Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

Writing content for a blog, website or promotional print media isn’t all that easy when you think about it. You cannot expect to attract readers simply because you wrote something and put it out there on the Internet. If you build it they will come does NOT hold true with traditional or online marketing efforts in today’s marketplace.

I’ve written some pretty horrific blogs on here before even by my own standards. Some I’ve simply removed right away and others still exist though I won’t be pointing them out. Then again maybe a “Top 10 Worse Posts” section on my blog is a good idea…

I once gave a friend of mine some advice when he first launched his blog and he wrote a decent follow up blog titled, “Swallow Your Pride: How To Take Advantage of Constructive Criticism“.

So in the spirit of good humor and in hopes of everyone actually liking what I write on this blog I think for kicks I’ll find a way to set up a thumbs up / down system much like Rand Fishkin is doing over at SEOMoz with the blogs they post. Everyone could use a little constructive critism every now and then and even Rand would agree with that; right Rand?

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

• Uniqueness: 10.0
• Overall Rating: 10.0
• Usefulness: 10.0

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Throughout my day on the job I find myself constantly explaining to my client’s things like writing content and even link building is one of a kind. They both are vital parts of on site optimization efforts. Giving advice on these two topics is probably one of the things I spend most of my time doing each and every day.

The conversation usually focus’s on what parts of content the website owner is using for linking purposes to internal or external pages. It is simple enough to say, “Click Here”, “Here”, “E-Mail Me” and so on.

When writing content it is a fairly decent idea to include the desired target keyword within your content. When that doesn”t seem possible with how you wrote it out then you should consider rewriting the content. If THAT doesn’t work for you then at least try to use parts of your keywords within the content.

What looks better from these two sentences?

• Click here for an example of keyword parts
• I’ve written a blog post on keyword parts if you are interested

From a visitor point of view, “Click Here” is a straight forward invitation to do something. From a search engine spider point of view you’ll get them to follow the link but when they record what the anchor text link was all they will see is, “Click Here”

From a visitor point of view, “Keyword Parts” explains what they are getting when they click on the link. Since most people surfing the web can identify a link and what you are supposed to do (Click It), you really don’t need to instruct them on what to do. From a search engine spider point of view you’ll get them to follow the link and they will record a potential keyword for the anchor text link.

Through this example I hope that my advice has given you some idea’s to look at when you are writing content. I also hope that you’ll pay attention to what you are using as the anchor text link.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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One thing I’ve always liked to share with my clients is
that when they write content for their website that they should always consider
the parts of keywords and not just the keywords themselves. I personally think
both the actual keyword and the parts of the keyword are vitally important.

I have clients that rank well within the search engines for keywords they aren’t
even purposefully targeting. It just so happens that parts of the actual keyword
are found within the content of the page that they have written.

When giving this content writing advice to my Realtor clients I like to use
the following example:

“Tahoe Tyrol is nestled just South of Heavenly Ski Resort and many of
the luxury homes overlook the beautiful lake”….

Notice that within this sentence I my focus is on Tahoe Tyrol which is a fairly
pricy community in South Lake Tahoe California. By picking apart this sentence
I could potentially find myself ranking for the following keywords without actually
including them into the content.

1. Tahoe Tyrol luxury homes
2. Lake Tahoe luxury homes
3. Lake Tahoe homes
4. South Lake Tahoe luxury homes
5. South Lake Tahoe homes

The above terms are specific to my audience but there are a few keywords that
I might ‘accidentally’ end up ranking well for as well; they are:

1. Heavenly Ski Resort
2. Luxury lake homes
3. Luxury homes
4. Lake homes
5. Tahoe ski resort
6. Heavenly Tahoe

Some of these terms are actually found within the sentence like ‘Heavenly Ski
Resort’ and ‘luxury homes’. However they weren’t actually keywords I purposefully
wanted to target when writing the content.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

• Uniqueness: 4.5
• Overall Rating: 4.0
• Usefulness: 3.0

7 Comments »

It would appear that I am a big fan of the Axandra newsletters. The authors write some pretty amazing articles and the content is well worth a rant and rave every now and then.

On February 26 2008 they published a nicely written article titled, “How Yahoo’s phrased based indexing affects your website rankings”. I highly suggest giving it a read when you have a few minutes; it has some quality advice that I am incorporating into this very blog post.

Instead of discussing how Yahoo’s phrased based indexing affects rankings, I would like to look at how it will change the way some of us will write content. The following content writing advice certainly isn’t old advice but it is something I’d like to revisit on my marketing blog.

The patent application indicates that Yahoo tries to understand concepts instead of single words. For example, someone looking for “tiger woods” isn’t just searching for web pages that contain this word combination.

If a page contains the phrase “tiger woods” as well as some related keywords such as “golf”, “green” and “clubs” then it is more likely a match for a search for “tiger woods” than a web page that has a story about a tiger in the woods that threatened a boy with the name Mowgli that doesn’t contain the related keywords.

So if I understand this right; in order to rank well in Yahoo for the term, “Content Writing Advice” it is a good idea to write about copywriting and maybe have a few guest content writers post to my blog with related topics.

