Copywriting SEO Techniques

In : Search Engine Optimisation, by seoblog

Copywriting SEO techniques simply means writing website copy that is optimised for the major search engines. In the good old days, this usually meant having a main keyword phrase that was simply included in the body of the article to a density of around 5%. Some even advocated a higher density of 10%! For a while this worked reasonably well. Today you need something completely different. Here are a few copywriting tips to help you get the search results you want.

1. Write naturally. Yes, you still need a main keyword phrase to wrap your article around, but don’t get obsessed about it. Forget about keyword density completely and you’ll write better copy. OK, use the keyword near the beginning of the first paragraph, and then three or four times more, but that’s it. Search engine optimisation is better served with a density of less than 1% these days, but don’t go checking it every sentence.

2. Perhaps you have heard of something called latent semantic indexing, also known as LSI. It sounds formidable, but it simply means theming your article so that the search engines know exactly what your page is about. You can use synonyms, or words that mean the same thing as your main keyword. You can use words and phrases that are closely associated with the main keyword. Doing copywriting SEO this way, you build a theme that cannot be mistaken. In this way your web page can only be about a specific topic, and the search engines will know it too.

3. Find theme words and phrases from your competitors. This is perhaps your best copywriting SEO tip. Look up the top 10 search results for the search terms you are trying to rank for. Examine the text of the pages. Note down any and all keywords that are related to the topic. Think laterally and make the list as big as possible. Make two lists in fact, one for single words, and one for phrases of two words or more. This will be your targeted search terms to use.

Think of it this way; Google Bing and Yahoo already think these pages are important for your main search phrase, so the words on the pages must be important to the topic. If you use the words in your own creative way, your page will be considered important too!

4. Copywriting actually flows more naturally and reads better when you prepare in this way. With a list of words and phrases to use in a natural and unforced way, you can quickly see where to add them and when. It becomes a writing aid that makes the article flow easily and smoothly.

5. Copywriting SEO is all about writing naturally, informatively and interestingly. When you use search terms in your web copy that are in the same general theme of your main keyword phrase, it’s difficult to go wrong, for you will have themed content. Do this and your SEO copywriting will improve – and the search engines will like it better too!

The Newsletter Opt In And It’s Advantages

In : Email Marketing, by seoblog

The newsletter opt in has become almost ubiquitous on websites these days. No matter what the product or service of the site in question, it will more likely have a little newsletter opt-in box somewhere visible on the page. When a visitor fills in their name and email address, they will be eligible to receive a free newsletter. So, what exactly is a newsletter in the Internet sense?

For a start it’s a digital newsletter and not anything tangible like a magazine printed on paper. It may be offered at regular repeating intervals, every week or every month for example, or it may be occasional. Your newsletter subscription or signup may entitle you to a bonus, or several bonuses, usually offered to help entice you to sign up in the first place. You are important to the owner of the newsletter, for as long as you remain a subscriber, there is a chance that you will be a profitable commodity. Of course, you can always unsubscribe whenever you like too.

The reason the free newsletter opt in was offered to you in the first place was to gain a new subscriber. When you opt in you are placed on a mailing list. That list is part of the Internet marketing machine of the website you signed up from. You will receive information on whatever it was you signed up for, of course, but you will also receive the occasional offer. the offers will be geared tightly towards your interest, which is why you may find it an attractive offer and buy it. The owner of the newsletter will profit if you do.

This is a fair deal when you think about it. You get something you like and the other person gets a profit. With a large enough mailing list through newsletter opt in, a very handsome profit can be made on demand. It usually is a very profitable way to market and maintain an online business.

This is known as permission based email marketing. The usual method involves double opt-in, which simply means that the customer opts in, then confirms their desire to do so. The procedure works like this. After you take out a newsletter subscription you will receive a confirmation and welcome email. This message will ask subscribers to confirm their subscription by clicking a link. That’s double opt-in in action.

The best of the newsletter opt in services will immediately try to form a close relationship with the customer. Your messages will be personalised with your name on them, and you can expect a lot of good quality information and only the occasional offer. This allows you to trust the newsletter owner. You get a lot of free stuff, so when you do feel the urge to buy, it isn’t so bad really.

The Value Of Bespoke Web Design

In : Web Design, by seoblog

A bespoke web design is one that is custom made and unique to you. Because a design company has been asked to create web site especially for you, expect to pay more than you would if they were using a standard template, though perhaps edited for your particular needs. Of course, not all bespoke design companies are made the same. You need to know up front what you can expect to pay, what service they will provide and when they can be expected to deliver.

