One of the best parts of the article is his paragraph on “niches”. it’s a short read, so, you don’t have to take much time.

Karon Thackston offers her take on what Cutts had to say in her article “The Purpose and Practice of Writing Successful SEO Articles”

Here’s the beginning of Cutts’ article:

Okay SEOs, what can you learn from my previous post about changing the default printer for Firefox on Linux? In the last week someone wrote and said “I want you to talk about SEO, and don’t give me any of that crap about good content.” I’m going to beg to differ. I wrote that post mainly because I’ve looked for this information a couple times and never found exactly what I was looking for quickly. That tells me that in this small niche, I could utterly rock the search engines. Plus once I figured out the info, it was only 10-20% more time to package it up nicely. Now this short content post can act as an evergreen draw for searchers.

Notice what I did with keywords. I carefully chose keywords for the title and the url (note that I used “change” in the url and “changing” in the title). The categories on my post (”How to” and “Linux”) give me a subtle way to mention Linux again, and include a couple extra ways that someone might do a search–lots of user type “how to (do what they want to do).” I thought about the words that a user would type in when looking for an answer to their question, and tried to include those words in the article. I also tried to think of a few word variations and included them where they made sense (file vs. files, bash and bashrc, Firefox and Mozilla, etc.). I’m targetting a long-tail concept where someone will be typing several words, so I’m probably in a space where on-page keywords are enough to rank pretty well. I don’t need anchor-text for “linux default printer” or similar phrases; in the on-page space, I’d recommend thinking more about words and variants (the “long-tail”) and thinking less about keyword density or repeating phrases.

Read the rest of: “SEO Advice: writing useful articles that readers will love.“

Recently, author Andrew Wall offered some tips on SEO content and copywriting, discussing several topics from research to tips to ROI for your content. SEOBook is the core book, but Wall makes updates to it daily. Below is one of his most recent posts:

If People Hate Your Writing, Google Hates Your Website

I recently got asked to review a couple articles to see which one was better for Google. But the problem was that it was obvious that the writer did not know much about the subject they were writing about, based their content around a keyword list, and was not structuring the content for Google.

Gathering Background Information:

You can learn enough about a topic to sound intelligent about it if you just research the topic for about 10 minutes. Go to the associated Wikipedia page, search Del.icio.us for your topic, and find a few other articles that are research oriented (like the history of, industry background from trade organizations, trends, what people are blogging about in that topic, etc etc etc).Read more of the blog entry: If People Hate Your Writing, Google Hates Your Website.

The results are evidence that cross-medium promotion remains effective for several industries – movies, food & beverage and travel – but not all. Honestly – when was the last time you saw an ad on TV for Paypal (if you have, please let me know)? If you’re new to Internet marketing and the web social scene, you may be surprised to find “xanga” ranked above “myspace”, because there’s not much chat these days about “xanga” (which is older than MySpace). And a couple of the misspellings, such as “perez hilton” will make you chuckle.

So what does the data mean? Well, before starting your keyword research, it can give you a little insight into what people are searching for. Additional industries are covered on the HitWise site.

Content Strategy as a Marketing Tool

By: Heidi Cohen

our online content strategy has a major effect on your marketing. Although content is obviously critical for publishers, it’s also important for anyone with an online presence. Content helps drive traffic, which leads to results.

Content is intricately woven into with your brand. Content attributes such as voice, presentation, area of expertise, markets covered, and points of view define a brand. These factors all contribute to attracting a reader base. The contrarian, irreverent approach to investment advice of “The Motley Fool” differs from in-depth, low-key reporting style of “The Wall Street Journal,” for example.

Read more of “Content Strategy as a Marketing Tool.”

(You can thank sites like YouTube and MySpace for this latest innovation in Internet Marketing.)

Social Media Optimization is another avenue of search engine optimization that involves making your content – whether written, audio or visual – more readily available in social arenas on the web. The SEO community is all a-buzz with this latest development – and in his article “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO),” Rohit Bhargava offers some things to keep in mind before starting with SMO.
SEO and SMO both have the same end goal (getting enough attention [links] from the Web community to gain merit points with search engines,) they appear, at least at this stage, to merely be two different roads to the same destination.

The explosive success of both YouTube and MySpace are a testament to the web’s potential to circulate content at lightning speed. Look at how quickly Saddam Hussein’s hanging was circulated around the web – a dismal example, sure, but evidence that if you make content easily transferable, which is one of the five rules Bhargava gives for SMO, and you deliver content of interest to people, you can have success reaching a vast audience.

But one of the key strategies, just like any other marketing done these days – is going to be starting circulation of that information with a targeted audience, more than likely. And then, through web-networking – one person gets your content, and sends it to five of their friends, and each of those five friends send it to five of their friends, etc., – you can watch your information circulate like wildfire.

So what does this mean for copywriters? Well, social media optimization is yet another opportunity for us to be ambassadors of content – offering up conversational copy with a message, right?

What’s different about SMO compared with SEO or any other type of marketing copywriting? Well, the concept has only recently become a serious topic of discussion, so I will re-visit the topic when there’s more info to share. For now, I’ll leave it to Bhargava:

5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site’s performance on organic search listings. While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client’s website:

Read the rest of 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

However, if you come across any such overwhelmingly positive or negative feedback/commentary about the new features, or if you’ve had an experience one way or the other yourself, please let us know by posting in the comments section.

Here’s the new features highlights:

• Database update
  Global database now has 35 billion searches; premium database now has 10 billion searches – both with results from the last 12 months

• Plural Search Feature
  Now, when you type in singular or plural version of a word, Keyword Discovery will give you both. KD says the feature was requested by a customer, offering encouragement for customer sumbission of ideas to improve KD

• Import
  You can import to any KD database now.

