Tag Archives: seo Blog

Content From a Visitor’s Point of View

Website content is the vehicle site visitors take to decide if your offerings meet their needs. Writing web content requires a style fit for the medium. Web users are busy and rely on the Internet for convenient access to information. Effective communication requires understanding what motivates your users, how they use the web, and how to speak to them on their terms.

Web users are primarily online to solve a problem. The sites they visit must quickly and clearly state how they can solve that problem, or the visitor will move on.

Because of the sheer volume of information available, web users initially read as little as possible. They will search, click to a site based on the descriptions in the search results, scan the home page, and then judge whether or not this site can solve their problem. “Scannable” page elements include headings, subheads, photo captions, and bullet lists. These are the first things that visitors use to determine the site’s value to them.

If a visitor finds something of interest, they will click to go deeper and read in more detail. But it cannot be expected that a new visitor will wade through lengthy paragraphs for the information they need when it’s so much easier to click to another site that may be more useful.

Web content also benefits visitors by focusing on information rather than “sales-speak.” Glossy, adjective-laden prose serves the company, not the visitor, and visitors have no patience for it. What visitors want is solid, factual information that helps solve their problem. The sooner their problem is solved, the sooner visitors can stop searching, delve deeper into your site, and become customers.

Brief Is Better

Because reading on computer screens takes energy and visitors are busy to begin with, web content must be brief. Short paragraphs and sentences with plenty of white space make textual content more inviting. Cutting the word count almost always improves the user experience.

But web pages are not only read by people. Search engines read websites to learn what they have to offer and then list them appropriately on search results pages. The content that search engines find is the main factor in determining these rankings. Therefore, web pages should be written for humans but with search engines in mind as well. Placing keywords in a page’s META and TITLE tags, headings, image ALT attributes, and page copy can improve search engine rankings.

Finally, content should motivate visitors to act. “Action” is the natural response of visitors who believe that what they’ve learned on the website is a solution for them. Content can include links that enable visitors to go to the next step towards the desired goal, such as making a phone call, filling in a form, or making a purchase. Giving users the ability to act on information is a key difference between the web and other media and should be fully utilized in any web-based sales scenario.

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Google’s Tweak Should Mean Better Search Results

Google has tweaked its search algorithm, which should be good news for websites with legitimate content. They are finally going after the “article farms” that create keyword-rich articles to rise to the top of popular searches.

Manipulating search engines is something that no one wants, but everybody does. The goal of being “#1 on Google” is the typical request of people who want their websites to rank high in search results. But to get there requires meaningful, helpful content that others connect to via links — in other words, content that’s good enough to share. And that’s an excellent approach for deciding who gets top rankings on search results pages. After all, highly relevant results are what we want when we search, right?

That is unless your site could also be returned for that search term. Then you want Google to rank your site on top, whether the content is the best or not. Getting your site to #1 is the art (myth?) of SEO (search engine optimization), an industry called everything from miraculous to snake oil. And sorting out pages with genuinely useful content from pages that are merely “optimized” is the dilemma that search engines must deal with every day.

Suppose you’ve gone to great lengths to create valuable, meaningful content that helps people make decisions. In that case, you’ll be happy with Google’s new tweaks, which penalize sites with content designed simply to manipulate the search engines and manufacture rankings. If you’re an “optimizer,” you’ll be less than thrilled. However, the happiest people of all should be search engine users. Remember them? They’re looking for helpful, relevant information, and if that’s what you deliver, you shouldn’t have to “optimize” to see your pages valued by Google.

Read full article: Google Tweaks Algorithm to Push Down Low-Quality Sites

SEO and the Article Myth

There’s a myth out there that says spreading keyword-rich articles about your company and products around the web will enhance your search results. SEO specialist Jill Whalen reminds us that writing articles that provide people with pertinent information that helps them make intelligent decisions is the only effective way to “optimize” your website.

When your goal is to “create SEO articles,” you’ll almost always make bad decisions when choosing what to write about or how to write it. You’ll be thinking about search engines rather than your target audience. Anything and everything you write for your website should have a good reason for being there. And that reason is not SEO.

Read full article: (ARTICLE REMOVED BY AUTHOR.)

The Easiest Way to Optimize Your Site

The clip below is from an article on Clickz.com which illustrates that search engine optimization doesn’t always have to be rocket science:

“The easiest way to optimize your site is to love what you do.

Every time I come across a website that’s naturally optimized, it always comes from someone who is passionate about the topic they write about.

Because they love their topic, they have an endless reservoir of material for their websites. Consequently, they come up for hundreds of key phrases in the search engines.

Do you remember when you were in school asking how many pages your research paper had to be? You asked that because you weren’t really interested in the topic. If you had loved the topic, you would have written the paper until you had covered the topic completely. The length of the paper would have been irrelevant.

When someone is just doing a “job,” they always ask if they really have to write new pages for all the key phrases we’ve found. When I say yes, their next question is, “Can we just take the content we have on one page and make a bunch of other pages with the same content and just switch out the targeted key phrases?” No …

People that truly love what they do are living a life filled with purpose and happiness. Almost without fail, they optimize their website perfectly every time.”

Read full article: http://www.clickz.com/3640886

Three Important SEO Factors

In the current web economy, SEO (search engine optimization) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and the like) are all the rage. Justifiably so. But for the most part, the interest is for the wrong reasons, ie: many tend to think they are free or cheap ways of making money on the Internet. Yes, it can be more affordable than traditional marketing, but it’s far from free! Indeed, a solid commitment of time and finances is required for success in these venues, just as it is in any other worthwhile arena.

Still, there are many things that a website owner can do to improve their search rankings — if not become “number one on Google,” as the spam pitches promise. And some of the easiest techniques to implement can also provide significant results. That’s the point of the following article from ClickZ.com, which shares three simple but effective SEO tips that you can use right away.

1: Use Your Key Phrase in Your Title

2: Use the Target Key Phrase in the Body Copy

3: Cross Link Your Pages Using the Target Key Phrases

Sound interesting? Check out the entire article for details, try the techniques, and see how your site does on Google over the next several weeks.

Full article: http://www.clickz.com/3636405