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10 SEO Copywriting Do's and Don'ts

Posted by Gareth Cutter

Writing search engine friendly content - from a technical point of view - doesn't need to be overly complicated. Of course, the more unique and useful the content, the more likely it is that people will link to it, making it more relevant in Google's eyes.

We'll leave it up to you to come up with a unique content idea for your business (although we can help you on a one-to-one basis). For now, we'll leave you with these 10 simple pointers to ensure you're doing everything right from a purely copywriting perspective.

Do:

• 1. Place most important key phrases at the top of the page - search engine spiders weight content towards the top more heavily
• 2. Place most important key phrase at the end of the page too - less important that the top but search engine spiders recognise this is where you're going to summarise your main points, so don't neglect it
• 3. Use headings and sub-headings regularly and place your key phrases in them - these also carry extra weight
• 4. Think of two or three synonyms / variations of your main key phrases - anything that customers might use to search for your services and include them in your copy
• 5. Use key phrases as link text for your internal site structure - these help search engines understand what your site is 'about'
• 6. Use bold text - this can be used to emphasise content both for users and search engines (but use the technique sparingly)
• 7. Use bullet point lists - there are also useful spots for including key phrases without them seeming 'out of place' to human visitors

Don't:

• 8. Get caught keyword 'stuffing' - if your main key phrase appears too many times, you will get penalised. While there's no known accepted limit, if the page reads unnaturally and human visitors could guess what your main key phrase from the amount of times it appears in the copy, you're probably using it too much
• 9. Copy and paste brand descriptions - search engines value unique content and dislike content that is copied word for word from other sites
• 10. Target too many keywords - one primary keyword and two to three secondary keywords will ensure your SEO efforts aren't diluted

A Better Link Strategy With Bloggers

Posted by Gareth Cutter

Link building is an important part of every popular e-commerce site's success. Its how new customers find you and how your web site appears on the first page of search engine results, so it’s important to get it right.

If you’ve been firing off link request emails to no response, follow these tips – soon you’ll have a net of links catching visitors’ attention and pointing them towards your web site.

Use the personal approach - short cuts are not appreciated by people online and sending a 'one size fits all' link request email will definitely rub them up the wrong way. Why? Because essentially it’s spam. Write personally, take the time to find out the contact’s name and refer to their blog by name in your email. This will create a warmer reception.

Send useful and relevant content - bloggers want to please their audience; entertaining and informative articles are integral to that. If you can make their job easier by sending informative material, they will most probably thank and credit you for your efforts with a link. Write strong, attention grabbing content and let it do the work.

Is the link not ideal? Ask politely for them to edit it - if the link is not pointing at the page where you are focusing your SEO efforts, a short polite email asking them to redirect it (and why) is better than not sending anything at all. Just don’t push them if they don’t – there’s such a thing as looking a gift-horse in the mouth!

Comment on their blog - show you actually value their content by responding to posts in a thoughtful and helpful manner. Directing them to articles that reinforce their main point always goes down well. Bloggers always notice comments and they might be driven to check your blog / web site out in return. Comment consistently, build a relationship and you’ll probably earn a link.

We hope these four pointers come in useful for you. If you have any questions about building links with bloggers, or any other aspect of e-commerce and online marketing, don’t forget to contact us – we always enjoy talking to people who are interested in what we do!

Uncover Your Money-Making E-commerce Paths

Posted by Gareth Cutter

Sales channels; tracking; return on investment. If you’re a retailer, you’ll know just how time consuming and mind-boggling digging into these things can actually be.

Customers don’t come out of nowhere but tracking how they find you has been difficult in the past - unless you adopted some kind of discount code. But did you know you can use Google Analytics to track everything about your e-commerce transactions, including:

• Source – did they come from a search engine or were they referred by another site?
• Medium – was it through natural search or pay per click?
• Keyword – if it was natural search, what keyword / phrase did they use?

The information breaks down much further than this, but the key point is you can retrace the path a customer took to your site much more efficiently than before.

