Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 2:45 pm Comments (1)
SEO content not only works, it works wonders. Recently, I had the pleasure to be involved in a massive writing project for a swimming pool cleaning products company. They had been around a while and had a pretty big network marketing presence, but had never really done the Internet thing. That being said, when it did come time for them to jump into the web marketing, they did it right. It was a big budget project, they had already chosen their keywords and they chose well.
They sell enzyme based products for cleaning swimming pools. Type in “Pool Enzymes” and you get a massive field of 430,000; not as bad as some markets but still pretty crowded. I produced a total of about 30 premium articles for them and was well compensated for my efforts. The work was tough going, due to the amount of research involved and all said and done it took me just under a month for it to be completed to my satisfaction. The articles and web content were all highly optimized, but not overly so. I developed the content with the goal that it was going to be good to read. I didn’t worry about keyword density. There were very few articles that had more than one keyword per paragraph. Some did not have any.
Less than a month later and the website was in the top ten on Google for “Pool Enzymes.”
Category: Content Development, SEO
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 18 of December , 2007 at 8:01 am Comments (1)
A lot of people ask me about what I believe is the best way to kick their sites off. Should they launch the site before it is officially ready for launch? Should they include pages that are under construction? I always answer, why not? The site does not need to be finished for a launch date. You need to make sure that the essential elements are in place, but other than your main pages, everything else can come later.
The core pages for your site are the following:
- Home page / Index
- Contact page
- Company information page
- Core product pages
Everything else can wait, but don’t let it wait too long. You want to start bringing in the traffic and the only way that you are going to do that is with some optimized content.
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 17 of December , 2007 at 8:48 am Leave a comment
In your website copywriting, are you using emotional trigger words? This is the one thing that I see more often on website copy - copywriters not using the trigger words.
Trigger keywords are words that trigger an emotional response. You want that response to be an appropriate response for your product or service - one that inspires action. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean a positive response. Trigger words could be words that provoke fear, love, greed, self-confidence, lust … and it must be appropriate to your product or service. In other words, if your website is about food then you want people to get hungry, not greedy for money.
Website copywriting is all about getting people to respond. End your website copy with a call to action with a strong trigger word. Then watch the dollars roll in.
Category: Content Development, SEO Website Copywriting
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 15 of December , 2007 at 10:00 am Leave a comment
When it comes to producing large amounts of content we know just how hard it can be. I have probably produced thousands of articles in my time about topics ranging from legal advice to swimming pool cleaning products. Over time I have developed a systematic approach to web content writing that has made the job simpler for me and I am sure can do the same for you.
- Link your themes - Chances are that you will be producing articles on a range of similar themes. It might be boring, but I have always found it much faster to deal with similar topics and keywords in quick succession. Jumping around keeps things fresh, but it does not make things faster.
- Original material, repetitive themes - Your material should be entirely original, but the theme of your material does not need to be. You can write the same article as many times as you want as long as you do not repeat the material. You can give each article a different spin if you want to, but it does not particularly matter.
- As much as you can bear and not a keystroke more - Content writers suffer inordinate amounts of burnout. Don’t worry, it will happen. The good thing is that if you deal with it properly you will bounce back quickly. If the workload gets too much, take a break. It can be difficult to take a break when you have a pressing case load, but managers do often understand and might be able to pass the caseload off to give you a couple of days break.
Building your web content development skills does not take a terribly long time. As you build your experience you will get better and faster and more tolerant of heavy workloads. You can make a living from web content development, plenty of people do, but you need to be build up your skill base first. Start slow and work your way up. If you are producing web content for your own site you can always outsource what you can’t handle.
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 5 of December , 2007 at 9:54 am Leave a comment
What is the most important ingredient to good website copy? Is it keywords? Is it repetition of those keywords? Links? Good meta tags?
Answer: None of the above.
The key to good website copywriting is to write copy that gets people interested. The first thing that attracts readers’ attention is the headline. Does your headline shout, “Read me?” If not then you likely won’t find many readers. Learn to write good headlines and people will read what you write.
Next, you must have a good lead-in paragraph. That first paragraph, first sentence, and first image are what will hook your readers. The headline gets them to click on your post or search engine listing. The first paragraph will determine whether they read the rest of your content.
