Posts Tagged ‘website design’

Website Content Development For SEO Success

July 1st, 2011

Content Development Part 1: The Recipe

In Spain there’s a little town called Elche. It’s a beautiful place near the eastern coast. The reason I bring this up in an article about how webpage content relates to SEO practices is because the residents of Elche have a very original dish that is highly –treasured for its lengthy list of ingredients.

The dish is called arroz con costar and it contains chicken drumsticks, rabbit, pork spareribs, sausages, meatballs, black pudding, tomatoes, chickpeas, chicken stock, Spanish rice, peas and spices – and to top it all off, they cover this mishmash of flavors in a crust made from beaten eggs mixed with bread crumbs.

So, in some respects it’s everything you can find in every refrigerator in town jammed into a pie. And to the casual travelling diner looking for a quick little bite, it’s too much to consume.

The food analogy boils down to this: Not long ago, website authors would stuff the body content of their web pages with volumes and volumes of keywords and phrases. Anything and everything went into the mix, in hopes that someone might stumble upon their page via some random search term or other and be willing to eat their way through all of that extraneous content to find the one little morsel they were hungry for.

Those days are long gone, thankfully.

Spend any amount of time with an SEO professional and you’ll routinely hear that Content Is King. This is true, as long as the content is natural, unique, relevant and search-worthy. Your visitors come to your page because the content is somehow relevant to their needs. They also come to your page because their search terms triggered a response from the search engine.

Ah, the conundrum reveals itself. Yes, writing copy that is both effective for SEO and reads like natural language can be a recipe of opposing ingredients. But before you pick SEO copy over natural language copy, you should know that the search engines seek to discover and reward natural language. You should also know that the best advice in the business suggests that you craft rich, unique and compelling content that addresses a particular search query.

Balance is required when content developers create pages, since they are being produced for both search engines and humans. Therefore, a compromise is certainly needed. If you can balance the two so that pages are understandable to readers and great bait for the search engines, you’ve got it made.

Is it easy? No.

This content development alchemy is practiced by the professional SEO agencies, where the mantra is to write for users, but to label content accurately for search engines. A good SEO content team is often comprised of  different experts. An analyst provides technical analysis of your existing content, as well as researches the market, competition, and target audience. The Analyst also helps define keyword and content recommendations. The SEO team also includes a Copywriter who is well-versed in writing copy for humans and search engines alike without losing a grasp on natural language. And rounding out the SEO team is a Link Building expert and a Social Media pro who can help promote the great content.

Although there are a number of additional team members that make up a quality SEO agency, these individuals all work together to define and develop the base upon which your SEO content plan is built. And each one of them is focused on one thing: high quality, relevant, effective content.

All that aside, how much content do I need? Good question.

Although a point of much debate, the current going answer is also a mix of content development practices: No more content than you need to convert your site visitors into customers, all the while providing enough content for the search bots to discover and index appropriately.

But what does that look like? Probably 300-500 words per page is a good measure of text content length. Good content – as it relates to marketing – is often more like poetry than prose, so try not to be too long-winded.

Here are a few tips on Content Development:

  1. [As stated before] Good content is rich, unique and compelling text that addresses a particular search query.
  2. Good content demonstrates to readers and search engines that you are an authority in your specific market (or topic).
  3. Good content courts reputation via recommendation (links, re-tweets, likes from social media, etc).
  4. Good content favors your site over the competition and helps you to convert shoppers into buyers.
  5. Good content feeds the ‘bots. Search robots love text.

Last word: If you’re not entirely sure how to go about developing content that gives you a recipe for success in your market, listen to your customers for the phrases they use when connecting with you. Your other option is also to use an SEO company like Sweet Spot Marketing for professional service in keyword research and content development.

Google Rolls out Instant Previews for Ads

May 6th, 2011

Last week saw the release of Google Instant Previews for ads. Much like the same previews that Google rolled out for search results last November, the new Instant Previews for Google ads (already available to users in the U.S. and coming soon to international users) will add a “preview option” to all Google ad placements, so that searchers can view what actually appears on any advertised webpage without having to leave Google search.

For those watching their advertising dollars, this may be great news – as those who use Google ads pay Google on a per-click basis. These preview options will allow searchers to view the site without clicking through first. Those disinclined to click through have certainly saved site owners a few adverting dollars.

This is also good news because it suggests that those who opt to click through to the site may be potentially open to your sales pitch or your call to action – based on what they have already seen the preview.

But all this good news comes with a few caveats. Let’s take it from the top.

According to the Google press release, “the Instant Previews icon will appear next to ads on Google.com allowing users to preview the ad’s landing page. With Instant Previews, your customers are able to quickly preview a page to see if its content matches what they’re searching for.”

I’d like to repeat that last bit: …customers are able to quickly preview a page to see if its content matches what they’re searching for.