It’s actually a lot of fun typing in the search phrase that converted into Google and seeing your listing outshining the competition. It also forces you to consider what kind of impression your listing is creating and how you can improve it – something you might never have considered without this process.

Taking the time to set up Google Analytics on your e-commerce site (something we can do for you), whether it’s new or existing, gives you more retailer insight and reveals which channels and search phrases are working, and which ones need improvement. Start mapping the money making paths back to your web site today!

Not So Niche – Optimising Landing Pages For Natural Search

Posted by Gareth Cutter

Search engine optimisation is much easier when you have niche phrases to target. With less competition, it takes less time to achieve visibility, and if the phrase accurately describes what your business is offering, it’s likelier to have a high conversion rate.

But ‘less competitive & highly searched’ phrases are as rare as gold-dust, and more often than not, retailers are trying to optimise landing pages for products and services that are widely available.

How can new retailers succeed in SEO when they don’t have stacks of niche phrases to rely on? Simple: by strengthening their on and off-page SEO tactics for the pages surrounding it.

Mind your headings

Make sure your individual product pages are all fully optimised with the correct phrases in page titles, page descriptions, headings and alt text for images. This process might sound obvious or even tedious, but it is very important: it can help these individual product pages show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for more specific search queries.

This in turn can strengthen the authority of your generic landing pages. If these ‘long tail’ landing pages receive good traffic, perform well and link back to your main product / service landing page, they will pass on their authority and help your larger landing pages rank more highly in the SERPs, simply by virtue of being associated with them.

Point links to your home-page

A lot of SEO gurus will tell you that a text link pointing towards the page you want to optimise is the best way of getting strong search engine optimisation.

But what if you’re one of many competitors stocking the same brand or offering the same service? You will have to come up with landing page specific content that other Internet users find compelling enough to link to - which isn’t always possible.

Instead, aim at getting links from quality sites to your home page.

A lot of off-page search engine optimisation has to do with being in the right ‘link-neighbourhood’. This means having links from sites that share similar interests to your own e.g. a clothing retailer will want to be associated with blogs and magazines about fashion, because they will share similar keywords and the search engines will associate you with them.

A link from a highly relevant site to your home page will be just as beneficial as a link with your ideal anchor text to the landing page. Since your home page links to your landing page, it will pass on any ‘link juice’ it gets and strengthen the landing page’s authority, helping them to rank more highly for generic search phrases.

Niche and easy

Search engine optimisation is a competitive industry and one that is continually evolving. It also requires patience and attention to detail to reap rewards. Start by finding someone (like Docnet) who can help you build a solid internal link foundation and then go in pursuit of those external links. Then it won’t matter whether your search phrases are niche or not.

Don't 'Pray Per Click’: Improve PPC Performance With Quality Score

Posted by Gareth Cutter

There is a fundamental process to search engine marketing that you can use to improve click through and conversion rates - as well as lower your average cost per click - that doesn’t involve devising any cunning tactics or holding top-secret board meetings: improving your ads’ ‘Quality Score’.

Google defines the Quality Score as the relevancy of your ad to the user’s original search query and intent; those with higher scores tend to be charged a lower cost per click rate by Google than others.

Here are four of the main factors used to determine your Quality Score:

• How does your click-through rate compare to similar ads for the same search query?
• How many people are leaving your landing page straight away?
• How close does your ad text and landing page content match the original search query?
• How well has your average click through rates performed historically?

Therefore, you can improve your Quality Score by making sure your ads are:

• Targeted to the correct search phrase, with it included in the ad and landing page copy
• Clear in intent at the beginning (are you asking people to buy today or sign-up for a free newsletter?)
• As attractive to users as possible through entertaining copy, special offers and smart design

By doing this, you will ensure your ads get a strong click-through rate; that people do not instantly hit the back button when they arrive (bounce), and are more likely to convert into sales.

So revise your ad text and landing pages constantly to deliver relevant content that matches the search content closely to push your Quality Score up, and your cost per click down when using search engine marketing.

