8 Simple Rules for SEO Copywriting

We all know that the lion's share of web traffic comes through the search engines. We also know that keywords and links to your site are the two things that affect your ranking in the search engines. Your keywords tell the search engines what you do, and the inbound links tell them how important you are. This combination is what determines your relevance. And relevance is what the search engines are after.

There's a lot of information around about how to incorporate keyword phrases into your HTML meta tags. But that's only half the battle. You need to think of these tags as street-signs. That's how the search engines view them. They look at your tags and then at your copy. If the keywords you use in your tags aren't used in your copy, your site won't be indexed for those keywords.

But the search engines don't stop there. They also consider how often the keyword phrase is used on the page.
To put it simply, if you don't pepper your site with your primary keywords, you won't appear in the search results when a potential customer searches for those keywords.
But how do you write keyword-rich copy without compromising readability?
Readability is all-important to visitors. And after all, it's the visitors that buy your product or service, not search engines.

By following these 8 simple guidelines, you'll be able to overhaul the copy on your website ensuring it's agreeable to both search engines and visitors.

1) Categorize Your Pages
Before writing, think about the structure of your site. If you haven't built your site yet, try to create your pages around key offerings or benefits. For example, divide your Second Hand Computers site into separate pages for Macs, and PCs, and then segment again into Notebooks, Desktops, etc. This way, you'll be able to incorporate very specific keyword phrases into your copy, thereby capturing a very targeted market. If you're working on an existing site, print out each page and label it with its key point, offering, or benefit.

2) Find Out What Keywords Your Customers Are Searching For
Go to WordTracker.com and subscribe for a day (this will only cost you about AUD$10). Type in the key points, offerings, and benefits you identified for each page, and spend some time analyzing what words customers use when they're searching for these things. These are the words you'll want to use to describe your product or service. (Make sure you read WordTracker's explanation of their results.)

3) Use Phrases, Not Single Words
Although this advice isn't specific to the web copy, it's so important that it's worth repeating here. Why? Well firstly, there's too much competition for single keywords. If you're in computer sales, don't choose "computers" as your primary keyword. Go to Google and search for "computers" and you'll see why... Secondly, research shows that customers are becoming more search-savvy - they're searching for more and more specific strings. They're learning that by being more specific, they find what they're looking for much faster. Ask yourself what's unique about your business? Perhaps you sell cheap second hand computers? Then why not use "cheap second hand computers" as your primary keyword phrase. This way, you'll not only stand a chance in the rankings, you'll also display in much more targeted searches. In other words, a higher percentage of your site's visitors will be people after cheap second hand computers. (WordTracker's results will help you choose the most appropriate phrases.)

4) Pick the Important Keyword Phrases
Don't include every keyword phrase on every page. Focus on one or two keyword phrases on each page. For your Macs page, focus on "cheap second hand macs". For the PCs page, focus on "cheap second hand pcs", etc.

5) Be Specific
Don't just say "our computers". Wherever you would normally say "our computers", ask yourself if you can get away with saying "our cheap second hand Macs" or "our cheap second hand PCs". If this doesn't affect \ your readability too badly, it's worth doing. It's a fine balance though. Remember, your site reflects the quality of your service. If your site is hard to read, people will infer a lot about your service...

6) Use Keyword Phrases In Links
Although you shouldn't focus on every keyword phrase on every page, it's a good idea to link your pages together with text links. This way, when the search engines look at your site, they'll see that the pages are related. Once again, the more text links the better, especially if the link text is a keyword phrase. So on your "Cheap Second Hand Macs" page, include a text link at the bottom to "Cheap Second Hand PCs". If you can manage it without affecting readability, also include one within the copy of the page. For example, "As well as providing cheap second hand Macs, we sell high quality cheap second hand PCs". TIP: If you don't want your links to be underlined and blue, include the following in your CSS file:

Then format the HTML of each link as follows:
As well as providing cheap second hand Macs, we sell high qualitycheap second hand pcs.

