SEO

During the website creation process, weeks, and even months can be spent on the design elements and structure of the site. This is a good thing. However, In doing so, one crucial piece of the website often goes overlooked: the content. Even in today’s visually stimulated interactive market, the quality of your content can make… or destroy your site. To that end, here are 10 rules for creating effective content that keeps users engaged with your website.

1. Remember the first rule of real estate
Location, location, location. I know what you’re thinking. This is supposed to be an article about creating content, not where you should put it. But just like in real estate, you can have the best house (content) ever built (created), but its value is heavily determined by where it’s located. So where should you put it? Let’s start with what should seem so obvious, but many marketers don’t realize – the homepage.Many sites’ homepages consist of mostly images, while others are built exclusively in flash. When creating your homepage, it is essential to keep two entities in mind: your audience, and the search engines you rely on to bring you that audience. Having content on your homepage not only gives your brand a clear voice and message, it provides the opportunity to successfully optimize for search engine traffic.

2. Use just the right amount
As you probably know, there is such a thing as too much or too little content for your lead generating website. On one hand, visitors get bored fast. It is important to note that users do not intend on reading every word of every web page they visit. Additionally, a website rarely ever captures a visitor’s full attention. For instance, think of what you are doing right now. Are you just reading this article, or are you also:

Listening to music?
Drinking coffee?
Watching television?
Texting?
All of the above?

If your target audience is internet savvy, they are digitally multi-tasking on a consistent basis. All is not lost, however. They are used to this juggling media circus act, and more importantly, they are still on your site. So what did we learn? Avoid putting too much content on your web page. But we’re not done just yet. Let’s take a look at the other side.
As you may recall from earlier (unless you were distracted from texting), pleasing the visitors and the search engines is the best way to bring sweet music to your lead generating ears. Pages with very little content can be perceived by search engines to have very little to offer. While there is no magic number, it seems pages with at least two hundred words generally perform better in search rankings than pages with less content. So ultimately, how do you please both sides? It’s a good thing we have rule number three.

3. Use text separators
Text separators are a terrific way to break up content for easy digestion. A large block of text can seem overwhelming to website visitors, making them less likely to invest their time in the page. Generally speaking, readers will skim an article first before reading it to determine if it’s what they were searching for. What do they skim, you ask? Text separators. Text separators are anything that breaks up text or makes it stand out. This includes headings, bulleted and numbered lists, bolded words, horizontal lines, pictures and even a simple paragraph break.

4. Speak to your target

This is probably the most difficult challenge in web content writing. However, the task becomes manageable once you have identified three factors:

-Who is the target?
This one is a no-brainer but considerably important. The easiest misconception for web content writers is that the audience is just like them. More often than not, this is not the case. Market research is an unwavering buzzword in the internet marketing world, but is regularly underutilized.

-Who influences your target?
Within your target market is a small sector of those who are most influential to that market. While the importance of “influentials” may vary by industry, they all have some. If you can get these few on board with your website or product, others will follow. It used to be called “word of mouth”. Now it’s called social media. Either way, targeting your most influential visitors can generate substantial return.

-How do you speak to all of them?
While you must speak to the uniqueness of your market, at most consist of several different segments – meaning different geo and demographic differences. How do you please them all? Start by Determining the spectrum, or segments, and make sure your content is simple and clear for all of the possible users. You may even want to consider separating sections for different audiences, if their needs are drastically different.

This can seem like a mysterious balancing act, but if you address these three questions, your website will reward you.

5. Get to the point
Now that you understand your website’s visitors have short attention spans, are often multi-tasking, and are not automatically invested in your web page, this one is easy – get to the point. Don’t save the best for last. An employer will not read every cover letter he or she receives for an open position. The employer will read the first few sentences and often skip to the next applicant if the interest is not peaked. For the analogy’s sake, treating your website like a prospective employee and the visitors like a CEO will help you get the job.

6. Have a pulse
When a user identifies with the human(s) behind the website, the website-visitor dynamic usually creates a more engaged audience. A common misinterpretation of this point is in order to humanize your writing, its professionalism must suffer. Correlation does not equal causation. In almost every case, you can still have professional writing, while still speaking to the customer.