Here are some tips to help you write better website copy:
• Write short sentences
• Write short paragraphs
• Use bullet statements
• Don’t just regurgitate what you find elsewhere - make it original!
• Use h1, h2, and h3 tags
• Enhance your copywriting with dynamite graphics
These tips should help you write better website copy. Hope it helps.
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 4 of December , 2007 at 9:35 am Comments (1)
Aaron Wall had an interesting post on his blog today. In response to Matt Cutts’ blog post about paid posts, he addresses scientific research that is sponsored by big pharma companies and how the information on those “research” papers is no more accurate the blather of people paid to write about products. It’s something I haven’t thought about, but he’s right.
This made me wonder just how SEO and research go hand in hand in website content. Many clients will ask us to ghostwrite their website content and massage it to look like their competitors’ content. We always try to discourage this for a number of reasons:
- First, you don’t want to create even so much as an appearance that you are taking content off of someone else’s website; that could land you in legal trouble
- Secondly, original content is king; your content will brand your company - do you really want it to look like someone else’s?
- Most importantly, in order to succeed in the marketplace, you need to stand out; customers want to do business with a company that has a unique position in the market
If your content looks like everyone else’s content then you will not stand out. Your content needs to be unique so that potential customers can see where you fit in within the market niche that you serve, but it also needs to be unique for the search engines. SEO and content are like the right and left glove. Don’t get them mixed up.
Category: Content Development, SEO
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 2 of December , 2007 at 4:49 pm Comments (1)
Live Search - aka MSN Search - has been showing some of the most aggressive duplicate content filtering I’ve ever seen across any search engine of late.
If this is true, it could have some far-reaching consequences for webmasters and SEOs. While Google doesn’t necessarily follow MSN, nor does Yahoo!, often times you will find the three big search engines being affected by the same, or similar policies. This is no doubt an algorithmic change for MSN. If so, it may need tweaking. Nevertheless, until then, be on the lookout for declining SERP results, especially if you have articles and press releases floating around that are also on your own website.
It’s not a given, of course. But if MSN is flagging press releases and other information normally found in various places as duplicate content then you’ll want to alter one or both of your sources of information in some way. In other words, rewrite that press release so that it doesn’t appear on your website exactly as it does in the distribution sites that you visit. It’s just a precaution, not a fix-all.
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 14 of November , 2007 at 9:15 am Comments (1)
Stoney DeGeyter wrote an engaging article. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I agree with his premise.
The title of the article, “Content is Dead. Community is King Now” pretty much says it. To summarize: Content is important, but it’s not the most important thing. Uh, excuse me, but try building a website with nothing on it - no words, no videos, no audio files, no pictures, no clip art, no graphics, no ideas, just plain old blank white pages. Think it will get anywhere?
OK, to be fair, I do understand where he’ s coming from. People like community, they want to be a part of something, just having a bunch of content on your website won’t guarantee you’ll make sales, or money. True, all of it true. I understand. Still, even if you build a community, the community must consist of content. That content must be quality content and not just useless fluff. In a word, content may have expanded the court, but it didn’t give up the throne.
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 2 of November , 2007 at 9:24 am Comments (2)
(Source) For those who didn’t hear the news, a major change to the Google algorithm has punished blogs and sites that heavily cross link in networks. There are suggestions by some that the change is related to punishing sites that offer paid links, but so far the evidence doesn’t support that. I’ve found a broad range of sites selling links who haven’t had a page rank change, whilst a number of prominent sites which have never sold links have seen big page rank drops.
Yes, I agree. I’ve written about this before, just recently. And I do think there is some confusion on this subject because Google made two changes at once. They seem related, but they’re really not.
It’s common knowledge that Google took a punch at paid links. We expected it and it happened. No big deal - unless, of course, you sell links. But what about the rest of us?
Well, if you own a network of blogs, like I do, then the other change to Google’s algorithms is a much bigger deal. Duncan Riley does a good job of explaining the mass linking problem. I’ll summarize …
Mass linking is really about linking all the sites in a particular network, or sometimes just some of them, so that the newer sites benefit from the PageRank of the older ones. He’s right that this has led to some website owners building trash sites that provide no benefit and selling links or advertising after building up a healthy PR. That’s been a strategy that has worked. It won’t work any more.
