Copywriting

Own a website long enough, and it’s bound to happen — maybe Google alters their search algorithm, the links you’ve gained take a hit in authority, or a beefy competitor comes along — your sunny days of ranking at the top of search results drastically turn gray. Now you’re suddenly bailing the ship as rapidly as possible, trying to keep from darker days ahead. What’s an honest website owner to do?

While thunder and lightning showering down on your web rankings will definitely put clouds in your day, the sky’s not falling. These proven, white-hat SEO techniques will help you weather the storm, and prepare you for sunnier days ahead.

1. Take a hard look at your website. Does your website have a leaky roof? Take a look at all the core SEO elements of your site and be sure they are properly implemented and use target key phrases, without tipping the scales towards spam (what makes it spam? well, you should “know it when you see it“)

In particular, make sure:

• All pages have unique content! No hard rules here but 400 words is a good minimum for a homepage and key supporting pages, and at least 250 for most everywhere else. Thinner pages can be acceptable, but don’t expect lots of rankings for them.
• All pages have unique titles reinforcing targeted keywords related to their content
• All pages have unique META descriptions reflecting their content and pitching the website. Though Google has said they don’t use META tags to directly influence rankings, they are sometimes used as the description of your site in search rankings and may be used to differentiate your pages from each other.
• Maximize your use of semantic markup. It’s hard to tell how much, but search experts will agree that heading tags are indicators of content structure and importance. The best guide I’ve come across is this one by Pearsonified — it’s written with blogs in mind, but is equally valid for standard web sites.
• Your images have suitable ALT attributes. Again, be careful not to spam, but put descriptive alternate text in image tags to reinforce your site’s content while boosting your site’s accessibility.

2. Take control of your site’s linking. Use the Yahoo Site Explorer to see the backlink profile for your site, and maybe compare it to competitors in your sector. Do you have as many or fewer links? Who links to you? Are they from reputable and related sites? Links play a major part in your site’s performance, and a poor link profile can pour misery down on a site, even one with bountiful content.

Link building is a discipline in and of itself, but some of the things you can do are:

• Swap links with businesses you partner with or with which you have a good rapport. This can also apply to client’s sites.
• Make sure you’re in reputable directories like Yahoo! and Aviva. Free and paid directories should be just the beginning of your strategy, but they provide a good foundation.
• Write a genuinely informative press release and market it on a reputable service like PRWeb.
• Build linkable worthy content and market it. Use Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, relevant forums, your MySpace account, and anything else at your disposal to promote your site once you get juicy things worth going to it on there! How do you come up with those ideas? Well, keep reading…

3. Fight back! The best defense to a rainy day is to be proactive. If your roof’s solid, no rain should get in! And even your site’s close to the high water mark, the proactive measures you should have taken will help turn the tide. What should you do? In a word: content.

Many businesses struggle with writer’s block, frustration with the task of writing, and coming to grips with what web users expect to get out of their website. While no blog post will destroy this cloud, we do have some ideas for you:

• Take advantage of offline content. Newsletters? Magazine articles? Newspaper stories? Get them, or links to them, or links from them, on your website!
• Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What are the questions you get all the time? Do you address them or answer them on your site? If not, you’re missing out on a rich opportunity for content that simultaneously qualifies your company as the solution to your customer’s biggest problems.
• Keep up to date. This may be the hardest of all, but no one wants to see “news” from last July or a blog updated every quarter. Even if your updates are cursory — new employees, tradeshows you’re going to attend, updates to the software that you carry — it’s worth making note of that on your site to keep things a little fresh. As a caveat, things like your new favorite tv show, pet and appearance at 80’s night are not newsworthy.

While storms are inevitable, and frustrating, what you do in response is even more important. A proactive, measured, strategic approach is always, best, and will likely keep you drier next time the search world shakes up. And remember, it can’t rain all the time.

