The different thing is that I wanted to witness the online marketing bizz from another perspective. Not as an external consultant, but as an internal specialist. Less consultancy, more operations. It’s another experience, another way of looking at things. Also, because of the size of the Ilse network, it’s quite a challenge!

I like the fact that Ilse is located in one of my favourite cities (Amsterdam), and that they have graffiti and Wii’s :)

For those of you who don’t know Ilse: it’s the largest Dutch internetpublisher (8.6 million uniques/day) and has sites like nu.nl, startpagina.nl, kieskeurig.nl etc. [overview].

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My new job: SEO specialist @ Ilse media

Ow, the video is here.

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We like SEO :)

You also told them that it is a good idea to do so, because:

• it generates a lot of relevant content;
• people use the same words to describe something as they would when they search for it;
• these people are looking closely at your products and site, and talk about it … publicly. If they like it, you have fans. Everybody knows how important fans are;
• and a couple of reasons more I forgot to mention.

Your client is excited: ‘yes, I want user generated content for my site. Gimme gimme gimme!’ Now it’s up to YOU to actually make it work… What can you tell them?

Below is my own list of items I think about whenever this need arises. Every situation is different of course, and it’s probably far from complete. But it should give you something to work with. Use it for your own benefit.

And while we’re talking about co-creation anyway: if you’ve got additions, drop a comment!

Goal defining

What do you want to reach? It should fit into the goals that you’ve already set for the business as a whole, and the website in particular. So what sub-target (KPI) is the addition of user generated content supposed to reach? Think about stuff like:

• generation of unique content to support rankings;
• generation of quality content to support rankings;
• both the above;
• establishing a fan base;
• higher conversion rates (user generated testimonials);
• etc.

Situation

What has already been done:

• Is it already technically possible and easy for users to interact with the website?
• Is the content displayed on the same URL it’s supposed to support?
• is it hidden or shown in full sight?
• Are there enough visitors already on the website that will start to interact immediately?
• Or do you need to kick it off yourself?
• what does the competition do?
• can you handle criticism?
• can you handle moderation tasks?

Users

The users (including the business owners) of the website are crucial, of course. What do you know about them?

• What kinds of users does your website have?
• how many visitors?
• how many of them convert into buyers?
• Can you display their presence in a percentage(%)?
• Can you track their presence? (more info)
• What part would each group of users play in the content creation process? Think about: commenting, just reading, moderation, etc.

Gains

What reasons would each group have to interact. What do they gain from it. Think about reasons like:

• curiosity
• meaning
• to belong to a community
• doing good
• reflection
• ease, comfort, gain
• status (within the community)
• coping
• testify
• etc

They’re all psychological reasons – and needs. This part of your analysis is critical, because YOU are the one who has to think of a way to fulfill these needs. If interacting with a website makes a user feel good, they interact with the website. So what should the website OWNER do, to make someone feel good about interacting with the website? The same principle applies to the other needs, and the other types of users. This is a one on one translation from user types to needs to facilitation of needs.

Reputation and fear of communicating

That being said, there is another thing you should think about. Do you WANT people to tell others about your products? Can you handle criticism? Do you have people avaliable to monitor incoming reactions? Do you WANT to monitor it? Are you willing to LISTEN to the reactions people give? Is your organization equipped to deal with the influx of a lot of comments/reviews? Can you finance it? In general: do you have fear of communicating with your clients? If so, I would advise to get rid of that fear first (or the reasons of that fear) before you start communicating.

One example: a comic book store

Let’s say that you have a comic book store and that you sell your inventory online. You have a number of goals, but let’s assume the most important one is sales generation. The website already has a number of visitors and some of them, most notably collectors, are passionate about your products.

What you should do is collect some data first: visitor/user types, number of visitors, website KPI’s, etc. After that, you can start a brainstorm: what are their needs and how can you address those needs? The brainstorm is intended to come up with ideas about gains that address the already formulated needs of user groups.