This is the most-significant take-away for the new search-enhancement release. In some respects, it’s a game changer because searchers – and prospective customers – will now be able to preview the page to which your ad links. In other words, it’s a peephole to see if the content of your page matches their keyword search and interests. Think of it as “advance knowledge” that may very easily sway their decision to click through to your page and consume your content. And, yes, from a cost-overhead perspective, any searcher that decides not to click through to your website has just saved you a couple of bucks (or maybe even more) by acting against the preview.

What does this mean for those websites that are actively trying to court prospects through Google’s ad program? The answer is pretty familiar to most: Relevancy.

Three things to keep in mind:

1. Quality website and user experience design has never been more important. You must put your best foot forward, so to speak, as a quick glance at your target page will immediately generate a positive or negative user response.

Note: Any web designer worth their can of RedBull spends a good number of hours trying to understand web users, developing product strategy, and planning out details that are developed specifically to engage the user and lead them toward conversion. The final product – especially in a world where searchers can (and will) peek at your site before entering – should absolutely meet your customer needs and your business objectives.

People feast with their eyes first. Give them something good to look at. Clicks may become customers.

2. Your choices in selecting your keywords must become highly relevant to the content of your site. Keywords, obviously, are those select words that describe the topics discussed specifically on your web pages. Common language keywords are often recommended, as well as some general terms.

Remember: keywords alone determine where your ads are eligible to show. Wrong keywords = wrong placement = wrong target audience = no clicks. That’s wasted effort.

3. Since the instant preview is effectively “speeding up” the searching and selecting process, it would stand to reason that any website content (copy, imagery, your call to action) should also be written or developed to engage your site visitors and quickly guide them to take action or make a buying decision without wasting time. If the nature of your site and your product necessitates a volume of page content, make certain that you’ve edited that content down to the minimums.

Here, we can all take a piece of advice from author Ernest Hemingway, who was famous for his economical use of words. Hemingway said, “Boil it down, rather than spread it out.”

A last note: At this time, Google does not offer search users an option to disable the instant previews. There are some third-party add-on extensions for Firefox and Chrome (Greasemonkey is one) that will allow you to disable the instant previews. But as far as Google is concerned – Instant Previews are here to stay.

Planning An SEO Friendly Website From The Beginning – Part 1

January 13th, 2010

This 2 part series aims to educate individuals and companies that are about to venture into a new site, or redesign their existing website. The web is filled with lots of bad SEO advice, and as a responsible internet marketing company, we hate to see another company fall victim to bad SEO advice.

If you think you are “buying SEO” from a web designer for an extra ~$500 dollars, or trying to save money by managing your web design and SEO efforts separately PLEASE KEEP READING!!

If You Build It, They Won’t Come

A big misconception on the web, even in 2010, is “if you build it, they will come“. Unfortunately, the last time this strategy really worked was when Kevin Costner operated a small farm in Iowa.

Competing for search engine rankings today is harder than it was just 5 or 10 years ago. Back then, your competition didn’t employ an SEO to improve their ranking above yours, or perhaps they didn’t have a site at all.

Today the web is growing rapidly while the amount of search volume for your keywords is remaining relatively the same. This means in order to out rank your competition your website architecture is very important.  Gone are the days of simply building a site and having it rank well. Now you must understand how to properly build and market your site in order for search engines to rank you well.

Web Designers Don’t Know SEO Like A True Expert:

Often times web design firms will say “SEO, sure we do that”. When all this really means is for an extra ~$500 bucks they will do a hack job on your sites title and meta tags. SEO consists of much more than title tags and meta tags, and you really are getting what you pay for when you go this route.

Sweet Spot has great relationships with several web design firms across the nation. Our intent is not to put down web design firms when we say they don’t understand SEO. We need them to build us great looking web sites, but that is typically where their expertise ends. Sweet Spot strongly recommends hiring a true online marketing professional to take a look at your SEO goals before you even get locked into a particular web design.

SEO is a term that is loosely thrown around these days without any real standards. With several articles released every day on the topic of SEO, you can image it’s difficult to filter out what is true and what is not. Because of this cloud of SEO confusion out there, many agencies and web designers who venture into SEO trying to find out what this “SEO” thing is, inevitably end up lost, confused, and overwhelmed. Inevitably this leads them to make uniformed decisions about how to properly SEO your site.

Hire A True SEO Professional:

True SEO professionals are your bridge between web design and accomplishing your online marketing goals. We have the experience, data, and knowledge about online marketing that enables us to easily wade thru what is real and what is not. This gives companies like Sweet Spot Marketing an edge over any professional web designer. We go to SEO conferences and have data to back up our methods. Quite simply, there are just not enough hours in the day for a person who builds websites all day to have the same expertise as someone who is dedicated to educating themselves daily on the latest online marketing trends and search engine news.

SEO Friendly Web Design Part 2