Over the years I’ve written a lot about search engine optimisation (that link will take you to a series of posts covering everything from keywords and on screen optimisation to link building and dodgy SEO practices that should be avoided), but mainly in relation to on screen SEO copywriting.
This post looks at the other side of SEO – your website’s structure.
As this also plays a vital part in your ranking success, it’s about time I gave it some coverage. However, a word of warning, I’m not a web designer or coder, so this is all stuff I’ve picked up along the way (i.e. it won’t be really technical).
I guess a good a place to start is your website’s navigation.
Navigation
Q: What is the purpose of your site’s navigation?
A: To help your visitors find their way around your site easily and for the search engine spiders to crawl your site easily.
Did you see that? The word ‘easily’ featured twice in that sentence – that should give you a clue as to where this is going.
There are 2 main things to say here: the first is that your navigation should be coded in such as away that it’s easy for the spiders to crawl it (i.e. not in Flash or JavaScript); secondly, think about how deep your website is.
Uh?
Depth is basically a measure of how many clicks people need to make to reach the inner pages of your website. The more layers they have to click through, the harder it is for them to navigate.
People (and search engine spiders) like to find the information they need quickly and easily and don’t take kindly to having to dig deep to find it. So, if possible, make sure your website only has a maximum of 3 clicks to find the information needed. This will help your rankings (in conjunction with your other SEO activities) and reduce your bounce rate.
That’s why it’s vital you plan your website’s navigation and structure from the outset rather than just letting it evolve.
Internal linking
The depth of your site thingy is OK if you’re a relatively small company, but what happens when the size of your business demands a big website?
That’s where good internal linking comes in to play.
There are 2 types of links relevant to SEO:
External backlinks – those than point to your website from one unrelated to your site
Internal backlinks – links that connect pages within your own website
Why is it important to link between your own pages?
Well they have a number of SEO advantages: such as decreasing the number of clicks need to access information deep within your site (benefiting the spiders and readers); giving you the opportunity to use keyword rich anchor text links; improving user experience.
So, whenever you add a new blog post, page or article to your website, make sure you use relevant anchor text links to link it to other related information within your website.
URL
The last item on my list is your URL structure.
Using your keywords within your URL structure will definitely help your SEO, so make sure all your sub-pages use keywords relevant to that page.
Not a lot more to say about that one.
Over to you
That’s a very quick, non-techy perspective on website structure and search engine optimisation.
So come you on techies out there, what have I missed out?
If you can offer some nuggets of wisdom, leave a comment below and enlighten the masses.
Everyone wants to be on the front page of the search results, but rather than working hard and building a solid base of informative, relevant content and good links, some marketers still try to find short cuts.
However tempting it may be, there is no substitute for hard work because if you do try to cut corners you will incur the wrath of Google.
So what sort of activities are we talking about?
There are quite a few, but for this particular post we shall concentrate on 7.
1. Cloaking
Nope, it’s not something out of Star Trek.
Cloaking means you’re showing the search engines one thing and your visitors something else. So you could be promoting a site for an activity such as fell walking in the search results, but when someone clicks on the link, they’re taken to a pornographic site.
A very deceptive practice, which is completely forbidden by Google.
2. Duplicate content
Yes, unbelievably this still happens. People attempt to boost their page views by creating many pages with the same content.
If you inadvertently duplicate content on your own site through the use of categories, tags or archived pages, you’ll be OK although it could still get you penalised.
3. Scraping content
Everyone knows that good rankings come from the creation of great content. But for those who really can’t be bothered and think it’s OK to scrape content from other sites, tweak it a bit and then publish it, Google is watching you and will come down on you like a tonne of bricks.
4. Unrelated keywords
The only keywords that should be used for your site are those that are actually related to the content in your site. It really isn’t rocket science.
Of course, stuffing your keywords (related or otherwise) is also a huge no-no, but you knew that, right?
5. Link exchanges
The best way to develop your links is to do it carefully, manually and with integrity. If you pay for links you’ll get banned; if you link back to everyone who links to you, you could damage your reputation.
Basically, Google will check out your external links and incoming links for the quality of the linking sites. If they have a low reputation it will have an effect on you – so be careful.
6. Hidden keywords
The below will get you de-indexed or penalised:
Plastering your site with keywords in the same colour as your background
Keywords in really, really tiny font size at the end of your site
Guess what? They show up in your code so it really doesn’t take much for Google to spot it.
7. Stacking your titles
There’s a simple rule to follow: one headline per page.
Writing more than one and stuffing them with your keywords will hack Google off. Do it properly and make the most of your heading my placing your important keywords at the start of headline, making the most of the 70 characters available to create one that is meaningful.