A couple of types of users are: comic book readers / commenters / drawers / buyers / collectors, etc. The table below could be the start of a nice matrix:

The table above is just a beginning, not complete, and could probably be better visualized, but the idea is clear, I hope ;)

Conclusion

The most important thing I’m trying to tell here is that you must have insight about:

• the goals
• the users
• their (and your) needs
• how YOU can facilitate fulfillment of their needs
• how THEY fulfill your needs
• how that fulfillment adds to reaching your goals
• rinse, repeat…

In short: user needs

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Checklist user generated content and SEO

Both considerations are valid! But they seem to oppose each other. I still see many discussions about using Nofolows or not. But they all revolve about this basic dilemma: spamfighting versus user friendliness / linklove. So it seems that both sides are in a stalemate.

Why?

Because they can’t compromise.

Introducing the Dutch model

The Dutch are known for the way they handle opposing interests. In politics, opposite factions sit together and talk about their differences. They won’t stop until they’ve reached a compromise. It’s tiresome, but works rather well and the Dutch model is named the ‘poldermodel’. I’m not a sociology professor, but I think it has something to do with an old heritage in trading, capitalism, and above all: making money. Making money is all about seeing win-win situations. You give me and I give you.

There is a win-win situation in using Nofollows. Let me explain it with a metaphor.

Protect your house, and invite friends for dinner

Just like my weblog, my house is my territory. I lock the doors when I’m away, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the world to taste my delicious pumpkin soup! If you happen to be at my house and I have it ready, I will probably let you have a taste (to all my friends who’ve never had my soup yet, it’s just a metaphor, but you’re welcome to come over and try the real deal ;)).

But one thing I will NOT do, is leave my door and windows open so that everybody can just grab some without asking me. I have no idea who it is. Maybe they’ll use my soup to sell it to others!

No soup for you!

CHOOSE when to give linklove

But I do invite friends to come and eat, drink, maybe play some Wii games, watch a good movie, talk about life, politics, the web, etc.

And that is exactly the same with my weblog. I close the doors, but let friends and other people I like come over and have a good time. With searchwritten, I Nofollow, but provide linklove to people I like. If I like your blog, I’ll let others know. If you don’t have one, I’ll sphinn/Digg/whatever your submits. I’ll let people know you have an interesting Twitter acount, etc, etc.

As ar as I am concerned, this is common sense, and not even worthy of such a polemic discussion.

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To Nofollow or not to Nofollow?

Watch how the pros do it. All of us get examples of it every single day. No, I’m not talking about Adsense adverts (though they are good too!), but spam. They’re sitting right there in your spambox… We know this already. But where do THEY get their inspiration?

This morning one spam mail passed the spamfilter and incited me to click. I usually don’t do that, but this one grabbed my attention. I’ll just show it first:

Ofcourse I only saw the headline first: ‘Naked mman superglued to exercise bike during heist‘. It sounded like a hilarious headline (I receive a number of newsletters every morning) and I clicked… Shit! Spam! LOL

I immediately remembered one of the greatest headlines of all time (new York Post, 1982): ‘Headless body in topless bar’.

Spammers learn from the best also :)

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Journalists show spammers how to write

What does the tool do?

• it displays your title, description, Url, and page size on the fly;
• it calculates how many characters you have left.

It takes a different number of characters than I do: a title-tag has 70 characters (I use 65) and a description has 156 (I use 150). I think Google will occasionally test with different lengths to display, so I usually make them a little bit shorter. This does not mean that a perfect title or description is *always* 70/156 characters long! (just read my ‘for dummies’ posts about that).

Will I use it a lot? No, but it might be useful for people who haven’t looked at the SERPs as often.

I use a spreadsheet program (Excel) to write titles and descriptions. With some simple formulas, you can check the number of characters in a cell and display in the next column. So we’ve set the maximum number of characters for a title on 65. The column next to that displays the number, and colors it red if it becomes higher than 65. This way, you can edit a LOT of titles/descriptions a lot easier.

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Title-tags and meta-description testing tool

This article provides a thorough explanation of what metadescriptions are, why and when you should use them and how to write them. My focus here is to explain it as clearly as possible while still being deep enough to actually learn something.

