Questions about Search Engine Optimization and Copywriting

6:44 am10:04 amM. Shifley 2 Comments

A few questions and answers about copywriting in regards to online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).

Do you think making some of the keywords like “example 1″ “example 2″ etc. as anchor text links pointing to articles on the site might be a good thing? Only if those are terms being targeted on the pages. You want to keep the same keyword throughout. They should be a matched set. If you put “example 1″ or “example 2″ in your title tag, description tag, page copy, ALT tags, etc., then yes, you can use those terms as anchor text with links pointing to the pages. But don’t target a page to “blue widgets” then use “example 1″ as anchor text pointing to it. That defeats the purpose.

I have over 100 articles on my own site, all original content. 30 days after they have been posted on my site, I submit them to specific article directory sites with a back link to the original article as well as multiple links to the site I am trying to promote. Do you think this is a valid SEO strategy? Yes. I do not want the sites I submitted the article to, to out rank the original article. Why not? As long as the reader still has access to the link back to your site, what difference does it make? If they are interested in what you offer, they’ll click to your site.

Do you think that by adding a backlink to the original article this will tell Google who had the article on the web first and who should be ranked for the article? It doesn’t work that way. Google will know you’re the original source for the article because it was published on your site/blog/forum/whatever first. Once it’s spidered and included in the index, you’re good. They know you were the first. Being first to publish doesn’t mean you automatically get ranked higher than others. There are LOTs of elements that go into deciding which pages get ranked where for what.

Does it help to wait 30 days to re-publish the article? No. Once Google picks it up, you’re good. Just type the title of your article into the Google search field (using quotes). When it shows up, go for it!

Also would you syndicate all of the articles to various sites or maybe 10-20 articles to 5 different sites? It’s not the quantity. It’s the quality. There are a bazillion article directory sites online and most of them are fly-by-night pieces of trash. They have no visitors (thus, no people to read your article and click to your site), they have lousy PageRank, etc. Be selective. Don’t worry about quantity. It’s not the article directory link that will do you a lot of good anyway. You get the power of article distribution when other sites pick up your article from the article directory and republish it on their high-quality site.

When marketing people talk about a “127% lift” in conversion rate what does that mean? Will I get a conversion rate of 127%?No. That’s a common misunderstanding. The lift is the amount of increase shown. So, if you started with a conversion rate of 2% and you experience a 127% lift (or increase), your new conversion rate will be 5%, not 127%.

I know you can split key phrases with punctuation. But can you split key phrases with line breaks, paragraph breaks or bullet points? Will Google ‘jump over’ the gaps and see the key phrase in its entirety?You can split keyphrases with *most* punctuation. The common stuff like commas, periods, semi-colons, dashes, etc. Tildes, brackets, etc. are iffy sometimes. When in doubt, check. Go to Google and type in the keyphrase without the punctuation and write down the top 5 sites. Then type in the query with the punctuation and see if the same top 5 sites come up. If they do, Google sees it as the same thing.Yes, you can split with line breaks, paragraph breaks and bullets. Spiders will read right through. Except that bullet points count as special formatting and *might* give you an extra point or two as far as SEO goes because the info in the bullet list would be considered important.
Please give me a call today at 208.598.0084 or contact me at matt.shifley@yahoo.com for more information to discuss how I can help you or your company with its search engine optimization, online marketing, or copywriting needs.

Professional Copywriting Services in Boise

1:37 am10:06 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

Copywriting for Brochures and Catalogs
The printed brochure or catalog, has an important role to play in marketing your business. Whether you need a fresh look at your company identity, or require a stand-alone sales tool, I can help you create the most effective brochure or catalog, with a strong and lasting impact.

Website Critique and Enhancement Services
A comprehensive package of services designed to analyze and improve your website’s marketing process and content. A valuable opportunity to get a professional second opinion on what you already have, and practical solutions to increase conversion rates.