The New Tradition: Online Spending on Christmas Day

Posted by Gareth Cutter

With reports indicating another year of growth for online retail in the US and UK (comScore have calculated a 3% year-on-year growth in US online retail over the 41 prime retail days from November – December 2009), businesses should consider what plans they have in place for making sales on Christmas Day - December 25th.

While many people still regard Christmas as ‘immune’ to the heavy spending that surrounds it, in reality, 5 million consumers spent a total of £102m in 2008. This amount was taken without any concerted effort on the part of advertisers and many retailers were in fact taken off-guard by how many visitors their sites received.

So it appears that for many, going online to shop after the traditional Christmas dinner might become the new routine for filling in the post-present-unwrapping boredom.

The easiest way to profit from this burgeoning Christmas market is to ensure your paid search campaigns are still running: instead of decreasing your budget, consider increasing it, and change the advertising copy to reflect any seasonal promotions or messaging you might be running to improve your message’s relevancy.

Christmas isn’t all about shopping for consumers; many will be logging onto social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and channels like email to send Seasons Greetings to friends and family members. Having a presence on these channels could prove more profitable on this day than any other time of year (plans from Google and Bing to incorporate Twitter feeds into live search results gives retailers an extra incentive to invest in this channel).

If you are closed over Christmas and Boxing Day, and any other day leading up to New Year’s Eve, make sure this is stated clearly on your web site, ad copy and landing pages. This is so prospective shoppers’ expectations are set correctly and you don’t create any undue disappointment.

Whether it’s your first Christmas spent trading online or one of several gone by, follow these tips to make a gift out of what is - in effect - an extra day on the calendar for retailers.

Is Google Going To Favour Faster Web Sites?

Posted by Gareth Cutter

How quickly does your web site take to load on average?

Slow load times are rarely a factor in managers’ minds (unless the page is so slow that it takes 10 – 20 seconds for a page to display fully) but an announcement by Google’s Matt Cutts indicates the search giant may soon be taking it more seriously – which means web masters should be too.

Google’s aims are for search to become lightning-fast, so when a browser types in your URL, your page displays the moment they click ‘Go’. Sites that load faster will likely be favoured by Google in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Having a faster site could potentially mean the difference between position number one and position number two for your chosen key phrase.

Therefore, it’s important you consider these two main factors: hosting and development. Using an ‘Out of the Box’ web site template and hosting solution is likely to have search unfriendly flaws in it, but a specially designed web site hosted on a dedicated server is a good way to ensure a minimal load time.

While load time may become an important factor, Google considers over 200 variables when determining search ranking, so it’s important not to lose sight of the bigger picture. All the same, we have often seen that an attention to detail can make a huge difference to performance in the search engines. We will keep you posted with any further developments.

Microsoft and Yahoo Search: A Done Deal?

Posted by Gareth Cutter

Pretenders to Google’s search throne, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed a 10-year search deal designed to consolidate their shared 30% of the search marketplace. In this deal, Microsoft’s search engine Bing will power all Yahoo searches whilst Yahoo handles worldwide search advertising for the two companies.

Yahoo will receive 88% of all search revenue from traffic on Yahoo’s sites with revenue guarantees for 18 months worldwide, while Microsoft receives "the scale and resources to create the future of search", according to Chief Executive, Steve Ballmer. The aim is for Microsoft to design better algorithms through a wider knowledge of the search-sphere that a partnership with Yahoo will afford.

The deal is expected to be complete in 2010, depending on regulatory approval regarding anti-trust concerns (that the search market will not have enough competition to remain fair), with full implementation following some 24 months later. Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz announced that there would likely be redundancies made at Yahoo, with some staff transferring into new positions at Microsoft.

What does this all mean for searchers and advertisers? In theory, a viable alternative to advertising with Google, as a third of the search marketplace comes immediately under the partnership’s control in the short-term, and in the longer-term, more competitive prices for search advertising as Google’s monopoly is weakened. It remains to be seen how smoothly the Yahoo and Microsoft integration will go, but given that it’s in both the companies’ best interests to join forces, we expect to see more friction arising out of anti-trust concerns. We will keep you posted with further updates.