2. Page Rank. The company should specifically address ways of improving your website’s Page Rank and Search Engine Positioning. Ideally, this will include a detailed site analysis.

3. Keyword Optimization. Your site’s keyword optimization is an integral part of onpage optimization. The SEO Company that you are considering should be able to analyze and optimize your keywords, and suggest alternative ones, if necessary.

4. Linking Strategy. Any SEO company worth its salt will understand the importance placed on both one-way and reciprocal linking by the Search Engines. Therefore, they should offer and be able to perform an advanced analysis of your website’s linking structure and offer to improve it.

5. Customer Care. You should have expert advice available to you within reasonable parameters. Do you want or like to wait for answers to your questions? I didn’t think so! A company’s philosophy on customer service is your indication as to how reliable they are as a company!

6. Time is of the Essence. If you can’t save time using an SEO company, what is the point? They should be able to do their job professionally, without asking for continual guidance from you. You should be free to work on other, more pressing projects, such as developing another income stream!

7. Savings/Pricing. The company should be competitively priced. Always compare the value of their SEO services with price that you will be paying. The prices should be reasonable; this means not too cheap, but not too expensive either.

8. Communication. The company should ask for all of your contact information and offer all of theirs. You should be able to get regular updates as to your site’s progress, at any time that you ask for it.

9. Value. Compare the price of the SEO service to that of traditional advertising (for example, PPC or classifieds). How does their price compare with other methods of advertising? Do they offer better results faster, with much less cost?

10. Reporting. A serious SEO company should provide detailed reports to you so you can see your website’s performance. Do you like guesswork? I know I sure don’t! It is much better to see results in print rather than “accepting” a verbal one. This way, you can be assured that the Search Engine Optimization Company is really doing what it said it would. Joe Borges is an experienced Internet Marketer and Software Consultant with experience in website development and implementation. He is also a professional SEO Consultant, helping internet businesses increase their web presence, website traffic and Search Engine Ranking. Get essential tips, tools and strategies that you can use right now to make your online business thrive by visiting our Search Engine Optimization website.

About the author:

Joe Borges is an experienced professional SEO Consultant, helping internet businesses increase their web presence, website traffic and Search Engine Ranking. He is also an Internet Marketer and Software Consultant with experience in website development and implementation. Get tools and strategies that you can use right now to make your online business thrive by visiting: http://www.tekretail.com/seo-services.html

These changes have led to a growing appreciation of
the value of quality web copy. This appreciation has,
in turn, led to an influx of opportunistic ‘copywriters’
promoting themselves as website copywriters or SEO copywriters.
Don’t get me wrong, there are quite a few excellent
SEO copywriters out there, and you should definitely
shop around. The purpose of this article isn’t
to scare you; it’s to help you find the SEO copywriter
who’ll deliver honest service and excellent results.

So with that in mind, take a look at the following
ten tips. These are the things you have a right to expect
from anyone wearing a name badge that reads “website
copywriter”, “SEO copywriter”, “internet
copywriter”, or “web copywriter”…
(See also 10
Things to Expect From Your Website Copywriter and
How
to Make the Most of Your Website Copywriter.)

1) An understanding of SEO

Obviously, your SEO copywriter must have a solid understanding
of the essentials of Search Engine Optimization. They
must know that ranking is essentially the result of
a website’s relevance (i.e. keywords) and importance
(i.e. inbound links). There are a whole lot of other
factors involved, but if your SEO copywriter doesn’t
understand these two basics, you should look elsewhere.
If you’d like to ensure your SEO copywriter knows
a little more than just the basics, take a look at SEO
for CEOs, Writing
SEO Copy, SEO
Trade Secrets, Web
Copy – How Much is Enough?, and How
to Top Google by Writing Articles for some clues
as to what you might like to ask in order to assess
their knowledge.

2) Proven experience

The proof is, as they say, in the pudding. It’s
not enough that your SEO copywriter can talk the talk;
they must also be able to walk the walk. Ask to see
some examples of websites for which they’ve obtained
some good rankings. Note that it may be very difficult
to find an SEO copywriter who has actually worked on
both keywords and link generation, so if you find one
who has, and they write well, snap ‘em up! They’ll
have a very broad and useful working knowledge of search
engines.

3) An understanding of how many keywords to use

You don’t want to fill every page up with every
keyword you’re targeting. This simply dilutes your
site’s relevance and reduces readability. Ask your
SEO copywriter how many keywords they would recommend
targeting on each page. Hopefully they’ll suggest
no more than 3, preferably 2. By targeting 2 keyword
phrases per page, you can use them a lot without impacting
readability.

