Wiep has a good idea, and i like it. In fact i like it so much that i’m not going to repeat it here and advise you to visit his article right now!

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

I work for a big publisher. My colleagues are typically young, smart, woman, and yes, beautiful. They are very good at what they do, but have no (or little) technical background. That’s all right, but of course I have to get the message across. I won’t reach that by showing off my knowledge of HTML.

The best way to explain stuff, is to try to find out what your target audience already knows, and use that to connect your knowledge to theirs. So what do all journalists, editors, and professional bloggers know that we can use?

The 5Ws

Every journalist knows the principle of the 5Ws : Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Et voila: there you have your most important keywords.

Tell them to use these in the first couple of sentences of the article, but also in the description and metatitle. This is the most technical part: to show where in the backoffice the meta-description and metatitle are used, and where you can see them in Google.

If someone asks WHY to use the 5W’s, and not for instance a snappy headline, then simply tell them that that is not what people are looking for in Google (back it up with data if necessary).

The inverted pyramid

Traditional journalism is all about the inverted pyramid: put the most important content on top, and less important info at the bottom.

That however, sucks both for SEO and for web copywriting. People don’t read (only) the first sentences. They scan, and then decide what (and if) to read.

The way to write for that kind of reading, is to NOT use the inverted pyramid, but to put the important content (the 5W’s) throughout the article: in the beginning, middle, and end. It helps if this repetition varies: use a text, a list, an image, a subheading, etc.

Synonyms

Good writers use synonyms. It makes their writing more lively, and less boring. It’s also a good way to use more keywords. It makes sure that keyword density doesn’t get too high and the LSI part of SEO copywriting is covered also.

That’s it. These three principles of journalism work fine to explain SEO copywriting. It’s good for the audience to know that writing for Google does not conflict with good writing in general, and also that they were taught well at school and can use that knowledge for SEO copywriting.

And as always, I’m really curious about the way you tackle this, so leave a comment :)

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

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 :)

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content 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.

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

below you see the result of some questions I sent to several people in the media business. The goal of this was to learn more about SEO optimizing Press Releases.

There is much, much information on the web about how to write Press Releases, and I’ve read quite a few articles about the subject. I wanted to know however, how the people that receive SEO optimized Press Releases think about this.

So I asked them, you see the first response below. There is more to come. Enjoy and learn!

General questions

1. Introduction: who are you and what is your business with Press Releases (=PR)?

Jeroen Mirck, managing editor of Emerce, business magazine on internet marketing. As an editor, I receive up to a hundred press releases a day, many of them being badly focused or written.

2. Please describe your organization

Emerce is a business magazine on internet marketing, published by VNU Media in Haarlem, the Netherlands.

3. please give me your definition of ‘press release’

A press release is an article sent by a company, institution or individual (maybe via a PR agency) to inform media about a specific subject matter.

4. What is a good press release?

A good press release answers all the questions that arise for journalists and are based on facts (many press release fail on these issues). It is well written in a smart editorial style which makes it easy to edit it for publication.

5. Please provide me with some recent examples of good PR and tell me why you like them. This helps me to better understand your opinions.

Mostly press release written by PR companies. Press releases have to be made professionally.

6. Do you use a distinction between different kinds/categories of PR? If so, which ones? If not, why not?

Not really.

Statistics regarding placement of Press Releases

7. How many PR does your newspaper/news website/blog receive on a daily basis?

Several hundred.

8. How much % of it actually gets published?

5%? That’s a guess, because this is very hard to measure.

9. How do you think these numbers relate to newspapers/news websites/large group weblogs in general (worldwide, Europe, Netherlands)? What data or opinions is this answer based upon?

Internet has the ability to publish more, but popular websites receive the most press releases. The % can be seen as an indication for all media.

Organization of Press Release publication

10. How many people in your organization are occupied with PR? In what ways?

The whole editorial staff of Emerce handles incoming press releases.

11. How do you receive PR? (specific channel, emails, technical format, etc.)

Mostly email, but many organisations also send letters.

12. In what way(s) (channels and technical format) would like to receive them?

Email with informative title/header, press release pasted in the mailform itself, with maybe an attachment with the same text too. Images are welcome, but not too big. It is better to place them on the corporate website or an ftp server with a deeplink.

13. Do you only receive PR or do you (also) set out to find them? If so, where?

If I see other media publish information that must come from a press release, I search for it on the corporate site of the company, to have the information from the original source.

14. please describe the process of PR publishing: from the moment you receive it to publication, to evaluation

1. Reading the header, deciding wether it is spam, uninteresting stuff or a relevant press release;
2. Discussing the issue with colleagues, deciding who’s “on it”;
3. Reading the full press release, checking the given information with other easy sources;
4. Editing it to a news article, maybe calling for more info;
5. Publishing the article online.

15. Do you alter the title of a PR? If so: how many % of PR are altered, how is this organized and why?

A good title can survice the editing process, but this is no certainty. A bad title (too positive about the source, too subjective or simply not true) will ALWAYS be changed. If a news medium wants to accentuate its originality, journalists prefer to change PR-headlines.

16. Do you alter the text of a PR? If so: how many % of PR are altered, how is this organized and why?

I always delete the corporate info at the end. Most press releases are heavily rewritten. Nevertheless, a very journalistically written press release might not be changed much.

17. Do you alter links within a PR? If so: how many % of PR are altered, how is this organized and why?

In offline media, links are almost never used, unless it’s an article about a website. Online news media only use one link to the source of the press release (otherwise it looks like advertising…)

18. Do you think there is a difference between different media types (newspapers, news websites, other) in the way they handle PR? If so, what is it?

Online media act quicker, and therefore make more mistakes with not editing press releases enough. PR agencies know that… ;)

19. Do you think your organization handles PR in a normal way or is it different? Why?

Normal way.