This guide is the second part of a series about ’seo copywriting for dummies’. The first article was about the title-tag. You may wanna check that one too ;)

What is a meta-description?

They are usually defined in two ways:

1. The short text in your HTML sourcecode, the one that says: <meta name=”description” content=”the text of the metadescription” />
2. Sometimes, people also think it is the text snippet that search engines like Google show below the links in the SERPs.

People refer to both when they talk about ‘meta-descriptions’, but no. #1 is the true description. No. #2 is called a ’snippet’.

Why use meta-descriptions?

Descriptions are important for users, search engines, and webmasters. Google for example, uses it to improve both user experience and analytics of their search engine:

‘[the meta description] directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.’ [link].

A search engine user scans descriptions to find what he or she is looking for and a webmaster uses it to show them what a page is about. That is why a well-written and relevant meta-description helps increasing the percentage of clicks your website gets.

How to write: 5 basic rules

Here is a quick list:

1. < 150 characters;
2. aim for CTR improvement, NOT for ranking;
3. include keywords;
4. different queries, different descriptions;
5. it’s not necessary to create descriptions for EVERY page of your site;

Rule 1: < 150 characters
A description is short, concise by nature. The major search engines display no more than 150 characters, including spaces. If a description is longer, they cut it. I’m not saying this means that your descriptions should always be exactly 150 characters long. Sometimes it’s better to be short:

It really depends on the type of search queries people use. When we look at the example of Apple: people that see this are probably looking for the Apple homepage, and not for technical specs of the 3G implementions of the iPhone.

(p.s.: this image was an old screenshot. I cannot find this description for the Apple homepage now)

Rule 2: Aim for CTR improvement, NOT for ranking
Meta-descriptions will NOT help you gain better rankings. But that does not mean you should forget them.

On the contrary!

Think of it as an advertisement. If humans absolutely trusted the suggestions Google gives them, then why is that generally 50% of the people (based on AOL’s data dump of 2006) do NOT click the first result?

It’s because they make up their own minds. And that’s where good writing WILL help you! This also means that descriptions cannot be seen separate from the title-tag. They’re a combo, and dance very well together.

Rule 3: Include keywords
Even though descriptions have no effect for better rankings, they DO impact the way people interact with it.

That is why you should always include keywords. It’s what people are looking for and if your description contains the words people entered as search query, they will be bolded:

Update: I forgot to mention a very important and obvious reason why you should always include the most important keywords in a meta-description. Because it depends on the query someone entered into the search engine, it is by no means obvious to a search engine that the description you gave up in the meta name=”description” field actually provides the best snippet. So you should incorporate the most important keywords in your descriptions too… 

Rule 4: Different queries, different descriptions
People use different kinds of queries to find different kinds of information. The four most well-known types of queries are:

1. navigational: people are looking for a website about a subject, for example: ‘homepage Packard Bell computers‘;
2. informational: people look for non-commercial information, for instance ‘name actress a beautiful mind‘;
3. commercial investigation: a mix of commercial and informational queries, for instance ‘water management expert‘;
4. transactional: looking to buy stuff or a local company: ‘Indian restaurant Nijmegen‘;

It might pay off to determine which type of meta-descriptions are best suited for your website or even different parts of the website.

Here are some examples of description types. I thought of them myself, so if you have better examples, please let me know!

Navigational: ‘The homepage of Apple‘
Informational: ‘Film: A Beautiful Mind. Cast & crew: Jenniffer Connelly [Alicia], Piet Bambergen [Kees], Year: 2005, Rating: 7.5‘
Commercial Investigation: ‘Need a heating expert in Nijmegen? Piet & co. fix your heating problem fast, efficient, and cheap‘
Transactional: ‘Chicken Tikka for $4.99. Delivered within 30 minutes. Order Indian food online now!‘

Note that the navigational description is short and the more informational queries are longer.

Rule 5: Not every page needs a description
Search Engines like to pick the first good sentence they find in a bodytext and use that as a description.