4) Clear agreement on who will provide keywords

Someone needs to perform a keyword analysis in order
to figure out what words you should be trying to rank
highly for. Your SEO copywriter should be able to do
this for you, but it’s quite often more cost-effective
if someone a little closer to the business does it.
Either way, make sure your agreement with your SEO copywriter
makes it very clear who is performing this task. Don’t
assume the SEO copywriter is going to do it, because
they may assume you’re going to do it, and then
you’ll blow your budget.

5) Keywords or keyword phrases

Expect your SEO copywriter to offer some advice regarding
how specific you should be with your keywords. In most
industries, the competition for keywords is so fierce
that you’ll be forced to target very specific keywords
in order to rank – at least at the outset. For
instance, if you’re in IT, you probably wouldn’t
start out by targeting the keyword “IT”. The
competition is immense (at the time of writing, there
were approx 3,240,000,000 results for this search in
Google.com) and the IT giants already dominate the search
engines for this keyword. Instead, try using a more
specific keyword phrase like “IT infrastructure
consulting new york” (at the time of writing, there
were only around 4,000,000 results for this search in
Google.com). The other benefit to targeting more specific
keyword phrases is that you’ll generate more relevant
leads.

6) Agree on word count per page

Always make sure your SEO copywriter gives you an indication
of the number of words they expect to write per web
page. While it’s necessary to have a decent body
of words on most of your web pages, you certainly shouldn’t
have too many. What “too many” is all depends
on your industry, the objective of the page, and the
needs of your audience. It’s always a delicate
balance, but it’s certainly possible to rank highly
with only 100-200 words per page. So don’t be fooled
into paying for copy you don’t need!

7) Density targets & measure

SEO of a web page is NOT guess-work. A good SEO copywriter
will talk about density measures. This is a measure
of the number of time the keyword phrase appears on
the page. It’s expressed as a percentage of the
total word count of the page. So if your page has 200
words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its
density is 5%. As a rule of thumb, your SEO copywriter
should be aiming for a density of approximately 5% for
your primary keyword phrase and 3-5% for your secondary
keyword phrase. If your density measures are much higher
than this, readability will be reduced, and you’ll
risk being perceived as spam by the search engines.
Make sure your SEO copywriter understands keyword density,
is prepared to state the target density for each keyword
phrase, and is also happy to be measured by that standard
(should you decide to measure).

Where to place keywords

The question of keyword placement has been the subject
of much debate amongst SEO copywriters. While it is
still unclear how much impact placement has, there is
a general consensus that it has SOME impact. Be sure
that your copywriter is aware of this impact. Popular
opinion has it that keywords are more effective if they
appear in headings, bolded text, links, and generally
toward the beginning of the page.

9) Some comment on structure & links

Websites are generally better indexed by search engines
if their spiders can traverse the entire site using
text links. This means your SEO copywriter should be
linking each page to every other page using text links.
If your site is complex, this may be impractical, so
your SEO copywriter will need to create a hierarchical
structure for your site. First, they should break your
subject material down into categories. Then for each
category, they should write a summary page. These summary
pages should be accessible from higher level pages via
text links. They should also be accessible from each
other. Each summary page should link – using text
links – to a number of pages discussing the finer
details of the category. And each detail page in a particular
category should link to every other detail page in that
category (once again, using text links). This way the
spiders are able to travel from the top of your hierarchy
to the bottom, and from left to right across any level.

10) Don’t believe grand promises

SEO copywriters can play a significant role in increasing
your search engine ranking. But they can’t do it
overnight. By optimizing your site for your target keyword
phrases, an SEO copywriter is simply declaring the relevance
of your site. If you engage an SEO copywriter to write
helpful articles containing a byline with a link back
to your site, you can then submit these articles for
publication on the Internet, and this will steadily
increase your ranking. But if an SEO copywriter tells
you they can dramatically increase your ranking in a
matter of hours or days, be wary. NOTE: Your SEO copywriter
should be able to submit your articles to various submit
sites on the Internet. These sites are closely watched
by hundreds of thousands of publishers of e-newsletters
and article pages from all around the world. High quality
articles are quickly snapped up and published prolifically.
And each time your article is published, you’ve
got another link back to your site, thus increasing
the importance of your site (to the search engines).
If you’d like to submit your own articles, your
SEO copywriter should be able to sell you a list of
50 or more submit sites for as little as USD$99.

Conclusion

An SEO copywriter is a valuable addition to your marketing
function. But you need to make sure you choose wisely.
When you know what questions to ask, the battle is half
won.