7) Use Keyword Phrases In Headings
Just as customers rely on headings to scan your site, so do search engines. This means headings play a big part in how the search engines will categorize your site. Try to include your primary keyword phrases in your headings. In fact, think about inserting extra headings just for this purpose. Generally this will also help the readability of the site because it will help customers scan read.

8) Test Keyword Phrase Density
Once you've made a first pass at the copy, run it through a density checker to get some metrics. Visit GoRank.com and type in the domain and keyword phrase you want to analyze. It'll give you a percentage for all the important parts of your page, including copy, title, meta keywords, meta description, etc. The higher the density the better. Generally speaking, a density measurement of at least 3-5% is what you're looking for. Any less, and you'll probably need to take another pass.

Follow these guidelines, and you'll be well on your way to effective SEO copy.
Just remember, don't overdo it. It's not easy to find the balance between copy written for search engines and copy written for customers. In many cases, this balance will be too difficult to achieve without professional help. Don't worry, though. If you've already performed your keyword analysis, a professional website copywriter should be able to work your primary keyword phrases into your copy at no extra charge.

Article by Glenn Murray for SiteProNews ©Copyright 2004

SEO & PPC Management - Keyword Mining Part III

Finally: Making sense of the numbers (here comes the shock).
Ok, now that you understand the artificial skew and the alternatives that can correct for it, let's move on to analyze the numbers given by Overture's STST and Wordtracker's keyword selection service (KSS) using the search term(s) keyword(s).

An in depth look at Overture's STST numbers...
Overture's STST shows 180,468 searches were conducted. This represents the combined count of the search terms keyword, keywords, Keywords, KEYWORD and KEYWORDS - the combined total of all singular, plural, capitalized, upper and lower-case searches.
When we divide Overture's count (180,468) by 30 (because Overture's figures are for a 30-day period), the inference is there are 6,016 searches per day that meet this criteria. In actuality, they receive just 40-60 per day total (are we shocked yet?).

Here's how we're crunching the numbers.
Fact: Overture's STST suggests a combined average of 6,016 page views took place between Overture and its major partners - e.g. AltaVista, Yahoo, and others - each day for the month of December '03. We're referring to search result pages like this one at Yahoo.

Fact: Each of these results pages lists between 10 and 40 URLs with descriptions.

Factor in Zipf's Law which predicts that traffic for any particular keyword on a search engine will be proportional to its popularity rank.

Factor in how the title and description affect a user's propensity to click on a Web site.

Factor in the Penn State University's findings that 55% of users check out one search result only, and 80% stop after looking at three results.

Factor in known elements leading to an estimated, but educated, conclusion as such...

Since it's a fact that Wordtracker's Web site appears in the top-ten of Overture's results throughout their partner realm, they should be getting a guesstimateed 10% of the overall click-throughs from all major engines, pay-per-clicks, and directories.

That would equate to about 602 visitors per day.

However, Wordtracker is currently ranked 1-10 on only about 25% of the major engines, directories and pay-per-click portals for the search term, keyword(s)... Calculate the estimate...
...therefore, the Wordtracker site should expect roughly 25% of this predicted click-through traffic, which is 150 visitors per day.

Compare calculated estimate to known facts...
In fact, Wordtracker receives 10 - 15 visitors per day for the search term(s) keyword(s). In fact, Overture's STST overestimates this search query by a factor of 10.

Furthermore, since Wordtracker is estimating they receive approximately 25% of the total traffic then that would put the total traffic generated at 40 to 60 per day (25% of 40 to 60 = 10 to 15 visitors a day).

In fact, Overture's STST overestimates the total search query count by a factor of 100 ...based on 6,016 being more than 100 times greater than the 40 to 60 figure suggested by Wordtracker's actual visitors.

Experience shock and awe at the difference between the numbers!
Wordtracker's service provides very different numbers...