A practical tip would be to take the first sentence of your copy and use a call-to-action in it instead of writing a separate meta-description. You can do the same for other parts of your text. Place a call-to-action next to your most important keywords in the text. They might end up being a description.

Conclusion

Meta descriptions are like advertisements in the organic search results. Treat them as such and understand how search algorithms and people view them. If you make the most of that knowledge, you can increase the click through rates of your listings.

A whole lot can be, and has been, said about meta-descriptions and their use for SEO purposes. This article is not unique in that it provides new insights. But I do think it helps explaining this basic SEO knowledge as clear as possible and still is advanced enough to really teach something.

Suggested reading

[link] Some nice tips from Google itself, specifically some nice alternative writing method tips.

[link]: a good introduction to why you want to write descriptions, and how different search engines dealt with it in 2004. A 2007 followup is written here.

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Meta-description writing for SEO

Last week I had the assignment to quickly write about 20 pages of text for a website in a *very* competitive market (travel). There was no real budget to hire copywriters and there was a tight deadline. I managed to do it in just under 8 hours.

Management summary

For those of you who do not like to read much, I used this workflow:

1. keyword research: focus keyphrase, secondary keywords, synonyms, and LSI;
2. text format: create variants for different parts of text;
3. fill in and vary the format variants (by using the different keywords, synonyms etc);
4. create unique sentences for EVERY text, as much as possible within the time you have!!!;
5. write meta-titles and descriptions (also use a format and vary);
6. check everything and make sure the right keywords are used.

Here is a screenshot of how it looked like:

Content shuffle

Content shuffling is a way to quickly produce a large quantity of texts. The idea is simple: make a bunch of standard sentences and ’shuffle’ them around. You can automate this, but that will NOT deliver good results. Both Google and Human Readers will hate you for it. It will also cost time/money to write software that does this adequately (if at all).

But that doesn’t mean you should abandon shuffling all together. By using a tight organization and formatting of your text, and even some short standard sentences, you can quickly produce texts manually. They will not be top-notch, but sometimes that is good enough.

Below is the way I did it. I’m curious about the way you do this!

Keywords

You start with keywords. Always.

First, I did a little keyword research of about 15 minutes. That’s fast, but from experience I already know which keywords I should use in this market.

The focus keyphrase I chose was relatively simple: $product $destination. There were three kinds of products (tickets, car rental, hotel, etc.) and various destinations.

The product keywords
For every type of product, there were about 5 synonyms that promised a lot of traffic and competition, and were most relevant. I chose the best one of them to use in the title-tag, H1, a subheader and throughout the text.

After the focus keyphrase, I chose the secondary keywords (the synonyms), and some combination words that convert nicely. Think about words like: ‘cheap’, ‘reliable’, etc. I also looked up some semantically related words to the products (I will write a post about LSI some day). I use these to support the overall ‘theme’ of my pages.

The destination keywords
I figured these out while I was writing the texts.

It’s not about the products you sell, it’s about what people want to do with it. In the case of a travel website, you cannot simply say: ‘hey, this is the destination, the name of the hotel is this, and the price is $567,-’.

People look for INFORMATION and ACTION. Why is this a nice city to visit? Why should I buy tickets from this website? Can I rent a car if I buy these tickets? What are the hotspots in this city? In the small amount of time I had I could not possibly answer all questions, but you’ll be amazed how much you can do in a short time frame if you have a plan :)

For every $product $destination text, I looked up synonyms of the destination name. Example: Girona in Spain is also called Gerona; Cologne is also called Köln or Keulen; Beijing is also called Peking, and so on.

Text format

I thought of a format for all texts:

1. start with 25-50 words about the product and place some call-to-actions along with it;
2. the core of the text is at least two paragraphs (100 words) with destination information;
3. conclude with more information about the company, and mention or link to related offers to this product (25-50 words). In this part there are also call-to-actions.