20. Are PR evaluated in your organization? How?

Articles are evaluated: why subjects are selected, if the tone of voice is alright and wether the article doesn’t look too much like the press release it comes from…

SEO: Search Engine Optimization and a Press Release

21. Do you know what SEO is?

Yes.

22. Do you recognize the work of an SEO in a PR? How?

Some titles really fit perfectly for search engines. That’s important, because the organisation itself often publishes the press release on its website.

23. Do you regard PR that is optimized for search engines as an ‘issue’ or is it no issue at all? Why?

No issue, because a journalist should rewrite it.

24. How much is a link (or reference to website if print newspaper) from a page on your website/newspaper worth? What data or opinions is this answer based upon?

No idea. I think the PageRank or Technorati score will give information about that.

25. Let’s assume you receive a PR you like and want to publish. You also see the text is optimized for Search Engines: it contains keywords and links. How do you respond?

Links might be used, keywords normally not.

26. Regarding the previous question: is publishing a link with a keyword rich link text an explicit choice? (in other words: do you explicitly think about the link and its link text and decide to copy it or not?)

The link text is the most logical word in the article to put the link under. It doesn’t get special treatment, but chances are that the product or corporate name is used. That’s logical.

27. Do you ‘nofollow’ links in PR? (if you don’t know what ‘nofollow’ is, skip this question)

…

Got Some Tips?

28. In general: which kinds of PR shall always be published and which never? Why?

Evident self-promotion will never be published. Senders of press releases must always ask themselves one question: does the public wants to know this?

29. Regarding the previous question: what are the three most important tips you can give to those who write PR?

1. Keep it neutral en objectively (facts, no opinions and promotional talk);
2. Ask yourself if the audience really wants to know your story;
3. Write the press release in a style that’s “fit to print”.

30. Do you have some specific tips for SEO consultants like me?

A good news title can be SEO friendly, but don’t exaggerate the use of product and corporate names in the title.

And I want to add another sidenote. The diminishing size of redactions and a growing deadline pressure makes that Press Releases are less and less throughly checked, particularly on the web. Journalists should be very critical, but due to time and pressure restraints that canot always be the case. You might see that as an opportunity for smart SEOs…

Thanks!

Okay, that’s it. I want to thank you very much Jeroen. These answers are very valuable to me and the readers. Now we actually see what the people think of the Press Releases we send their way. After I’ve received the other ones (it may take a while, be patient) I’ll write a summary about what SEOs can learn from all this valuable inside information…

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

Fortunately, I have some friends who also know *quite* a bit about SEO and blogging. They gave me great feedback about it: thanx guys!

It soon became clear that the way I called this website was giving some people headaches, because their initial interpretation of the word ‘SEO copywriting’ did not match my definitions of it.

I was not talking about copywriting alone. I was talking about everything that had to do with content SEO. Copywriting is actually only a part of that! Also, copywriting is not completely SEO, either.

That’s why I changed the name of this website to ‘A Study in Content SEO’. It’s broader and less specific, but still specific enough to be considered a niche. Also, I think that most SEO’s and copywriters will understand way better now what I’m talking about.

What do you think?

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO

Placing keywords in texts is merely the practical end phase of a larger web/marketing strategy. You should understand this environment and the location of search engine marketing within it. I intend to show you that there is more to ‘content SEO’ or ‘SEO copywriting’ than simply inserting keywords into the website’s content. The questions and situations posted below are only some examples and by no means exhaustive.

Working in project teams

Especially within large projects you’re just one member of a project team of specialists. These specialists operate better when they recognize and understand each other’s expertise. Think about (marketing) managers, content managers, usability experts, web designers, decision makers, and more.

It will help you a lot if you know how they work, and how SEO can be integrated smoothly within their content creation workflow, especially when you’re dealing with larger groups of content managers like journalists and professional writers.

Different content types

Every type of content requires a different approach. So do styles, target groups and even the companies you work for. The differences might not be so big, but it will help you if you recognise them!

Publications differ from forum topics, press releases from landing pages, FAQ’s from weblog articles. Is a text intended to inform, convince, teach, or perhaps a combination…? What about the style guidelines of the company you’re optimizing for, or the jargon within the company? And what about target groups? Are these texts aimed towards adolescents, scientists, linkerati, business owners, customers?

In this case, the difference between the research a ‘normal’ copywriter and an SEO is very much alike, because they are both looking for the right words and styles that make users ‘click’.

Advanced meta content questions

Title-tags and meta-descriptions can be written in many different ways. It is NOT simply a question of inserting keywords. Do you include a call to action in it? Should the main keyword(s) or the company name be the first? And what kind of title-tags and meta-descriptions does the competition use? How do you stand out in the crowd? How do you deal with titles that are generated massively by a large e-commerce site? Things like that ask for a clever way to deal with these texts and leave basic SEO behind.

Content creation management

Doing SEO copywriting this way also means doing project-management. You have to think about quality control, the organization and versioning of documents, the tools to use, writing guidelines, outsourcing, planning and deadlines. Also, think about where content is coming from. Do you hire students and let an experienced SEO review it? Do you reuse (parts of) the content in other parts of the website, for instance news leads or short product descriptions? Questions like that are part of your SEO content strategy and are a lot more interesting than the boring old keyword insertion stuff.

Conclusion: strategy, cooperation and advanced SEO

Keyword use in bodytext and metatext is only the beginning of content SEO. After that, things like different content types, cooperation with other experts, marketing strategy and even advanced SEO copywriting come into play. It makes it a whole lot more interesting, which is why I started this website in the first place ;)

SEO copywriting: Searchwritten - A Study in Content SEO