Frankly, I’m glad. I think it will go a long way to improving the search results returned for queries made at Google. Of course, it’s just a matter of time before these savvy webmasters learn how to profit from the changes. Until then, suffice it to say that if you own a network of websites, don’t bother linking them to each other unless they are related in subject matter and content. It won’t pay you to link them together. And with that I’ll close with another quote from Duncan Riley. It’s easy to agree with him when he’s right:
I don’t think links, and in particular paid links are dead, after all Google still needs links to discover new sites and content to index, however the days of being able to build crap content and profit from it via advertising that relies on a high page rank are dead. Online marketers are left with a couple of options. Advertising is a definite option, and if you’re content is not that good (or even MFA) Google Adwords is one solution. I’d also think that Text Link buys aren’t dead: I’ve always bought text links that have an above the fold display anyway to get click traffic, and there is nothing from Google saying you cant buy links for this purpose, even if the Google juice benefits may no longer be there as much as they were previously.
Bottom line: Content is still king. Don’t mess with the king!
Category: Content Development, Link Building
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 23 of October , 2007 at 3:27 pm Comments (1)
Reputation management is on the rise. Few people know what it is now, but in a couple of years everyone will need it and everyone will want it. The fact is, you can start right now managing your reputation and all you have to do is what you’re already doing.
Online Reputation Management, or ORM, is a new science and branch of search engine optimization. The key is to improve your reputation by ensuring that you have more positive results for your name or company name online than negative comments. For most of us, that’s pretty simple. Still, sometimes 1,000 to 1 is not good odds. Sometimes, a highly reputable website contains negative comments about us and we have to combat that.
For instance, MySpace is one of the top websites online. What if someone goes online and posts a bunch of comments about you on their MySpace profile. You can’t edit it or delete it. It’s not true. And when some Google’s your name they get this garbage. What do you do?
Well, you could start your own MySpace profile, and you should. But don’t stop there. Set up a Facebook profile, a LinkedIn profile, and other networking profiles as well. Blog under you real name, or company name, and do some article marketing. All of these things, of course, are things you should already be doing. But are you?
SEO is reputation management. The more you do it, the harder you make it for someone else to destroy you. And if you have a lot of high quality, relevant sites with positive things to say about you, the negative will sink like quicksand. Use your own content and get your networks involved too.
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 23 of October , 2007 at 9:00 am Leave a comment
Yesterday I talked about the importance of content. I even some got some useful comments. Thanks guys!
I still see these PLR packages being sold for $29.99 or for the reduced $14.95 if you buy it now, or free if you purchase somebody’s brand new gold widget with a kung fu grip and a secret handshake. I always wonder how many of them actually get sold. They must be selling because they wouldn’t be on the market if no one ever bought them.
PLR, if you don’t know, stands for private label rights. Essentially, it means you are buying pre-written content that you have a right to use as you wish after you purchase it. The problem with PLR is that other people are buying it too. If you were to buy PLR content and reprint it in newspapers all across the country, you might actually sell something and few people would notice. If they did, they wouldn’t care and the fact that the reprinted content reads exactly the same 1,000 times in different print publications won’t count against you anywhere. It probably won’t even affect how many copies of your secret handshake that you sell.
Online, however, it’s a different story. Buy PLR and you’re dead - literally. That’s because the search engines penalize - yes, penalize - duplicate content. In fact, if two web pages look the same, with the same exact content on them, then one of them won’t achieve any rankings at all. And the search engines will decide which one. It’s not always “first come, first serve.”
The only way PLR will benefit you is if you rewrite the content completely so that it is unrecognizable. And if you’re going to do that then you might as well just save your money and write your content from scratch. At least then you can create your own secret handshake.
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 22 of October , 2007 at 5:24 pm Comments (9)
It’s such a commonly used phrase now it’s nearly cliche: Content Is King. If you’re new to content and web development then you might be wondering what that means. If your an old veteran like myself then you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, no kidding. What’s your point?”
Some people have even gone so far as to modify the phrase to something like, “Unique content is king,” or “Content is the real SEO.” Truth be told, there is no SEO without content. It really is king.