Copywriting for Direct Mail and Sales Letters
I will write persuasive messages or rewrite your existing material. Writing effective letters means creating messages that target your potential customers and get direct, immediate results.

Copywriting for Magazines and Newspaper Ads
With magazines, advertisers have the opportunity and space to deliver a sharp message and to really distinguish their products or services from the competition. The best magazine ads are the ones that have been created with the special features of the medium in mind, using a wide variety of creative options.

Copywriting for Posters and Postcards
Messages on posters must be brief, and lettering must be large enough for easy reading. The most impressive, attention attracting posters must include both a strong, intelligent slogan and a well written text. I have vast experience with both posters and ad post cards.

Writing Press Releases
My press relations (PR) service can deliver ad messages, marketing materials and business information. Using professional PR ncreases the credibility of sales messages. PR improves a company’s credibility in the marketplace by acquiring neutral third-party endorsements for its services or products. I create professionally written materials, that people read to be challenged, persuaded, or to become informed.

Please give me a call today at 208.598.0084 or contact me at matt.shifley@yahoo.com for more information to discuss how I can help you or your company with its search engine optimization, online marketing, or copywriting needs.

Copywriting Services for Boise and Beyond

9:08 am9:36 pmM. Shifley Leave a comment

Ad copy doesn’t have to be annoying or patronizing to sell. It does, however, need to be distinct and creative, and a good freelance copywriter will make sure it’s both. And you have come to the right website because I can help create a clear message with you copy and cut through the clutter.

Are you in need of a slogan? Well some people do call them slogans, but in the ad biz they’re known as tag lines. A good tag line is important; it sums up the key element of your product in one smart line that people will remember. As an advertising copywriter, I can create the perfect tag line or slogan for your company.

Another copywriting need that companies are in demand for is search engine optimization (SEO).People come to your site for information, so it better be good as well as short and easy on the eyes. A smart SEO writer can make your web content appeal to the major search engines like Yahoo and Google by optimizing your site so search engines find you and list you ahead of your competition.

Anyone with a pen can write, but if you want your advertising to stand out, consult a professional copywriter. I’ve done it all and would be more than happy to help you or your company out.

Getting your company found online

9:06 pm9:07 pmM. Shifley Leave a comment

Do you want your website to show up in search engines? I know a dumb question but one that some companies will emphatically answer yes but do not realize how to make that happen. I can help.

Optimizing your website for maximum search engine visibility is a little bit art and a little bit science. I have a great track record for increasing search engine visibility for my clients and more than 5 years experience in the art of online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).

If you are interested please give me a call or shoot me an email and I will start by conducting an analysis of your website to identify content, keywords and structural issues that might hinder organic search engine indexing and ranking. From there I will tweak and optimize your site and content. Every SEO campaign is unique and requires a tailored approach to meet the client’s specific objectives.

Non-SEO ways to get your website ranked

5:13 am11:19 pmM. Shifley 2 Comments

Search engine optimization involves getting lots of moving pieces coming together in the right way to achieve better search results for your website. But are their non-SEO ways to get your website ranked? According to the folks at searchenginewatch.com there are five ways to improve your rankings beyond best SEO practices.

1. Enhance Web Site Usability – Dr. Jakob Nielsen is considered to be a foremost authority of site usability factors, and he also has a knack for SEO. In his book “Designing Web Usability” (which many consider to be the “Bible” of usability), he writes that “site design must be aimed with simplicity above all else, with as few distractions as possible and with very clear information architecture and matching navigation tools.” From an SEO perspective, this is preaching to the choir. If sites aren’t human-friendly, they are usually even more unfriendly to search engine spiders.

Typically, enhancing usability also involves improving the information architecture of a site, which of course will help the site to be more easily spidered, and will often increase the potential for solid anchor text-rich internal linking.

2. Work with Other Marketing Teams – Many SEO projects fall victim to “marketing-in-a-vacuum.” SEO teams should work together with other marketing teams to ensure the same message being delivered offline is incorporating its way into the site’s visible text. Also, not combining efforts with the paid search team is a top way to miss out on search ranking opportunities.