Using the same search term(s) keyword(s), we pulled a representative result from the Wordtracker database (on January 13, 2004) that predicts searches per day conducted throughout the major engines, directories and pay-per-clicks on the Internet.
The results were...

keyword - 93 searches (lower case, singular)Keyword - 39 searches (Capitalized, singular)keywords - 187 searches (lower case, plural)Keywords - 184 searches (Capitalized, plural)KEYWORD - 115 searches (UPPER case, singular)
Total Predicted Daily Searches for all Engines = 618

This figure - 618 - Wordtracker compiled directly from results taken from Meta-engines, Metacrawler and Dogpile in order to eliminate the artificial skew.

Wordtracker further adjusted the number downward by filtering out keyword sp@m (as defined above) based upon a proprietary formula used to identify search terms that are being searched at intervals too regular to have been conducted by actual humans.
These suspiciously regular and assumed to be artificially generated searches are therefore discounted in arriving at the final number - 618.

Even when taking into account such dependent variables such as position, title, and description, we would expect (logically guesstimate) the website to receive about 10% of the total traffic due to top-ten placement, targeted title and relevant link-description.

And finally, we should expect no better than 25% of that total traffic, due to the fact that Wordtracker has top-ten placement in only 25% of the relevant engines.

So the calculations show...
618 x 10% = 61.8 x 25% = approx 15 visits per day.

This is more in line with Wordtracker's actual 10-15 per day average number of visits generated by the 5 variations of the search term keyword across all of the major engines.
So, whose numbers should we trust?

When it comes to trusting the numbers, you should take into account what you are using them for. If you're looking to determine relative popularity of a given item, service, topic, or category, then Overture's STST can fill the bill nicely - and for free!

For instance, Overture's STST returns the following numbers for the following searches...
58,312 home insurance57,315 home owner insurance233,854 auto insurance570,337 car insurance
This tells us (for free) that car insurance gets about twice as many searches as auto insurance. It also tells us that home insurance gets about the same number of searches as home owner insurance ...and that searches for car insurance is TEN times more popular than home owner insurance.

No doubt about it, when researching what to sell online, this is valuable preliminary information that Overture's STST provides for free.

However, based upon what we now know about artificial skew, we'd want to get a third-party-review of the search terms - one that adjusted the numbers for skew - before we bought advertising on a pay-per-click engine or spent good time and money optimizing a site for organic (think Google) Web search results.

After all, if Overture shows 6,016 "hits" per day out of which Wordtracker is experiencing 15 visitors, then reality suggests we should do the math (i.e., apply the information) that distills the raw numbers into useful data. Let's first decide if "15" visitors per day will pay the advertising bill (duh!) ...and, if the reality count is anywhere near 6,016, we'll be ecstatic, right?

Always remember it's the amateurs that believe optimistically romanced numbers just before they lose their wallets on the way to bankruptcy. Professional marketers learn to err on the downside of expectations and then smile when the pleasant surprises shower down riches.
They know that nothing beats accurate information - the most powerful marketing tool on earth.

Article by Robin Nobles for SiteProNews

SEO & PPC Management - Keyword Mining Part II

Reason #2 - Duplicate Searches
As you most certainly must know, Overture's strength as a viable advertising medium for online businesses lies in the fact they provide results to "tens of thousands of Web sites" which include AltaVista, Yahoo, MSN Search, HotBot, and AllTheWeb just to name a few. They claim to reach more than 80% of active U.S. Internet users.

Potentially, this is great for advertisers! ...yet this very same structure is what so greatly contributes to the artificial skew leading to extremely over-inflated reporting of keyword queries.

According to Overture itself, statistics on searches in any previous month are compiled from Overture's partner search engines. To further understand how partnering tends to facilitate skewed query counts, let's examine what happens when a visitor conducts a search at AltaVista.
What's actually happening is that two searches are being conducted at one time - one at AltaVista, and another that lists the SPONSORED MATCHES supplied by Overture's pay-per-click engine.

Although it is next to impossible to know the exact figures, suffice it to say that a single human often generates multiple queries when doing a single search as calculated by Overture's STST. In some cases that same human could even generate additional "hits" for a given keyword simply by conducting the same search again on a different engine if such engine is also an Overture partner.