But if content is king then what’s the crown? Is there one, or does the king just run around naked? We’re not talking about some legendary fairy tale here. This is real web business.
Your website content is the best thing you’ve got going for you. It will either make you or break you. It can be your crowning achievement or just be a mote in a dead guy’s eye - whatever that means. But the cold, hard where-the-rubber-meets-the-road truth is … you can’t live, work, or breathe online without content, be it text content, video content, audio content, advertising content, or any kind of content. Your business needs content.
So where does your content come from and what does it say about your business? In a word, it says a lot. It says who you are, what you stand for, and what your values are. You should spend time really thinking over your content - what image you want it to convey, what you want it to say about your business. Don’t just whitewash it. Really think it through. I mean, how else would you treat a king?
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 12 of October , 2007 at 2:23 pm Leave a comment
This is true, not only of your blog content, but of all of your content. In other words, you can encourage comments on your website as much as on your blog and this is especially true of your forum content.
In essence, comments on your blog, forum, or website help you to optimize your content for the search engines in a number of ways. Just as each blog post on your blog is a separate web page, so too is each thread on a forum considered a separate web page. This is a prime example of how you can turn any website into a social marketing tool. And it is something I highly encourage you to consider.
What it boils down to is conversation. If you write a blog post about XYZ and someone comments on it then it is highly likely that they will use the same keyword or a similar keyword in their comment. The same is true in a forum thread. Related comments continue the optimization process that you started with your original comment. That’s why you should encourage comments as often as possible. You can get your site visitors and visitor/readers to contribute to your SEO. In other words, don’t turn off the comment feature on your blogs and don’t make it too difficult for people to join your community. Otherwise, you’ll discourage participation and lose out on the most important benefits you can gain.
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 29 of September , 2007 at 8:25 pm Leave a comment
Should you write your own content? That’s a difficult question to answer. For some, it’s a no-brainer. Obviously, the best person to write your content is you, but some people are not writers. Some people have a fear of writing while others just feel that they are not adequate enough for the job. Other people are lousy spellers. Still, who knows your business better than you do?
There are some important considerations in deciding whether you should be the one to write your content. Content development is not so much about getting the write words on your page as it is about touching your market with the right words. What I mean is, you can write dynamic content, but the best content is content that sells. If your content is great content but it fails to spark a reaction then it isn’t doing its job. Your content must get readers to make the click, buy the product. You’ve got to close the sale.
If you can do that then you should write the content. If you struggle with calls to action, trigger words, and with other copywriting techniques then you might want to hire a content production team or copywriter. At any rate, focus your content on the call to action.
Category: Content Development
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 23 of September , 2007 at 7:22 am Leave a comment
What kind of font should you use for your blog or website? That’s a question that pops up from time to time. I’ve got to say that I don’t give it a whole lot of thought. That’s primarily because I stick to conservative fonts - ones that have been used over and over again - and don’t really experiment much. But if you’re the experimenting kind, be careful. It could be dangerous to experiment too much with fonts.
I’m not just being melodramatic. Some fonts just plain turn people off. They’ll leave your blog or website and not do business with you. It will be business lost forever. They may never come back. That’s a pretty costly mistake so you want to be sure to use the right font.
I recommend a sans serif font. Those are the fonts that don’t have the little lines protruding from the t’s, p’s, a r’s. They are sans (without) the serif.
Fonts That Are Easy To Read
Why do these fonts do better online? Well, because they’re easier to read. Much cleaner. You certainly don’t want to use a font that is too fance - like Boulevard - which looks more like handwriting. Those types of fonts are too “creative,” and difficult to read. The fonts without the serifs are best and here’s a short list for you to try. Use these for both body copy and headlines, as well as subheads:
- Verdana
- Arial
- Helvetica
- Geneva
- Georgia
- Univers
- Futura
- Franklin Gothic
- Optima
- Avant Garde
Fonts Not So Easy To Read
Fonts I do not recommend for online reading, because they are serif fonts, include:
- Times Roman
- Palatino
- Courier
- New Century Schoolbook
OK, you get the idea. Do your research on fonts and choose one that is easy to read.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Category: Content Development
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