Also, came across some information about additional updates that are on the way:

• More KD databases in other languages: French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
• Wildcard search functions
• Adult search term database
• KEI improvements

It seems only time will tell whether or not these features will prove truly useful for SEO experts, copywriters, keyword resxearchers or anyone else using keyword discovery. The most interesting thing to watch is whether or not any of these tools save time on keyword research or help enhance SEO results.

Lastly, check out Jill Whalen’s take on Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker as she recently answered a reader’s question about which one to use.

http://www.seoradio.com/20060725-kevin-carr-international-news-media.html

While I’m least familiar with WordTracker, I can say that my minimal experience as an SEO copywriter and some research seems to indicate that there is no magical, one-stop shop keyword research tool that’s precise enough to give you everything you want or need. All of the big three have their advantages, with Overture being the most limited.

When researching keywords, a range of sources – from SEO for dummies to Karon Thackston at MarketingWords.com – suggest that solely relying on results from keywords is not a smart way to accurately conduct keyword research. Using some marketing savvy combined with additional research is more likely to produce the results you want.
Jill Whalen, a trusted authority on SEO copywriting, recommends WordTracker in her book “The Nitty-gritty of Writing for Search Engines.” In the SEO for Dummies book, author Peter Kent goes through a mini-tutorial on this tool, and I’ve read several articles that discuss the merit of WordTracker. Just like the other tools, the results represent a sampling of results across several databases all over the Web.

Keyword Discovery seems to work in much the same way, and offers anaysis tools similar to WordTracker. And I’ve ready positive reviews of KD as well, and Jill Whalen says she uses this tool in addition to WordTracker. The difference between the two (it seems), is that Wordtracker was created first, so it has more merit than Keyword Discovery because it is older. And depending on what type of information you’re looking for, one may be better than the other, but from what I’ve read that determination seems pretty subjective, more based on preference than on fact because both tools are pretty comparable.

Overture is a good, quick & easy keyword research tool that doesn’t really offer extensive analysis, and tells you how often a search term has been searched on over the last month.

So, there does not really seem to be a “best” keyword research tool. Keyword research remains more of a trial and error marketing research process than just a task that can be accomplished with a couple of clicks of the mouse. And in his article, “Keyword Data is Almost Always Wrong,” author Jay Stockwell offers an interesting perspective when comparing keyword results – for the same term – between the big three and a couple of other research tools.

SEO Copywriting Checklist for Web Page Writing

Page name at the top of the page with the URL (if page exists; if page does not exist, write “New Page”)

NOTE: THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS THE PAGE TITLE

List of targeted Keywords for the page

Page Title

Meta Description

· 150-200 words

· Should include both keywords if possible

· Should include a call to action

· Should include phone number or email

Heading Tags

· One H1 on every page

· All headings should include keywords plus secondary and tertiary words (when applicable)

· Keyword in tag should be repeated in first sentence of the following paragraph

Make sure to include call to action near top of the page – on pages dense with copy, make sure call to action is introduced at the top of the page and reiterated in the last paragraph

Incorporate keywords throughout text

Use Bold, Italics and Bullets to emphasize key points on the page, but use common sense. Not every keyword should be bold or italicized. Think from the reader’s perspective

Hyperlinked text (or anchor text) should be keywords for the page you are linking to on the site; if linking to a page on another website, should be linking to a page with high page rank (PR4 or better)

Include keywords in the last paragraph

Check keyword density (should be 1-3 percent) and look for additional opportunities to insert keywords and hyperlinks to other pages on the website, or links to other high-ranking websites (when applicable); Do a final read-through to identify other opportunities to insert keywords

Notes to the client – make sure any notes to the client are clearly indicated, by using brackets and bold, red font color

While I can’t guarantee that everyone will get the pleasure from these pastimes that I do while I write, I hope that at least one of them strikes a chord with you. Maybe you already play some of them anyway or you have variations on these ideas. This might let me see whether we all do the same sort of thing or whether I am maybe going a little bit loopy from looking at spell checker and word count for too long.

Make the Connection

With some subjects I have personal experience on the matter while on others I don’t. However, using the “6 Degrees of Separation” theory I try to find some way in which it is connected to my life rather than just write an impersonal article or make something up.  Maybe I could make a board game version of this one as well.

Include Song Lyrics

I have a sneaking suspicion that I am not the only SEO writer to do this one. This game basically consists in putting some song lyrics into my article in a way in which no one will really notice them for what they are. At best you would expect some readers to vaguely recognise a couple of phrases but not be able to put their finger on why.

Hide the Keyword

This is probably the simplest one on the list. Generally, I will make the keyword as unobtrusive as possible in the article I am writing. However, when I want to set myself an extra challenge I try to hide it as well as possible in the text, so that even another SEO copywriter couldn’t work out what the keyword is if they were looking for it. With some words it is easy while with others it takes a lot more work.

Argue With Yourself

It is pretty easy to write an article from a neutral point of view, isn’t it? What is more difficult is going against your opinion and creating something which is still passionate and persuasive. If I have to write on a subject I have an opinion on then I like to make at least one of the articles from the opposite point of view. I might even convince myself that I was wrong not to agree with myself, if you know what I mean.

Follow the Sequence

In this game the idea is that the last sentence of an article has to become the subject of the next one. So if I am writing about shoes and finish off the first article by saying that you should make sure that you choose the right size then this is what the second article has to be about. It actually works well for making me work faster as I don’t need to come up with ideas for the articles after doing the first one.

If any other writers have other games or pastimes to share then I am always open to ideas for making my day a bit more entertaining.

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