Before you commit to anything, look for a professional design company. While a fancy website does not guarantee anything, any company that cannot produce a decent web design solution for themselves is obviously not worth bothering with. Look also for their degree of experience. If they set up shop last week, they may be really great, but are they? An experienced professional company will have testimonials from past satisfied customers. Read them. They can say a lot between the lines.

When you have decided on a suitable bespoke web design company, you will need to discuss your particular requirements with them. This should not be a rushed affair. Take your time and be sure they really understand exactly what it is you require – every last detail. However, always remember that they are the experts in this matter. Be guided by the web designers you talk to if they suggest something. Ask why of course, but they are the ones who develop bespoke design all the time and they should know best.

Ask to see their design portfolio. This is where they can show you each past project created for other clients. Here you can see the kind of solutions that others have used, and the success or otherwise of any design can be easier to appreciate in its complete state. Bear in mind that your chosen bespoke web design company will be showing off the best designed and most effective examples they have. However, they will also appreciate that their design portfolio needs to be representative of what they can deliver, so expect it to demonstrate a realistic expectation of the company’s expertise.

It is common with a good bespoke web design business to include a content management system. This allows you to easily perform your own updates and revisions. You may also be offered server hosting. This can be useful, but do some comparison checking on their quotation before agreeing. The domain name for your new web site should be the exact match of the main keyword phrase if possible; this helps with basic search engine optimisation. There are other web design solutions to look out for, but these should be enough to at least get started with.

Web 2.0 Marketing Strategies

In : Social Media Optimisation, by seoblog

Web 2.0 marketing strategies have evolved over fairly recent times to become an important part of promotion for websites. Yet, still many people ask, “What is web 2.0?” It seems there is a lack of clear understanding  about the technologies and techniques involved. A certain mystique surrounds the modern Internet for some people who remember the Internet of the 1990’s with fondness, and are not too sure about the direction it is currently taking.

For this reason it is important to keep in mind that any web 2.0 marketing strategies are just that – ways and means to promote websites so that they perform better, and result in yielding a better profit margin. Some work better than others and most people do them all wrong anyway. Not understanding what bookmarking or blogging means, or how to make use of social networking and social news sites, the hapless marketer ends up outsourcing it all to social bookmarking services. This costs a lot and usually doesn’t have the desired effect anyway.

There are better ways, lots of better web 2.0 marketing ways. Take blogging for example. A blog is a type of web 2.0 property. It can be used to promote a main website, or it can be the main website. When you make a new post you can take a small part of it and submit the snippet to several of the top social news sites, such as Digg, Propeller and Reddit. Next you can bookmark the blog post snippets you just submitted using social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Faves, Mixx, Google Bookmarks or Simpy.

Each of the bookmarks you just made has an RSS feed. If you ping each of the feeds, that will tell the search engine spiders that there is something worth looking at, and they will come running to see what it is. There are several pinging services available for free that you can use, but be careful not to overdo it. Once is enough. Marketing online is not rocket science, so don’t make it so. Using web 2.0 properties is just a way of using suitable marketing tools at your disposal. Don’t ignore the more traditional strategies. Getting good solid backlinks from reliable sources is still an extremely important strategy of promotion that will build dependable website traffic.

Using web 2.0 marketing for businesses is really just modern Internet marketing tactics. Social media with its viral marketing potential offers a greater scope for achieving the desired end result: websites that perform really well and stay successful.

Website SEO

In : Search Engine Optimisation, by seoblog

Website SEO is basically website promotion through employing careful strategies to ensure that a number of things come together to cause a website to rank well in the major search engines in an organic manner. Achieving this will result in targeted traffic to the website, and a regular and dependable flow of traffic will in turn mean a successful online marketing endeavour.

There are a number of things that make up website SEO. It can start with on-page factors such as the description meta tag. This is part of the hidden HTML code where a description of the page can be added that most of the search engines will use in their results. You have control over this, so use it well. Possibly the most important on-page factor is the page title. This should definitely include your main keyword phrase.

The visible website page should be structured properly too. It should start with an H1 headline tag. The headline should include the main keyword phrase. A subhead can follow this, again with the main keyword if possible, or secondary ones, followed by the body of the article. The main body text of the page should be well written content that uses a theming nature. The text should include words that are part of the overall theme of the piece to assist the search engines including Google of course, in making sense of it all.

Website SEO should also have off-page factors assisting its progress. These include the very important link building efforts that search engine rankings depend so much on. The more high quality incoming links a website page can have the better. And if those links also have targeted anchor text, then better still. Anchor text is the words used in a hypertext link. If the anchor text is the exact main keyword phrase of the web page, then the major search engines get excited and treat it as being very special.

The Internet is a very competitive place. Internet marketing, or online marketing, has become a highly specialised business. Website design covers part of the search engine optimisation field and overall website SEO sees to the rest. You don’t really need to be an SEO expert or a fully fledged SEO service in order to get good search engine ranking for web pages. SEO services are good at doing this, but the average man or woman in the street can do it too with a little care and understanding.