For instance, searching Yahoo, then searching again on MSN, then searching again on AltaVista, then again on AllTheWeb.com would tally at least five "hits" for the selected search term. In comparison, if Overture (like Google, for instance) counted only the searches that were done "on-site," such duplicate searches would not be counted and their search query numbers would be far more accurate.

This scenario, combined with the myriad artificial duplicate searches conducted by the various softwares (explained above), severely pumps up the number of queries for virtually every legitimate search term imaginable.

Reason #3 - Plurals and Singulars
Remember our STST example (above) regarding the 180,468 "searches" for the term "keyword"? Well, another factor to consider is that Overture's STST combines both the plural term (keywords) and the singular (keyword) in compiling that number.

And, Overture's STST not only combines the plural and singular versions of "keywords," they also combine upper and lower case searches as well. Obviously, these two factors also exert an upward effect on the query count tabulations.

Third: Examining The Alternatives.
So now the obvious question - Is there a "better" way to tabulate search term query counts? ...let's examine the alternatives.

Meta-engines - a better way to accurately tabulate queries.
Obviously we'd like to eliminate artificial and duplicate searches from our tabulations, and fortunately there is a way to do so. The solution is Meta-engines.

Composite (Meta) engines, like Metacrawler and Dogpile, are search engines that query all the major engines simultaneously. One of the key differences is that the ratio of human queries to automated queries for a meta-engine is much higher than for a major search engine. That's because it doesn't make sense for anyone to point their auto-bots at meta-engines.
Position monitoring, bid-optimizing, popularity checks, etc., are typically conducted directly at the search engines themselves. It would be pointless to conduct such automated queries on a meta-engine because meta-engines do not "add-url's" nor do they offer pay-per-click options. They are simply a search engine that queries other search engines. And, since there is no "metacrawler" of meta-engines, the search query counts are unlikely to be artificially skewed by such artificial searches. Furthermore, duplicate searches are eliminated because the query counts are being tabulated from a single source instead of combining results from myriad partners. Therefore, query counts taken from meta-engines are far, far more representative of the number of searches conducted by actual people - but even this is not yet a perfect solution due to a relatively obscure form of keyword spam.

Keyword spam (in this case not to be confused with word stuffing or repeating keywords within a Web page) refers to the practice of using cgi-scripting to manipulate the Metaspy metacrawler voyeur to artificially promote certain products or services.
By entering a flow of terms or phrases at predetermined intervals, such sp@mmers hope to inflate the importance and significance of certain search terms thereby artificially increasing the value of such terms related to their products.

In a perfect world, adjustments should be made to filter out this flavor of sp@m. In a minute we'll share with you how such filtering is done but first, let's address the issue of combining plurals with singulars and upper with lower-case searches.
Plural, singular, upper, and lower-case searches represent a decision-point for search engine optimizers because sometimes it's good to combine the search query numbers while other times it isn't.

For instance the search terms "keyword and keywords," whether singular, plural, or in upper or lower-case, are similar enough in meaning that they could arguably be combined into one search query number.
However, the search terms "tap, taps, Tap, and TAP" can have entirely different meanings. Take a look at the results for the search term "tap" on Overture. The following references were all found within the top ten sponsored listings:
Machine threading taps,Tap / Rap support softwareBeer tapsTap DancingTAP A StockTAP

Terminal Phone Numbers
Note that none of the above has any relation to the others! Obviously if we are selling any of these items, we'd want more specificity regarding the search queries than the simple 10,485 searches that STST reports were conducted in the past 30 days.

The example above illustrates the importance of obtaining search query tabulations for each version of a selected keyword independently of the other.
After all, it's easy to manually combine the numbers while it's impossible to break them out into their own categories once they've been compressed by Overture's STST into a single search term regardless of potentially different meanings.

Article by Robin Nobles for SiteProNews

SEO & PPC Management - Keyword Mining

The root of all success in search engine marketing begins with keywords. Period. Get them wrong and virtually everything about your online endeavor will fail. Only by targeting the right keywords can one expect to ride that exhilarating magic carpet to online prosperity.
Stating the obvious you say? ...well, if so, then why is it that virtually everyone - professional and amateur alike - is oblivious to the fact they are selecting, and frequently buying, keywords based on highly skewed numbers?