The call-to-actions were simply little dialogs between text and customer: ‘buy/book/order $product, because $company offers these/this POD's‘ (POD = Point of Difference)

Throughout the text, the focus keyphrase is mentioned at least 3 times (beginning, middle, end), and one time in a subheader (H2). The synonyms and semantically related words are used less frequently, but throughout the text. Also, within the texts, there are optimized links to related products and to local authority websites.

Meta texts

I also made a format for the title-tags and meta-descriptions. They were something like this:

Meta-title: Cheap $product $destination? Compare $synonym_of_product.

Meta-description: $brand_name offers cheap $product to (note: or 'in') $destination. We offer the best deals for $synonym_of_product.

I wrote a couple of variants like this and used them.

The actual writing

For the first and last part of the texts, I wrote about three global variants and made sure that all sentences were SHORT. This has to do with the way Google calculates shingles and detects duplicate content issues. I also ‘broke’ the shingles by making them as unique as possible through using variants of words, make some them plural, use synonyms, etc.

The middle part of the text is unique for every page. I simply sought and found two to three notable sightseeing locations in every city and wrote a couple of sentences about that. If possible, I would link to a local authority website.

Finishing up

I checked if the focus keyphrase was mentioned in the title, H1, a H2 and at least three times in the text. Of course I would also check if the grammar was okay and the texts made sense.

This is the method I use to quickly write up texts. If there is more time, I do not use pre-formatted variants of sentences but simply make every sentence unique.

So how do you write optimized texts? I’m also curious if you know of another way to quickly produce texts that are as unique as possible, contain the right keywords, and are still very readable by human readers.

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Do the content shuffle!

Below I will explain the basics of making a print stylesheet for your website, product page or just a page with your contact details. Some knowhow of CSS and HTML will be nice, but don’t be affraid. It’s pretty simple, and if you do need any help, don’t be afraid to drop your question in the comments.

Ok, so first things first. The easiest and most common way is to make a new css file in which you put the formatting for your print stylesheet. You can use a simple texteditor to do this. Call the file “print.css”.

Save the file in a location on your webserver and leave it for now.

Go to your html pages or your template files and edit them. If everything is ok, you’ll see some code between the <head> </head> tags.
Put the following line of code between those tags:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

Do this for every html file or template file.

Some explanation:
href=”print.css” points to the location of your new CSS file. Change that location if your CSS file is in another directory.

media=”print” tells the browser to use this stylesheet for printing the page. Nice to know: You can also use this for other media. For example a PDA. A full list of media types you can use can be found at W3.

Now the browser will know that when a visitor prints the page, it should use your new print stylesheet.

Formatting the print stylesheet

The print stylesheet overwrites your normal stylesheet. So you don’t have to put all your formatting in here. Just the difference is enough.

Hiding all unwanted images, ads and the navigation

Is your navigation in <div id=”navigation”></div>? Put the following code in print.css:

#navigation {
display: none;
}

Ads or images you don’t want to appear in the print copy? Do the same thing. For example, if you have ads in:
<div id=”ads”> </div>

use the following code:

#ads{
display: none;
}

For images it can also be handy to use a class. Use the following class in your image:
<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”alternative description” class=”noprint” />

Now put the following code in print.css:

.noprint {
display: none;
}

You can combine this to:

#navigation, #ads, .noprint {
display: none;
}

Using the full size of paper

Visitors want to use the full size of a paper when they print your page. In most cases, they use an A4 or the letter format, but this method also works for A5, A3 and other formats.

To get the content on the full size of a paper you give all elements (divs and tables) the following styling:

{
float: none;
margin: 0;
width: 100%;
}

For example:

#container, #content, #post, #comments {
width: 100%;
margin: 0;
float: none;
}

Writing out the URL of a link

Of course you can’t click a link on a paper. So if people have a print copy of your page, they want to see the full URL of the link. This is pretty simple to realize. Just put the following code in print.css:

a:after {
content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
}

Now, when you print a page, the full URL will be shown behind the link between two brackets.

Of course it is possible to give the URL some different formatting, for example another colour or a smaller, italic or bold font.