Understanding Email Opt In

In : Email Marketing, by seoblog

Understanding email opt in is actually a lot easier than it may seem if you are encountering the concept for the first time. It is also known as permission marketing as its basic nature is to encourage visitors to a web site to subscribe to a newsletter by filling in an online form with their email address and name, and then submitting the information.

In this way the visitor has performed an email opt in, they have freely given their prior consent to receive an email newsletter in return, which is just a convenient way for the marketer to keep in touch with the new subscriber. The newsletter may be published once a day or once a month. Some are only published occasionally and there may be several months between issues. It all depends on the individual marketer.

The agreed best practices for compiling an email list is to use double opt-in. This simply means that after a new subscriber opts in by submitting their information, they receive an email from an autoresponder asking them to provide confirmation that they really do want to subscribe to the mailing list. This usually means that they are asked to click a link in the email message, which will take them to a web page that declares them to be a confirmed opt-in.

This form of email authentication is encouraged by everyone within the industry who strives to maintain best practices. Unfortunately though, there are some who do not adhere so closely to the accepted standards. They practice unsolicited email marketing, also known as spam. Anyone who has an email address will know what spam is. It’s the wave of unwanted messages you receive daily, usually containing outrageous offers to do just about anything for you, from increasing certain body parts to decreasing other parts, and more often than not, guaranteeing to make you rich overnight.

Spam obviously works for some, but it is not only heavily frowned on by every respectable email marketing service, but also illegal. Those who send out unsolicited, and therefore not email opt in messages, are finding themselves in prison in some cases. It simply is not worth doing.

A responsible email marketing campaign on the other hand, works through prior consent. Every confirmed opt-in new subscriber knows what they will receive, and they are happy to do so too. They also know they can opt-out at any time should they change their mind and choose not to continue receiving the regular targeted offers. The subscribers are given a choice in the matter.

SEO Article Writing

In : Search Engine Optimisation, by seoblog

SEO article writing for web content has evolved over the years in many ways. At one time stuffing a keyword into an article to a certain keyword density was the way to go. It still is for some people, and it still works to a certain extent too. However, there’s a better way. It’s called theming, or latent semantic indexing (LSI), and it involves structuring a piece of text in such a way that all the words and phrases that would naturally be needed to explain the topic of the article are used in a natural and unforced manner.

The article can still have a main keyword phrase, and in fact needs one, but writing the article successfully does not depend on a certain density of that keyword. Writing articles in this way not only produces high quality SEO articles, but it makes complete sense and provides the end user with a much richer and better reading experience. Any article writing service worth its salt is now using theming in the web content they write. In fact, it’s search engine optimisation at its very best.

If you have any doubt about the performance qualities of a well themed article, try analysing the top 10 web pages in Google to see how well they have been constructed for any given keyword phrase. You are very likely to discover that the top ranking pages are better themed and use more theme words and theme phrases than the pages ranked below them.

Of course, it’s true that back links are important and a page that has a high number of quality back links pointing to it will usually do well. When that same page also has web content that has been custom written to LSI standards, it will perform even better. This concept has been tested many times and the basic principle holds true more often than not. Where sites with a poor degree of theming rank higher than one that is well themed, it is always other factors that cause this to be so.

You may be wondering how you can find theme words and phrases. There is software to help in this respect, but if you simply think of all the synonyms and industry phrases, as well as any words that would naturally be used to describe the topic, that a very good start.

When LSI is combined with unique and well written web content, article marketing almost takes care of itself. If your original content is structured to be useful articles as well, all the search engines will take notice, and every website visitor will take notice too. The SEO article writing pros already know this. They can produce content for your website that the search engines will love.

Good Usability Web Design

In : Web Design, by seoblog

Good usability web design is not difficult to achieve. Much of it is really nothing more than common sense. However, all too often we come across sites that have not so much been designed as put together. You may think that all sites are put together, and they are, but good usability web design is the art of putting a site together in such a way that there is no confusion, no surprises and no irritation when something happens that should not have happened. In short, it’s well thought out design and navigation fused in one – good usability web design.

If you are seeking to have a web site designed by a professional, but you don’t really know much about it, and therefore won’t really know if the outcome is good or not so good, this article can guide you by pointing out a few common mistakes that should always be avoided. Some otherwise good web designers can sometimes make mistakes they never seem to learn from. Here then are a few of the more common mistakes that prevent good usability web design.