The fact is that very few online marketers understand the results supplied by the two most basic keyword selection tools. These are the very same tools being used globally to hone keyword choices into supposedly laser sharp focus in an effort to keep pace with the challenges of increasingly keen competition and ever-rising keyword pay-per-click costs.

The Critical Differences — Overture's STST vs. Wordtracker's KSS

As one of Wordtracker's technical support team, one of the most frequent questions we receive these days is...
Why are the keyword search query numbers supplied by Overture's search term suggestion tool (STST) so incredibly different than those supplied by Wordtracker's keyword selection service (KSS)?

Frankly, there isn't a better search engine related question one could ask. And, now's a good time to pay close attention because the surprising answer will likely change forever how you evaluate keywords!

First: Understanding Their Motives.
To help you understand the details we're about to reveal, let's examine the motives of the services that are providing the keyword query numbers.

Motive Analysis: Purpose
On the one hand, there's Overture's STST whose purpose is to help customers buy keywords.
On the other hand, there's Wordtracker whose purpose is to help customers select keywords.

Proposal:
Overture's STST suggests what keywords to buy from them.
Wordtracker suggests what keywords to use in your optimization efforts and/or which to buy elsewhere.

Success:
Overture's success depends on you believing there are Lots of search queries for whatever you are selling.
Wordtracker's success depends on you getting accurate numbers upon which you can reliably base your optimization and keyword purchase decisions.

Profits:
Overture's STST is free. Overture profits by selling you the keywords that STST reports on.
Wordtracker's KSS is fee based. They profit by selling you access to accurate and impartial information. Since they don't sell the keywords, there's no vested interest in query numbers beyond accuracy.

It's important to note there is no good-guy, bad-guy here - just two companies that provide information and do so with different incentives in mind.

Second: Understanding The Artificial Skew.

In researching the search term "keyword," Overture's STST indicates there were 180,468 searches for the 30-day period ending the last day of December '03. Of course, when we divide this number by 30 (days), one naturally assumes that's an average of 6,016 combined searches per day for the term "keyword" - (180,468/30=6,016).

Now, if you happen to be in a business that sells keywords (like Overture) then 6,016 pairs of eyeballs per day is a pretty encouraging number indeed! The problem is, there isn't anywhere even close to 6,016 per-day queries for the search term(s) "keyword(s)". In fact, the actual number, which we'll share with you in a minute, will no-doubt shock you!
But, for the moment, let's look at why that number is skewed.

Reason #1 — Artificial Searches

Overture's STST numbers are increased upward by automated queries. These include automated bid optimizers, position and ranking monitors, page popularity analyzers - anything other than a real person manually performing a search is considered an automated query. Monitoring a site's positioning at, say, AltaVista for the search term "keyword" tallies a "hit" within Overture's STST system for that search term. That's in spite of the fact that it was actually automated software that generated the hit. The same holds true for page-popularity checkers, pay-per-click bid optimizers or any other machine generated monitor or tabulator that queries an engine for a "pet" keyword and generates a hit in the process.
Then, when the same positioning query is done at, say, MSN (another Overture partner), STST records yet another hit. Understandably, STST cannot differentiate between automated and human queries. Neither can they tell when the auto-query has already been queried at another partner's site.

Now, when we take into consideration all of the position monitoring, page popularity checking and pay-per-click bid analyzing - there are well over 15 automated and semi-automated bid checking software programs alone - it's staggering to realize the significant effect these automated queries are having on the overall search term query tabulations.
However, artificial searches are only one aspect contributing to the artificial skew (defined as: the inflation of actual search queries for specific keywords performed by anything other than humans).

Article by Robin Nobles for SiteProNews

Google Page Rank - One Man's Theory

Google's PageRank (PR) is one of the most sought after, and yet misunderstood web page attributes. PageRank, named after one of the founders of the Google search engine, Larry Page, was the innovative foundation that the Google search engine was built on.

