copyworks.org

What’s your website for? One of the big criticisms of companies’ websites is that they don’t know what they are, or want to be. We’re constantly shocked, if not surprised, by large, commercial operations that spend thousands on slick websites that don’t work, that don’t deliver what they are meant to deliver or … don’t know what they are meant to deliver. Is your website trying to capture new leads? Is it trying to sell your products? Is it a ‘pro bono’ information service? Have you realistically appraised your business and decided that a website cannot step in and do the job your people do, so it then supplies phone numbers or email contacts - a first point of contact in fact? Is your content doing it’s job?

But even when companies get their heads round the idea that simply being on the web isn’t enough, they often still miss a trick with what their site is going to do for them. Once the owner of a site gets his or her head round the search idea, they rightly decide that what they want is to capture those searches … But which searches? Too often this is a game of guessing blind. You are a company selling chocolate cakes, so you naturally go online and find …3.5 million search results. ‘We want to be on page one for chocolate cakes’ they cry.

Content writers often find themselves tearing their hair out over clients who want to feature for pet search terms (which may make sense to you but not to your market). A content writer might market herself with a site that boasts about her ‘content writing skills’ when the potential clients aren’t interested in her ’skills’ but in ‘content that sells’. It’s the old advertising adage about customers not buying ‘the sausage but the sizzle’. In other words, a client wants the benefits, not the product … so you need to see things from the other side (which interestingly is what ’search matched content’ is all about - reflecting the keywords people actually use in the content you write.

But a final point … are you sure they’re searching for content? A good half of the people I speak to, especially the older and less web-savvy ones, glaze over when I use the word ‘content’. They call it copy, the phrase used over decades in newspapers, magazines and advertising. Don’t get too ahead of your customers.

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Cheats, scraping and black arts aside, there simply is no substitute for writing good, ‘original’ content on your blog on a weekly basis (if you want to catch Googlebot and the other spiders) and ideally daily. And on the subject of scraping, I’ve left a comment up as an example of what artfully scraped content looks like. No names, no pack drill, and I’m not making a moral point here. But the above comment on a previous copyworks.org post shows how people swiftly pick up your original content and chuck it straight back at you in an attempt to swiftly build links. It’s easy and hey, it’s one way of building content on your website, but it is thin stuff indeed.

It does, however, raise the whole subject of the value of comments on your blog posts. Are your posts merely spider food, or do you WANT the reading public to be actually reading this stuff and coming back at you?  Which leaves you with the problem of producing original copy on a near daily basis. I’ve discussed this long and hard with my business partner, who is the SEO-techy side of this enterprise, while I am the SEO-copy and content side. He would leave comments off on any posts we put on any of our sites … as far as he’s concerned content on a blog is purely there to catch the eye of the spider as it swings by once a week or so. That approach is very common in fact, and when you’re ploughing through the accretion of Viagra, porn and affiliate signup spam messages in the filters, you might think there’s some value in just putting up the blocks.

But I produce one blog which is a hobby job on London history, and the posts I get coming back from people are hugely worthwhile. They often point out related stories, pick me up on mistakes, occasionally tell me I’m a clueless twat who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and frequently spin me off on ideas for other stories. I get a few links of course too, never get asked for them, never elicit or solicit them, but watch them slowly grow over the years. My point is, that turning off comments on your blogs is strangling the thing at birth.

My favourite tool for generating keyword phrases is Wordtracker, but if there’s one better it’s the stuff people submit to the sites. Otherwise, bloggers and webmasters can get simply trapped in a closed circle of their own copy and ideas.

Tags: All about SEO // Add Comment »

Is online content different? Yes, and it’s all about the technology. They are like London buses. First no new print technologies come along for five and a half centuries (thanks Johanes Gutenberg) and then a bunch come along at once. But through the move from lithography, to hot metal to DTP, and now online, no one technology has changed the actual business of writing in the way that the move from paper to online has done. There was always a process of evolution in written copy going on of course - compare the journalism of Charles Dickens to the reporters of today. Fewer words, punchier headlines, getting to the point more quickly … we’re simply not as concerned with filling space on the page anymore, and of course a lot of that is to do with competition on the page from photographs. In fact, pick up a copy of any newspaper from 2008 and compare it to its counterpart from 1958 and you’ll be struck by the differences in writing style. Even more instructive is to pick up a paper from the 1980s, just before Pagemaker and QuarkXpress came in and changed everything, and see how clonky it all looks to modern eyes.