Happy hunting!

About the Author
* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.

There are some simple rules that will help the beginning SEO copywriter and keep the experienced “know-it-all” like myself grounded!

First let’s start by really defining SEO copywriting.

SEO copywriting is the art and science of combining three elements:

(1) Valuable Content: providing the reader with content that affords them the opportunity to learn, experience or clarify a product, service, position or opinion. Key factors in creating “value” in your content include organization, a high level of detail, a birds-eye view, reader perspective, usability and specific calls to action.

Your content must provide the reader with ”news you can use” if you will. The overall reader experience must take into account a variety of different levels of knowledge/proficiency with the topic. Here’s where defining and organizing your thoughts come in. Start with a bird’s eye view of the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, then expand into greater detail on a point by point or step by step basis.

(2) Readability: The user must be able to understand what the heck you are talking about. A good rule of thumb is to write for the reader first, then make a second and third pass for the search engines.

(3) Structure and Formatting: Search Engines are becoming smarter about assessing the “value” of your content, but they still rely on a variety of distinguishable factors which are outlined below. There is no hard and fast rule for any of these tips. Use them all “sparingly” and remember #1 and 2 above.

10 SEO Copywriting Tips

(1) Use Bold, and Italics: Just like a regular old human reader the search engines give more weight to words and phrases that are in bold or italics. Just don’t go too crazy or you’ll irritate the search engines and give your reader a headache (unless you’re selling aspirin, but that’s a different article on subliminal copywriting!).

(2) Internal Hyperlinks: You are your own best resource, so use and to a certain extent abuse yourself. Hyperlink to other resources/pages of your site which are relevant to the copy you are writing. This will benefit the reader, increase the amount of time they spend on your site and help you with the search engines. Don’t forget your ALT tags.

(3) External Hyperlinks: Incorporating links to external resources which will benefit the reader can help you in two ways (a) they provide a third-party validation to a certain extent of your “expertise” and (b) afford you the opportunity to pick up some extra coin if that resource provides reciprocal linking or has an affiliate program.

(4) Use Bullet Points: Using a bullet point or numbered system helps break up your copy into consumable pieces, aids in the clean design of your page and makes it easy for the reader to “go back” and reference previous points without wasting time reading through dense copy.

(5) Content “Mass”: Never have less than 400 words on a page. If the content you are providing is in fact valuable you should be able to come up with aroundt 1,000 words.

(6) Use Examples to beef up your content with relevant keywords. (See #8).

(7) Keyword Density: I like to try for 7% density for no more than 4 sets of keywords or phrases per page. Segway to #8.

(8) Break your keyword sets/phrases into tiers or alternates to enable a better flow while maximizing density and penetration (based upon Yahoo!’s Keyword Selector Tool, WordTracker, WebCEO or a like keyword recommendation program).:

Example: Target: SEO Copywriting
Tier 1: SEO Copywriting
Tier 2: SEO Copywriter
Tier 3: Writing copy for SEO
Tier 4: SEO copywriting services

Example Sentence: “Instead of spending time evaluating SEO copywriting Services become a SEO copywriter yourself by following these guidelines and you’ll be writing copy for SEO in no time.”

I sort of packed it all into one sentence, but you should get the gist.

(9) Write for what the reader is searching for, not what you think they should be searching for. Remember that your job is to provide the “solution” to the problem, not create a greater problem by making the reader/searcher feel dumb. If they are searching for Ham and Green Eggs instead of Green Eggs and Ham, give them Ham and Green Eggs – “The Searcher is Always Right” to paraphrase a service industry mantra.

(10) On Page Structure and Code “Tricks” There is an old saying from high school debate teams: “Tell them what your gonna tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them”. The same applies to SEO copywriting. Use an “introductory statement”, then your body content with bullet points or numbering, then a “summary” (which is essentially the same as your introductory statement). Don’t forget to avail yourself of page specific meta tags, page title, ALT Tags, Image Tags, Screen Tips, etc. to fill in the blanks for the words that just didn’t fit into the “flow” and to increase the relevant weight of your selected keywords.

Remember, SEO Copywriting is a skill. For most people it’s really something you learn over time by doing it, paying close attention to what your competitors are doing and reading up on how to write copy for websites, blogs, press releases and articles.

Follow these simple rules that will help the beginning SEO copywriter and keep the experienced “know-it-all” like myself grounded!

Happy SEOing!

Kaboodle Ventures SEO Copywriting
The Blog Mill
Blog Templates