The theory was that a link from one web page to a web page of another site was in essence a vote for that page. The reasoning was that webmasters would only link to pages that they thought were interesting and of value to their viewers. Google used the number of inbound links (IBL) to a page to judge the importance and relevance of that page, and based on this calculation, and other factors, decided where to place that page on the search results page (SERP).

They devised a scale of measurement for PageRank from 1 to 10. Then for the information of webmasters and interested people they produced a toolbar that can be deployed in Internet Explorer that indicates the PageRank value of any page being viewed in the browser. These values have become known as PR0 to PR10.

Since PR values are a result of IBLs, Google decided to give them their own name and refers to inbound links as backlinks. As part of the toolbar there is a quick lookup of the number of backlinks that Google reports for the page that is currently being viewed in the browser. This search can also be done without the aid of the toolbar by simply typing "link:http://www.yourURL.com" into the Google search box.

The one trick to this link search is that Google does not display all backlinks. At one time it was thought that they only listed pages with a value of PR4 or greater. Today however, you will find backlinks reported from pages of lower PR values. So, at best, Google's backlink search seems to present some sample of pages linking to the site. Suffice it to say that this search is not a reliable measure of all IBLs to a page.

How is PageRank Calculated?
In simplest terms PR is calculated by the sharing of PR from all the IBL links to your page. This is not strictly accurate because Google also uses the internal links within a site in the calculation of PR. Each link to a page carries with it and passes PR value to the target page. The PR points or value passed depend on the PR value of the page they come from, and the total outbound links from the page. It is generally agreed that a page will only pass about 85% of its value to the page it links to. So a PR5 page with a single outbound link will pass 85% of the value of a PR5 page to the page it links to.

But virtually no page has only a single link -- remember internal links are also used in the total outbound link count -- so the value passed to any page is 85% of the PR, divided by the total number of outbound links.

The question now becomes what is the PR point value of the different PR levels. Most observers believe that the relationship between PR levels is logarithmic rather than linear. In other words PR5 is not worth 25% more than a PR4, but may be worth 4 to 6 times more.
It is also understood that a PR value is not a single number, but is in fact a range of values. So not all PR6s are equal. As the chart below shows a PR6 may be just on the upper boundary of a PR5 or it may be just short of the entry point for a PR7.

The chart that follows shows the range for each PR value. It also shows how much PR value or PR points a page with 50 outbound links will pass depending on of its own PR rank. From this I have calculated the number of links required from each value of PageRank necessary for a page to attain a desired page rank.

Here is a PageRank Calculation Chart: (http://www.sitepronews.com/pagerank.html).

The Assumptions And The Mathematics:
For those who are interested I have used logarithmic values of base 5.5. In other words the value range for a PR1 lies between 5.5 to the power of 1 and 5.5 to the power of 1.99, and PR2 lies between the value of 5.5 to the power of 2 and 5.5 to the power of 2.99 etc. The rest of the chart is fairly straight forward. It assumes that there are 50 links per page and that 85% of the PR value is passed to the recipient page.

The number of links required to attain any ranking is based on the median value of the donor page and the entry threshold of the desired PR value. In other words to achieve a PR5 you need 5,033 points and the average points available from a PR6 page with 50 links is 1507.
The chart was calculated with an Excel spreadsheet and it can be downloaded if anyone wants to play with the calculations and assumptions. It might be interesting to work with a different base number for the logarithmic calculation. And it is also interesting to see the impact of more or less outbound links from a page.

Are These Findings Valid?
Nobody knows for sure how Google calculates PR. I have shown this chart to a number of knowledgeable people and they have all agreed that my calculations look reasonable. One SEO guru from a major firm said the results were very similar to independent research that his firm had conducted.

So take it or leave it. It is probably a fair reflection of how PR is passed and accumulated.
The lesson that can be drawn from this explanation and chart is that if you want to increase your PR you need a few links from pages with equivalent or higher PR, or a great many links from sites with lower PR.

Article by Bob Wakfer for Sitepronews