But through all this, as generations of writers discarded conjunctions, threw away the semi colons and colons, shortened sentences and paragraphs, before turning every sentence into a paragraph, no technology ever actually forcibly changed the way we wrote. Generations of page editors and subs on the national papers may have said ‘if it works, it’s right’, before twisting a pun from some hapless victims name, or starting a paragraph with a preposition, but the grammar and the syntax were still basically intact.

Along comes the web though, and the game changes. Writers have always had to give readers what they wanted, no matter how much they try to dress up their journalism as art. Anyone who thinks the merging of commerce and culture, advertising and editorial is a new challenge should look at a Victorian newspaper. There you’ll see that not only is the line between adverts and copy very blurred, but what came later to be called ‘advertorial’ (and I’ve written a few of those for local rags such as the East London Advertiser in my time) was never tagged as such. A reporter may have been covering the Central Criminal Court one day and writing of the glories of Collis Brown’s patent medicines the next. But with the web, for the first time, we know exactly what our readers are searching for.

Things have moved on in the last few years, and it know longer plays with Google to lard your features with 90 per cent keyphrases (’sex market gardening norwich’, ‘viagra organic bread suppliers se22′ just won’t cut it. But any SEO doing his or her keyword research knows that they are going to have to seed their features with the phrases people are using, and people - you and I included - do not tidily type grammatically correct strings into Google. I want a hotel in Italy, I’ll type ‘italy hotel’, ‘hotel italy’, ‘hotel lucca italy’ and so on. I may have discovered that lots of people are typing ‘online copywriter UK travel’ into Google and have decided I want to target thast phrase in a feature. And while Google is sophisticated enough to pull the constituent parts out of ‘online copywriter wanted for UK travel site’ you are still going to play more strongly in the SERPs (rankings) if you directly use the phrase ‘online copywriter UK travel’ in a piece. So our language gets bent out of shape and we start using phrases such as ‘visitors to this lovely Lake Maggiore, Italy hotel’ rather than the far more natural ‘visitors to this lovely hotel on Italy’s Lake Maggiore’. Experienced writers may find themselves holding their noses as they type ‘I’ve years of experiencing in writing UK online copy’ … spot the keyphrase there! And if we’re having to target a texting generation who have a scant grasp of spelling and are quickly adapting what written language they have - how far are we prepared to go in discarding the rules?

As ever, there ARE no rules - grammars are descriptive not prescriptive. That is, the spoken language has always come first, with the dictionaries, grammars and primers only there to describe what is going on in an ever-changing language. The only rule of language is that it should be mutually intelligible by the two people using it to converse - and if that means we have to break bits of it to be understand, to connect, then so be it.

Tags: All about SEO // 2 Comments »

Copyworks is a group of online content writers, based in London. With a mix of journalists, advertising copywriters and marketing professionals our job is to get your message to your potential customers by getting you ranked for the keywords you want on Google, MSN and Yahoo … and to do it via the tried, tested and trusted medium of good writing. SEO content creation too often means poorly written, poorly researched, by-the-yard copy, with keywords all too obviously shoehorned in. We don’t use offshore content writers, and we don’t use cheap student writers to produce online content … so we’re not as cheap as some SEO content creators.What we will do is work with you to build a blog library that will generate visits both from the spiders and the humans … online copy that people will actually want to read. We won’t make your business look stupid by posting badly researched pieces, and we won’t show you up with misspellings, bad grammar and duplicate copy. Because our expert writers will be on board with you - building your brand and your business as well as visits to your websites. Drop us a line and see how our SEO content creation can help your business grow.

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