1. Have you ever been confronted by an eager car salesman? That’s how your main home page should read. In fact, all your pages should read like that. They should be imbued with enthusiasm, bubbling over with bold benefits, and they should be honest and not over hyped either. Pages that are lacklustre and plain boring persuade visitors to reach for the back button – fast. Good usability web design demands riveting, interesting and exciting words on every page that motivate, captivate and inspire.

2. Are your web pages all about you and your company? Do you tell the visitor all about the features of your company and how it operates? Do you say things like, “We’ve been serving the community faithfully for 25 years”? You should not be doing that. That is not good usability web design. It is a simple ego trip. Start telling your visitors what you can do for them by listing the benefits of doing business with you. If your new blue widget runs faster than the last model, tell them you can save their time, which means saving their money too, when they get the new blue widget. That’s a benefit!

3. Never have surprise links. One of the most common surprise links that seriously irritate visitors is the innocent looking link that opens a PDF document without warning. It takes time for the PDF reader to load and open the document. More often than not everything freezes while the loading takes place, and believe me, your visitor is fuming by the time the page settles back down to normal. If a link does something unusual, say so! That’s simply good usability web design.

Using Link Wheels For A Greater Boost

In : Social Media Optimisation, by seoblog

Link wheels are not a new concept. The idea has been around in one form or another for many years. In fact, It was Michael Campbell from Canada, a well known SEO expert, who first mooted the idea of what is essentially link wheels with his mininets. These are simply small niche web sites arranged in a certain pattern, linking to one another and all linking to a main central web site. The small satellite sites act as a powerful funnel for traffic to the main site.

Link wheels work in much the same way, but they make use of free to use social media sites instead. This has several advantages in that the social media sites used usually have a high page rank number. This can give the site you create a natural boost right out of the gate. Also, because the use of social media sites is free and they are easy to set up, anyone can do it. Setting up several quality link wheels every week would be easy to do.

You can have as many individual sites as you like in link wheels, but around five or six is a good number. The social media sites to use are the ones that allow you to create your own blog or page where you can publish your own article. You also should only use social media sites that allow “dofollow” links to get the most value out of the back links you will create.

Let’s suppose that your link wheels will have six social media sites each. They could be sites created from the likes of Squidoo, Blogger, Wordpress, HubPages, etc. We do not use social media bookmarking sites like Digg or Mixx. You will need to write an article for each of the six social media sites you use. The articles should be about the topic you are targeting, of course, and each social media site should link to one other until they are all linked together in a wheel fashion.

Each of the sites should also link back to the web site you are promoting. This should be your own site, but it can be a merchant site you are promoting. However, if you are promoting a merchant site to collect a commission on each sale, you should check with them if this is allowed under their terms and condition for affiliates.

That’s really all there is to it. If you use carefully chosen keywords for each social media site as its main keyword phrase and you write good compelling articles, linking everything properly, all you have to do is sit back and wait for the results. Of course, you can create as many link wheels as you like.

More about the link wheel service here.

Organic Search Engine Optimisation

In : Search Engine Optimisation, by seoblog

Organic search engine optimisation is considered by most people to be the best way to encourage a web page to rank high in the search engines. It is also the way that the search engines themselves appear to think. They prefer things to be natural and unforced. When a page is created properly and finds its way up the rankings of its own accord without using every trick in the book, the search engines are happy, and so is the owner of the web page.

Performing organic search engine optimisation is actually quite easy. The trick is to manipulate things, but make it look perfectly natural at the same time. If you are not sure about your own abilities to do this there are plenty of good SEO companies that can do it for you. However, if you are prepared to give it a try yourself, here are a few tips.

1. Focus each page around one main keyword. Do some keyword research and find a keyword that doesn’t have too much competition, but still has a reasonable search count. Look carefully at the competing pages. You have to beat them if your page is going to be any good, so don’t tackle really strong competition. Beating strong competition can be done, but it will take a lot more time and effort.

2. If possible, and if you are creating a web site from scratch, register a domain name that is the exact keyword phrase of the main theme of your site. If your site is all about Blue Cube-Shaped Widgets, then register bluecubeshapedwidgets.com if possible. If you cannot get the .com, then try to get the .org or .net instead. Both the search engines and the people searching are impressed when they see the exact keyword in the domain.

3. Use your exact keyword phrase in the page title. This is the HTML title that appears in the top bar of the browser. This is probably the most important on page optimisation you can do. Put your keyword phrase in the description meta tag and in the keyword meta tag too. Then use the keyword phrase in the article title and use it in the first paragraph as well as several times throughout the article body.

There are other things you can do to help organic search engine optimisation, but these are a few of the basic things that will help. You will also need to get a few backlinks to your pages, but do it in an organic search engine optimisation way as much as possible. Organic search engine optimisation isn’t difficult to do, but it does make a huge difference when you do it properly.