It’s one of the most daunting, yet most important tasks of a website owner — how do you come up with rich, fresh and compelling content related to your subject matter that’s attractive to search engines and customers? While the answers are elusive, we throw out some ideas in the latest episode of our SEO podcast.

SEO Audio Episode 15

As the end of 2007 approaches it seems like a perfect time to recap our most popular and commented blog posts:
7. More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Linking

How much are certain links worth? Are directories valid? Should you pay for links? How do you measure your linking success?

6. Microsoft Jumps in the Ad Company Buyer’s Club

Now Microsoft jumps to prove they’re not out of the online advertising game with a whopping $6 billion purchase of aQuantive in a move to expand their breadth of paid opportunities on web sites, Internet television, video on demand, and other places online.

5. The Human Element of Search

Take a look at your homepage. What does it say? Does it give you a clear sense of personality… say, clean-cut professional, serious business or funky casual?

4. What Happened to my Google Page Rank - SEO Audio

Were you one of the thousands of web site owners crying foul this week? Or maybe you hardly know what a PageRank is, but want to know the kind of thing that gets bloggers from coast-to-coast, time zone to time zone gossiping and ganging up on Google

3. Blogging your way to The Top of the Search Engines in Minutes

Although Google’s search ranking methods are usually shrouded in mystery, we can assume from these two examples, that Google may be using its Blog Search feature in collaboration with its general search to retrieve the most up-to-date information on any given topic.

2. Is Your Website Ready for Cyber-Monday?

With online holiday sales expected to hit 39 Billion dollars, it is essential to make sure your e-commerce site is in tip top shape.

1. Thinking about Buying or Selling Paid Links? Think Again…

Webmasters have been aggravated for weeks because of Google’s more aggressive policy, with most of the drops in PageRank a few weeks ago blamed on a penalty to sites perceived as buying or selling paid links.

Do you remember encyclopedias? You know those heavy books stacked up on the bookcase collecting dust. The only time they were ever used was when little Johnny had a report on the solar system or some other mundane topic. Dragging his feet to the bookcase, Johnny would take down the Encyclopedia ( being careful not to drop on his foot..those books were heavy!) and proceed to regurgitate information that had been written years or sometimes decades before his time.

In this age of blogs, wikis and 24/7 news outlets, it’s laughable that we ever used encyclopedias for information. Out of Date V. Up-to-the-minute. With the help of sites like YouTube, news blogs and message boards, we are literally able to watch history in the making. Little Johnny can not only report about the solar system, he can watch a YouTube video about solar eclipses, view pictures of the different planets, and chat with others interested in the Solar System. Talk about a comprehensive report little Johnny will have!

So how does all this encyclopedia talk relate to your website? Well..ask yourself, is your website an encyclopedia or an outlet for up-to-date information? You see, it’s simply not enough to ‘just have a website’ anymore. In the early days of the internet, having a rudimentary website complete with flashing icons and scrolling text was acceptable. But the growth of the internet and the competition to be on top has changed the landscape of how websites are built and marketed.

Bruce Clay makes a good point when talking about the expectations of prospective clients,

“They buy the domain name, plan out the site, write up some relevant content and then they wait for the Internets to bring them the traffic and the adoring fans. Soon they will be rich!
Only they’re not rich. They’re not even successful. They’re Just Another Web site and nobody cares.”

Having a website is the first step in catapulting yourself into internet infamy (maybe). But it takes a lot of work to get on top. It’s not magic and it doesn’t come easy. Having a professional looking site which reflects the needs of your user is essential. Marketing your website through link building, press releases, and blogs is another step in the right direction. Updating your content frequently can be the most important as it not only provides beneficial to your visitors but it also attracts Google’s crawlers more frequently. And the more frequent Google crawls your site, the greater the authority it thinks you are becoming. The goal to not only have a presence on the web, but an identity…and identity of authority in your niche.

P.S. If I relied on Encyclopedias for my information, I might think that Pluto was still a planet.