It often takes extra “pushing” to become involved in other marketing efforts, or at least well informed of future planning. Fortunately, many of our clients have bought into the idea that we’re their partners in a mutual effort to gain visibility and traffic. Typically, the stronger the in-house SEO team is, the more clout they already have in their organizations, which certainly helps this effort. Every year, Super Bowl advertising gives us insight into how many top companies are combining these two forms of marketing.

3. Incorporate Traditional PR Efforts into the SEO Plan – Press releases should be optimized to help the company’s site perform better within search results. Again, this calls for involvement by the SEO team, especially in the distribution of the article and in the placement of properly structured hypertext links within the article to relevant pages on the site.
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4. Monitoring and Leveraging Communities – Every industry has an online community of some size. Some industries — such as travel in particular — have literally thousands of forums and blogs talking about deals and experiences. Savvy marketers can leverage these platforms by becoming an active participant — without being “spammy” or invasive — and gain traction within rankings as a direct result of this community participation strategy. Additionally, there’s lots of user-generated content about products and services in these communities, providing both invaluable feedback for refinement of current offerings and services, as well as an excellent base for R&D efforts.

5. Keep Content Fresh by Updating it Regularly – For some organizations, content is hard to update on a regular basis. For example, a company that sells one type of widget that never becomes obsolete may seemingly have no reason to update its content. However, the majority of sites on the Internet could benefit from occasionally “sprucing up the place.” Bottom line: if the content seems like it’s “getting stale” from your human perspective, imagine what a search engine that crawls it every month may feel.

Even if you’ve never done SEO, chances are that improving and updating your content can help you to gain rankings for terms that will drive traffic. Although this can be argued — especially for competitive industries — the core of the belief is certainly sound. There are sites out there that have simply followed best practices by including important content in tags, and maintained rankings and traffic simply due to keeping the content fresh.

Keeping these five factors in mind when thinking beyond traditional SEO best practices will likely yield long-term success in terms of driving organic traffic.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

5:04 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

Those new to the world of search engine optimization (SEO) may feel a little overwhelmed with all of the tactics that are needed to achieve higher rankings. But here are a few tools that you need to help you get started.

Keyword Tools – Employing the right keywords can really make a difference in your SEO campaign. If you begin your campaign without taking the time to find, analyze, and validate your keyword set, then you run the risk of using keywords that won’t perform well for you. It takes considerable time for your SEO efforts to reach your ranking goals, so it might be months before you realize you needed to use different keywords. That would be a waste of time and money. A good place to start is SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. It links to most of the other existing keyword tools, such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and tools from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. This one tool lets you explore many others.

SEO Site Grader Tools – If you have an existing site and would like to take a pulse on the SEO effectiveness, then these tools will help. They will analyze your site against specific criteria and produce a report, or even give you a grade. You can even use these tools on your competition to see how you stack up against them. Website Grader is a great tool for running a health check of your site. Then it will provide a score that incorporates elements such as Web site traffic, SEO, social popularity, and other technical factors. It will also provide advice on how your Web site can be improved from a marketing perspective. Another SEO site grading tool is Quarkbase. This tool provides a great way to find your site information, including social bookmarking statistics, Alexa ranking, and related sites and domain information.

Linking Tools – You should be aware by now that the number and quality of external links that come to your site are an important factor in achieving good rankings. You need to be able to see how many URLs have links to your site and their quality, which is measured by its PageRank. A PageRank of 10 is the highest and rarest. You’re looking for PR 3-4 and above. SEO Pro’s Link Checker will report all backlinks to your site. Be patient, it will take time to run this report. This tool will show the PageRank of the pages your URL is on. It will also tell you the number of links on the page and the anchor text for the link. You also have the ability to check the number of backlinks for all of the pages on your site, or just the top domain. Another important factor in SEO is analyzing your internal links and identifying bad links. You’ll need to isolate any that you have and fix them.