A disadvantage of this method is that when you have a lot of links in your page, it will harm the readabilty. A solution for this is using footnotes, in my opinion the best way to go.

Putting links as footnotes in the print copy

A nice method to put links on your page as a footnote in the print copy has been written by Aaron Gustafson. This method uses a little JaveScript code to collect all unique links on your page, assigns a number to them and puts them as a footnote on the bottom of the page. You can find the last version of this script here.

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A Print Friendly Website? How To make your website Printer Friendly

1. Navigation items that takes two pages
2. Text that is wider than my page
3. White pages or pages with only a title
4. Unreadable URLs
5. Flash or other applications which can’t be printed
6. Images that are broken done on the bottom of the page
7. Text in frames that can’t be printed

Let’s say something more about some of these irritations.

Some websites use different print pages. As a user, I’m not very happy with this. Most of the times, I don’t see the link to the print page and I just press Ctrl + P which most of the time doesn’t work that well. The only reason a separate print page might be useful, is when an article is spread over multiple URLs. The print page should contain the entire article.

Duplicate content

This is how SitePoint works. Articles are split in pieces of about 500 words. However, the complete article can be printed on www.sitepoint.com/print/article-name. The danger is of course that this leads to duplicate content and SitePoint doesn’t seem to be aware of this danger. The links to the print version are follow links and the print version isn’t excluded for indexation by a robots.txt file. By the way, SitePoint has another problem as well. Both of the following URLs lead to the same page:

• www.sitepoint.com/print/properties-glance-guide
• www.sitepoint.com/print/1231

Print pages at the ANWB

The Dutch organization ANWB offers a nice routing tool. The ANWB also uses a separate print page. This print page works well in the browsers I used for testing. However, it’s quite hard to find the link to the print page. This is frustrating because printing the normal page in Firefox doesn’t work that well. The routemap changes to a black or a white rectangle, depending on your printer. It’s hard to solve this problem because the Google Maps application uses JavaScript functions to navigate through the map. Google Maps itself doesn’t have a print version itself. The print version of the ANWB uses a .png file.

Irritation #2: Empty pages and more problems at SEOmoz

The blog pages of SEOmoz don’t have a separate print version. Internet Explorer prints their pages really nice, but Firefox doesn’t understand the print CSS. I assume most visitors of SEOmoz will use Firefox. The first page only shows the title of the blog. The blog itself starts at page #2, which leaves a nearly empty first page.
SEOmoz does have another problem with their print functionality. I tries to print a page of about 2,000 words. In the opposite order, I received 4 pages with comments, one page with (a part of) the article and my printer ended with the almost empty title page. The article itself should me around 5 pages long, but I only received the first page. Internet Explorer understands what should be printed.

Irritation #3: Useless navigation

A printed version of an article doesn’t need any form of navigation. Many print versions of articles however do place the navigation on the paper. A few days ago, I printed an article of a Duth online marketing blog. The article had a length of about 2 pages (including comments) but my printer printed 7 pages consisting:

• Top navigation
• Last reaction on the entire site
• Some statistics
• A little bit of whitespace
• A long list of tags
• The article itself
• The comments
• Links to not related article on other sites

We know that important content should be placed above the fold. It’s weird that it seems that this doesn’t apply for print pages based on the history of the term ‘above the fold’.
Some articles say that it’s a bad user experience if a print version has a different layout than the normal webpage. I don’t agree with them. People print an article to read the stuff and not to study the navigation.
Most advertisements don’t have any value on a print page. The only work for branding but people can’t click on them. An advertisements for a new cartridge with a short URL might be a good idea though.

Irritation #4: Non-readable URLs

How do you tackle links on a print page? Most print versions underline the link but it’s still not possible to read the underlying URL. SitePoint uses an elegant solution. They use footprints in their print versions so the URL of a link is placed in a list below the document.

Best practices

What is the way to go with print pages? Let me give my few cents about this one:

• Use a media=”print” CSS
• Delete all navigation and banners
• Use the entire paper
• Place URLs in a footprint
• Test the print version in the most important browsers

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Usability of print pages