7. Be consistent
So you probably already know this. However, it is essential to monitor your content’s consistency and accuracy, rather than assuming its flawlessness. Some common mistakes include: using the writer’s perspective (we, I, [company name], ect.); formatting numbers (does it say $49.99 one place and $50 somewhere else): and not keeping your website up-to-date. If the reader can tell your last update was over a year ago, they may discount its relevance, even if the topic doesn’t justify it.

8. Provide direction
You can lead a visitor to your website, but you can’t make her buy… unless you tell her to. Tell your visitors what to do. Make a point to have adequate call-to-action and direction within your text. Website visitors will often ignore advertisements and call-to-action buttons on the top and side columns of a website, and only look at them when they want to navigate to another page. Directive text may not be as pretty as a starburst “Click Here”, but it speaks to the audience when their interest is peaked.

9. Incorporate pictures
I should have the restraint of avoiding this cliché, but… a picture is worth a thousand words. Although using content instead of pictures is not recommended, the combination is key to captivating a visitor.
[insert picture here??]

10. Integrate keywords
Remember the concept of pleasing the visitors of your website, as well as the search engines that send visitors your way? The magic solution is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of altering a website to increase its organic rankings for targeted search queries. Integrating targeted and well-researched keywords into a web page is an important SEO tactic. While the users read this integrated content, the best SEO is that which goes unnoticed, unless your name is Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

First off, let me begin by explaining that geo-targeting, or local targeting, consists of enhancing your search engine results to only display sites in a particular state, city, area, etc.

For example, if you’re looking for a massage therapy school in Kansas City, you might begin your search by entering the keyterm phrase, “massage therapy schools.”  However, your search engine results probably would not show results in Kansas City within the first few pages, if at all, because your search is not specific enough.  But, if you search for “massage therapy schools in kansas city,” you will find what you are looking for.

In SEO, when I perform keyterm research for my clients, I geo-target keyterm phrases by adding specific geographic locations, such as city names, to my phrases, so that searchers in that particular area can find the schools, and find them on the first or second page.

I recently took on an SEO client that’s a beauty school in Ludlow, Massachusetts.  Where is Ludlow? It’s in Southern Massachusetts, about 90 miles southwest of Boston, or a more specific geo-target, about 12 miles northeast of Springfield.  Ludlow is considered part of the Springfield metro area, just like Lenexa is part of the Kansas City metro area.

Why is this geography lesson relevant? Well, Springfield has about seven times the population of Ludlow.  A person looking to find a beauty school in the Springfield metro area probably won’t enter the keyterm phrase, “beauty schools in ludlow,” especially if they are not in Ludlow. They are more likely to search for “beauty schools in springfield” or geo-target their search even more by searching for “beauty school in springfield massachusetts,” because of the number of states that have a Springfield. Geo-targeting on this local of a level will draw more qualified visitors to my site, because they are seeking out that school in that specified geographic region.

On a personal, local level, when I did a search for “paddy o’quigleys in kansas city,” I received search results for the Leawood location, in addition to the North Kansas City one.  This location worked better for me, since I live in Overland Park.

Geo-targeting locally helps visitors find my site quickly and easily, even if they are not in Ludlow, MA – or Lenexa, KS.

By Matt Kluemper
There were quite a few updates in search in the past month – especially with Google. If it seems like I write about Google a lot, well, I do! But I guess there’s a reason for that, which brings me to some of the ever-changing search updates.

According to a HitWise study, Google search market share increased to nearly 66 percent of all searches in January. This just goes to show that Google is going nowhere, and – with updates to some of the Universal Search items, they are getting better. Yahoo! (21 percent) and MSN (7 percent) are still coming up short by a large margin.

Of course, Microsoft put the offer on the table to purchase Yahoo! (which would combine them into a 30 percent market share) earlier this year, but was not able to get the deal done. I highly doubt this is the last we’ll hear of a Yahoo! buyout, however…

Google also rolled out a cool edition to their Google Maps feature with the ‘street view’ – very neat (Feel free to mess around with the street view of PlattForm below!).