Google Webmaster Tools – A free service that provides a wealth of information about your site. After you’ve verified your site, you’ll be able to check for errors, analyze your HTML tags important for SEO, identify top search queries, enhance 404 error pages, and much more.

To Tweet or Not to Tweet …

6:30 pm4:55 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

that is indeed a question some of you may have been asking yourself since it seems like everyone and their third cousin from their Mother’s side is on Twitter. But is this social networking phenomenon right for you? Well ultimately it is up to you and how you want to leverage Twitter. Do you want to meet new people? Follow businesses or columnists? Increase the exposure of your business? Or just want to be part of the in crowd? Whatever you decide here are some reasons that a lot of the experts think Twitter should matter to you and can be an effective online marking tool:

1. Personal Branding. Twitter is a social media platform you can use to build your personal brand. It has the primary benefit of developing a casual persona and establishes you as a social personality that is connected and approachable.

2. Get Feedback. Need an alternative perspective on how a website looks or the right course of action to take? Blast out a message asking for advice and you’ll receive replies from other users. This collective intelligence can be used as fodder for articles or projects.

3. Hire People. Need a good logo designer, marketer or programmer? Send out a message asking for recommendations. This is a very quick and easy way to hire freelancers or even companies based on familiar recommendations.

4. Direct traffic. Twitter can be used to get traffic to your websites or the sites of friends. If you ask your friends to tweet about it, the message will spread faster and further as other active users pick it up. There is a viral nature to all types of news, even on a site like Twitter.

5. Read News. Twitter users often link to useful sites or articles and can be a source of scoops and alternative news. You can also subscribe to Twitter feeds for specific websites/conferences, which allows you to receive and view content quickly. This is very useful for active social news participants.

6. Make New Friends. Like any other social network, Twitter has a built-in function for you to befriend and track the messages of other users. This is an easy way for you connect with people outside of your usual circle. Make an effort to add active users you find interesting. A Twitter acquaintance can be developed into a long lasting friendship.

7. Network for benefits. Twitter can be used as a socializing platform for you to interact with other like-minded people, especially those in the same industry. It can be used to establish consistent and deeper relationships for future benefits such as testimonials or peer recommendations.

8. Business Management. Twitter can be used as a company intranet that connects employees to one another. Workers can liaise with each other when working on group projects. Particularly useful when certain workers go out often in the field. Updates could be set to private for security reasons.

9. Notify Your Customers. Set up a Twitter feed for the specific purpose of notifying customers when new products come in. Customers can subscribe via mobile or RSS for instant notification. Twitter can also be used to provide mini-updates for one-on-one clients.

10. Event Updates. Businesses can use Twitter as a means to inform event participants and latest event happenings/changes. This is a hassle-free way of disseminating information, especially when you don’t have the means to set up a direct mobile link between you and the audience

11. Find Prospects. Twitter can be used as a means to find potential customers or clients online. Do a search for keywords related to your product on Twitter Search and then follow users. Tweet about topics parallel to your product and close prospects away from public channels by using direct messages or offline communications. Discretion and skill is needed in this area.

12. Provide Live coverage. Twitter’s message size limit prevents detailed coverage of events but it can allow you to provide real-time commentary which may help to spark further discussion or interest on the event as other Twitter users spread the message. Very useful for citizen journalism.

13. Set Up Meetings. Twitter can help you organize impromptu meetups. For example, you can twitter a message while at a cafe, event or art gallery and arrange to meet fellow users at a specific spot. It’s an informal and casual way of arranging a meeting.

Create Content to Improve Search Engine Rankings

6:08 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

Content is one of the most important pieces. Without it, you are just showing off a graphic composition, even if done amazingly well, you are missing the necessary information your customers need to purchase what you offer. For online marketing reasons content helps you rank top on search engines.