Over to you
The 7 scenarios above are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to getting yourself de-indexed by Google.
Can you think of any more?
If so, write a comment below and let’s see how many we can find.
Everyone understands the importance of search engine optimisation.
But not everyone seems to grasp the fact that it’s an ever-changing field of marketing. As search evolves so do the complex algorithms the search engines use to determine which sites are relevant to which search terms.
Why the constant changes?
That’s mainly down to the less than white SEO ‘experts’ out there who find a technique to boost their website’s rankings and exploit it.
For example, as a result of websites with poor content that wasn’t relevant, Google’s Panda came along. Hot on its heels was the mighty Penguin to battle against keyword stuffers, cloaking, duplicate content and those participating in link schemes.
In the world of SEO you have two choices: keep doing what you’ve been doing for years and watch your website disappear from view; or move with the times and adopt new techniques.
SEO Techniques to steer clear from
To get you on the right path, here are just a few old SEO techniques that should be consigned to the rubbish bin.
1. Keyword density
This is a phrase that should never be mentioned again.
If you’re not sure what it is, it’s a dreadful practice old SEOers once employed, claiming you have to have a certain percentage of keywords in your website copy in order get ranked for that particular search term.
Wrong.
If it were that simple, the world would be full of websites that were complete gibberish and only contained one or two phrases repeated again and again.
The right way to create effect SEO copywriting is by writing high quality content that is written naturally.
2. Numerous press releases
Online press release outlets were seen as a God send to many.
The result was numerous press releases that had absolutely no substance to them whatsoever being blasted across the web in the hope of attracting a back link or two.
The main problem with this is that you’re putting out substandard releases for the general public to see, which is hardly going to put your company in a good light.
There’s nothing wrong with issuing press releases, but only when you actually have some news to tell.
3. Content spinning
Once upon a time, marketers would write an article, spin it using some software and post it out to numerous websites. Worse still, they would send out the same article to hundreds of websites creating vast swathes of duplicate content.
That is such a bad idea.
If you want to put content out there make sure it’s original, of high quality and offers the reader something. After all, if you want to generate links, it has to be some pretty awesome content.
4. Meta tags
Once upon a time (there’s a pattern forming here) SEO was linked to your meta tags because they helped the search engines determine the relevance of your website. Surprise, surprise, this resulted in numerous SEOers stuffing their meta tags (they appear in the <head> section of your website’s code) with keywords.
The search engines are far cannier these days, and use other tags (e.g. title tags and alt tags) and the actual content of your website to determine what your web page is about.
As you can see, throughout the history of SEO someone finds a loophole and exploits it. That’s why it’s important you keep updated with the latest SEO techniques and news to make sure your efforts continue to bring you the results you want.
The following guest post was written by Vicky Fraser. The author’s views are entirely her own and may not reflect the views of FreelanceCopywritersBlog.com. If you are interested in producing a Guest Post for this blog, please get in touch with your ideas.
SEO: search engine optimisation. It strikes fear into the hearts of some; cynicism and distrust into the hearts of others. However, if your business has a website and you need to generate leads, you’ll ignore it at your peril.
Firstly: a warning. Anyone who tells you that they can shoot you to the top of Google overnight is either lying, not terribly bright or using dodgy techniques like ‘spamdexing’ (which will get your site blacklisted).
Tackling it yourself
For those who want to undertake SEO themselves, there are a few things to think about. If this is your first foray into SEO, it’s worth spending a little time learning about it.
A video is worth quite a lot of words on this subject, and this is a great little introduction to SEO from those clever guys at Search Engine Land:
When you’ve sussed out your meta descriptions, chosen your URLs, set your keywords and (this is important) written your image ‘alt’ tags, it’s time to think about the copy itself.
It’s not just the search engine spiders you’re writing for; it’s your customers, too. And the search engine spiders know that. New algorithms are popping up all the time and they are getting more and more intelligent. The spiders can recognise good, relevant, useful content and they are more likely to rank it highly.
However, it’s not just about algorithms: the more relevant, interesting and engaging your copy and content is, the more likely it is to be shared, and the more likely it is to be ranked highly in the search engines. Be honest: if you’re not a good writer, employ one. It’s an investment you won’t regret.
Use the tools available to you, as well. There are quite a few good freebies around. HubSpot has an excellent ‘marketing grader‘ tool that gives feedback on a variety of aspects of a website. The SEO snippet tool is a brilliant wee thing for writing your Google snippets and URLs. And SEOQuake is great – offering a suite of widgets to diagnose individual webpages.