How about your own goals with Yahoo? Are you a Realtor in Denver wanting to rank well for “Denver real estate”? Be sure to write about Denver related topics so Yahoo doesn’t think you are writing about John Denver. If you are a Realtor in Denver whose name is John then I’d suggest changing your name or using an alias.

Anyways, just some rambling to get me back into my blog. I have a few more ideas that I’d like to write about on this topic over the next couple of days. I hope that my input and advice on writing quality content to improve rankings in Yahoo will be helpful to those who can understand my writing ranting.

Tomorrow evening I want to talk about using the parts of your keyword within content to help boost relevance for that targetted term

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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Many of us have used services like Copyscape to see if anyone has plagiarized our content. Some of us also use it to see if the content we plagiarized is unique enough after all the manual or automatic modifications we made to it.

Regardless the reasons I use Copyscape, I didn’t really care much for the service when they decreased the free searches from 20 to 10. I can burn through 10 searches in 10 minutes. I don’t want to spend the meager $5.00 for an extra 100 searches as a Premium Member so I take advantage of TinyURL for an additional 10 searches for the month.

TinyURL allows me to convert http://www.10minutes.org to http://tinyurl.com/yv9y9m. This isn’t what TinyURL was created for mind you; it was originally created to convert LONG URL’s to shorter URL’s for e-mailing links and what not. However the practice works rather well so I keep at it.

Most of you already take advantage of this back door so it isn’t anything new. The reason I am writing this blog post is because I discovered another site today that converts URL’s into shorter URL’s in the same way that TinyURL does. The new discovery is TubeURL.

Enjoy the find and feel free to post other sites just like this. A collaboration of resources that we all have will only make some of our jobs much easier.

JJ

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

4 Comments »

This post is going to look a little messy with a lot of bolding but it is done for a reason as you’ll see when you get to my closing paragraph.

I’m not one to buy into keyword density. This is something that the search engines have long ago figured out was being manipulated by Internet Marketing individuals. Keyword density is the practice of including your desired keyword term(s) multiple times within pages content so that a certain ratio of content and those keyword term(s) exist.

While keyword density may not be a factor to consider anymore, it does help if you actually include the keyword within the content of your page. Google is smart enough to put two and two together but it is a much nicer approach if you simply mention your keyword within the content.

If someone searches for say, “Content Writing Advice” then it would make sense to make sure they read something about the topic itself. Don’t short change yourself by not mentioning your keyword term visibly through out your content.

Writing captive content is one thing but being able to write content that is keyword rich is another thing. Before writing your content, my advice would be to figure out what your target audience is going to be searching for to find you and then write your content around a few of those terms on each page. It is simple writing advice but you’d be surprised at how many people miss this small but important step when writing content.

Notice that in my above remarks I stated that Google can put two and two together but it is nicer if you simply mention the keyword? I’ve taken advantage of doing both of these in this blog post. The keyword I used as an example is mentioned within the content and so are the parts of the keyword. I’ve bolded each full or partial instance so you can see what I mean by putting two and two together.

• Uniqueness: 1.0
• Overall Rating: 1.0
• Usefulness: 1.0

9 Comments »

Writing content that is appealing to the people you want to target is going to be an essential part of your planning when building a website. You have to be able to sell your product or services not only visually but through the way you describe what you have to sell.

Yes you’ll get some attention if you put up a photo of a celebrity or showgirl touting your product or using your service. We all know that sex is one of the leading angles used by major companies to close the deal. However photo’s, design and even bells and whistles are not the only factors you should consider when attracting interested buyers.

• The first rule when writing content is to determine what kind of keyword is most likely going to be searched when someone comes looking for the product or service you have to offer. Once you know that the first thing you want to write about is that discovery.

  Because I work with real estate agents the biggest thing I personally see all the time is an agent talking about themselves, their credibility and their professionalism. I’m sorry but YAWN! There is a time and a place for such content and that is usually an about page. While most of my clients have moved away from that practice, I’ll encourage you to not fall into that trap.
  

• The second rule I try to live by is that of making the content read well. My English teacher in college always told us to read our essay’s out loud before turning them in. Do you pause? Do you go back and read something more then once? Do you start to get a droning voice where it would appear that even you are getting tired of your own content?
  
• The third rule is to include sensible call to action verbage within your content. People expect this! You are probably not making a website just for shits and giggles; you want to make money just like anyone else would. Invite visitors to look at your inventory or service plans; if they didn’t want to know more about these things then they won’t be reading your content to begin with.
  
• The fourth rule I have is to not make anything live on your website until it has been checked for spelling, grammatical errors and punctuation. This is the biggest mistake you can potentially make as it shows your professionalism and thoroughness. While there is understanding for an occasional error here and there, if your content reads like a train wreck then that’s what you’ll have… a train wreck.
  
• The fifth and final rule I’ll add to this blog post is to be sure to use formatting to spruce up the content if there is a lot of it. Underlines, bolding, italics, bullets and even header & sub headers will help prevent people from getting bored with your site.

• Uniqueness: 10.0
• Overall Rating: 10.0
• Usefulness: 10.0

1 Comment »