How? When you constantly post information on your site web spiders establish that you are a constant content generator, therefore you will be visited with more frequency than pages that don’t post with the regularity you do. This way you become a more important and useful website people consult regularly.

Keywords are very important in this process, especially on titles or headlines. Also on the first paragraph of your content, keywords are added with the intention of becoming the main words on your site, the way you are going to be found online. So, when your potential customers enter those words on search engines, your site appears on the first places without having to pay for words or place bids on them, like PPC campaigns.

You will have a natural ranking on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines depending on how frequent you add information on your website. There are many ways of having different sections on your website to post information: news, blogs, press releases, audio content, video content, etc.

Although written content is useful for web crawlers to improve your search engine positioning, other information sources will also generate more traffic on your site. Remember, you are creating a site to be positioned online and a spot where people can find the products/services you offer, also a place where web surfers can find useful information and tools they search for online.

Social Networking Strategies

4:28 am4:32 amM. Shifley 1 Comment

The purpose of creating social networks basically began as places where people could have access to other known members and share information, thoughts and experiences on different subjects. For online marketing strategies, social networks are great sites to promote products, services or brands, approaching customers in a direct way, without any intervention of thirds in the process. Directly hitting the market segment your company is aiming at.

Its constant mutation has generated new features and ways of operating, making usability on these communities necessary for personal and work related issues, increasing the number of online social users significantly. Entering a network where you know your potential market segment is present may radically increase the chances of reaching a broader, more specific segment in the same market place. If used wisely you may have an army of followers that are faithful to your products and name brand.

Know how to operate among these communities. Depending on your target audience choose where your marketing efforts will be present. Research, know where your audience is logging in and be a part of that community too. Begin by knowing what the social network you are working with offers, what features and characteristic are available to work with. Know how to use them in your favor to attract potential customers. Know the communication channels available in social networks such as:

• E-mail for marketing campaigns
• Instant message boards
• Multimedia availability
• Ways of promotion available in the social network

Have a marketing strategy for your social communities ready. Know how you are going to reach your potential customers. How are you going to be known in that specific network and what are the options to reach a broader audience. Be constant; work on your communities and build a relation with your members. Answer questions if asked, support people in any way possible, and add value to your corporate concept by attending people’s needs.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Mistakes to Avoid

4:27 am4:31 amM. Shifley Leave a comment

The process of optimizing your website has to be a carefully thought out process. Each space of your site has to be designed and structured to reach your objectives. Here are some search engine optimization (SEO) mistakes you must avoid.

1. Many pages include a beautiful but useless graphic as a header. The upper part is very valuable for SEO. Don’t turn important texts into images; less if you use keywords, because a search engine cannot read a graphic, so you will be losing opportunities to be indexed by search engines and to reach top positions.

2. Now, let’s talk about the menu. As we just read, using graphic elements can be attractive but not effective: the description, words and links you use in the menu and content must include keywords. It doesn’t mean that is necessary to avoid graphics or pictures; they can accompany the text or be used in sections of lower relevance to search engines. Even better, make your images into code, that way search engines would be able to index whatever text you include in them.

3. Graphics cannot be read by Search Engines but let me give you a trick: including ALT attributes on each images become legible. So, never let your graphics alone.

4. Experts suggest as a good strategy to include a register format for users. In this way, each time he or she visit your website there is an ID session which helps webmaster collect information, create statistics and discover his/her behavior while explore your page. All data can be used for optimization.

5. If you can avoid it, never redirect your site. If you do it, search engine robots will get confused and it will be difficult for them take your web page and index it.

6. Don’t forget to write a title tag and meta tag descriptions on each page of your site.

7. Flash allows huge possibilities of a dynamic page, full of color and animations, but too much is a big error. It might be attractive but not for search engines, they don’t like Flash pages because they can’t read the content. Never use a Flash website without HTML alternative.

Matt Shifley: Marketing Specialist

Services include copywriting, copy editing, graphic design, SEO, SEM, PPC and much more.

Matt Shifley