Once your site is optimised – don’t leave it alone! SEO is not a ‘job done’, it’s an ongoing task. Start a blog, and update it often. Fill it with relevant, useful content that people want to share – the search engines love it.
Make social media work for you too – more and more, it is searched and indexed by those spiders. The search engines are recognising what valuable sharing and search tools social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are.
Employing someone to tackle SEO for you
The advice above is very brief, and is the tip of the iceberg. If it feels like more work than you can take on yourself, pay an expert to do it for you.
There are many SEO bods out there with a variety of skills, and you may not want or need someone to take care of the whole shebang. Take a good look at your site, using the free tools mentioned above, and decide which areas need your attention most. Then spend your budget on those areas, and tackle other areas yourself.
If you have a little experience with the back end of websites, and know how metadata works, this is a relatively simple (but fairly time-consuming) task, and one that you could tackle yourself. Don’t underestimate, though, the skill involved in boiling each page down to 156 characters for the meta-description (that’s the snippet that appears in Google’s listings. It’s not terribly important for rankings, but a well-written snippet will stand out from the rest on the page and is more likely to be clicked)…
Perhaps your website copy needs rewriting and optimising for search engines? It is not simply a case of stuffing keywords in there; in fact, doing so is likely to harm your rankings and it certainly won’t do your customers any favours. As mentioned above, and this cannot be overemphasised, your website copy needs to be interesting, useful, relevant and informative – as well as easy for the spiders to recognise and rank using keywords.
Maybe you’d like a regular blog, but you just don’t have the time? Or perhaps you’d like to embrace social media, but you don’t know where to start…
Getting the best from your freelancer and the most from your budget
You’ll be paying for the copywriter’s expertise, and a good one is worth their weight in cheese. However, you can keep costs down by doing some of the legwork yourself.
Do your research yourself. Ask your customers, your friends and family, your colleagues and even complete strangers what they would search for if they were looking for your product or service.
If you can pass on a decent list of keywords and keyword phrases to pass onto your freelancer, you will save them time. That is not to say that they won’t do their own research if necessary, but they will quote accordingly.
Compile a full list of your competitors – local and national – and pass it on to your freelancer. They can do some keyword research, investigate their blog and take a good look at their use of social media to see what works in your industry.
Trust your freelancer: they will be able to look at your business from the outside, and talk about what your customers (and potential customers) want to hear. This will probably not be the same thing you want to say! Your customers want to know what you can do for them, not how great you think you are. It may be painfully honest, but it will be honest and it will do your business good.
If you’d like to employ a copywriter to blog for you, you can save them time (and reduce the bill) by providing a list of topics, and writing an outline. Researching blogs takes time, so if you do the research for us and provide a skeleton article, the costs will come down.
SEO isn’t that scary. Honest. It does require skilled writers, and an investment in time. Either way, if your business relies on inbound leads from the internet, you can’t afford to ignore it. Dive in – and do it properly!
Vicky Fraser is a freelance copywriter and marketeer based in Warwickshire. Being a science nerd undertaking a physics degree, she specialises in simplifying and clarifying scientific and technical copy but writes about all manner of things for a wide variety of clients. She blogs about science, freelancing and writing – amongst other things.
But what I want to concentrate on in this post is the use of your keywords.
Going right back to basics, keywords are the words and phrases your customers type in to Google’s search box when looking for your products and services.
In the bad old days, ‘SEO experts’ would have you believe that to be highly ranked, you had to cram as many of those keywords/phrases into your copy.
The result…well, you can imagine; page after page of complete drivel.
Thankfully, those days are gone (but be warned, there are one or two dinosaurs still around touting keyword density as the Holy Gail of SEO copywriting) and marketers are far savvier.
Be natural
Natural writing is the key to good rankings.
By keeping your copy focused on your reader and the benefits you can offer them, your writing will engage and naturally contain your keywords and phrases.
But there is one caveat here: your key phrases do not have to be used in their entirety throughout your web page.
What do I mean by that?
For example, let’s say you sell “designer leather dog collars”, rather than using that phrase in its entirety everywhere in your site, you can break it down using single words such as “designer” and “leather” or combinations “dog collars” “designer leather” “leather collars” etc.
You get the idea.
You see Google looks at your page for synonyms too, so splitting your phrase down will really help your rankings.
Of course, you still need to use it in its entirety somewhere to show Google exactly what your page is about, perhaps in your:
Headline
Sub headings
Alt text
Anchor text links
Remember, writing SEO copy is an art form when it comes to understanding Google’s likes and dislikes, but the overwhelming aspect of it is to write naturally and always for your reader.
Keep them firmly in your mind when writing your copy. If you start to think about the search engines your content won’t do its job.