View Larger Map

Apparently they pay people to drive around and take pictures – Sounds like fun to me!

But it wasn’t all about Google – Ask.com also had some updates – just not as fun as Google’s. Besides laying off 8 percent of their staff, it looks like they are going to change their search strategy to “focus to better answering search queries posed as questions.” (Sounds familiar, right AskJeeves?)

Keep tabs on all of the search updates for the rest of the year – 2008 is sure to be a good one! I know there’s been way more updates in the past two months – have you seen any updates that sparked your interest?

At PlattForm we have a policy that requires each department to blog once a month. I understand why the policy is there, and it’s not too much to ask. One post per month from a department isn’t asking a lot. You don’t want to have a blog that just sits there without ever having new posts on it. The policy is perfectly logical, but is blogging on demand a good policy?

I was reading a book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel called Naked Conversations. It’s a great book about how to best execute corporate blogging. It stresses disclosure, honesty, authenticity, and other honorable traits. The best part of the book is the Corporate Weblog Manifesto starting on page 192. It’s a concise list of 34 corporate blogging rules. You could skip the book, read the list and speak intelligently on the subject. The first 20 of the 34 results are on Robert Scoble’s blog, but here are some highlights from this manifesto that you might not have considered are:

• Tell the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth. If your competitor has a product that’s better than yours, link to it. You might as well. We’ll find it anyway.
• Post fast on good news or bad. Someone say something bad about your product? Link to it—before the second or third site does—and answer its claims as best you can. Same if something good comes out about you. It’s all about building long-term trust. The trick to building trust is to show up! If people are saying things about your product and you don’t answer them, that distrust builds. Plus, if people are saying good things about your product, why not help Google find those pages as well?
• Use a human voice. Don’t get corporate lawyers and PR professionals to cleanse your speech. We can tell, believe me. Plus, you’ll be too slow. If you’re the last one to post, the joke is on you!
• Link to your competitors and say nice things about them. Remember, you’re part of an industry and if the entire industry gets bigger, you’ll probably win more than your fair share of business and you’ll get bigger too. Be better than your competitors—people remember that. I remember sending lots of customers over to the camera shop that competed with me and many of those folks came back to me and said “I’d rather buy it from you, can you get me that?” Remember how Bill Gates got DOS? He sent IBM to get it from DRI Research. They weren’t all that helpful, so IBM said “hey, why don’t you get us an OS?”

and then I saw this one:

• Don’t blog on demand. Is your marketing department demanding that your write about something? Push back. Your blog is your own. Tell the guys in the marketing department to get their own blog if they think they have something people should know. Always make sure it’s you saying something, not someone else. Your are responsible for the content that goes on your blog.

The last one really struck me because, well..that’s what I do. So what do you think? Is he right or is Robert Scoble an idiot? His argument in the book is that forced posts are easy to spot and sound forced. Is that the case on this blog? Thoughts?

Please let me know your thoughts. I’ll be following up on this post. My next one is due March 3rd.

Web Sites for larger schools can be a huge challenge for web developers and the school’s marketing or admissions department. The sheer size of these sites can sometimes make maintaining good usability very difficult. If your school’s web site has become a usability nightmare, a minisite may have its uses depending on your marketing strategy.

Searching around on the web I found a few that seemed to work well. McMurry University has a pretty good minisite for their school . A local art school, Kansas City Art Institute also has a good one [WJ2] [WJ2]. Both are smaller with better usability and can make navigating around the site a little simpler than their respective ‘large’ sites with hundreds, even thousands of pages.

When to Hold Them, When to Fold Them

These can be great landing pages for ads, and other direct marketing. These sites can also do well for SEO. The key to making these sites perform well in SEO is to link out to them from your main school web site, which shows they are working together to produce one great product for users.

These sites, however, should not be a school’s primary SEO focus, but can be a good marketing supplement to the main site. As always, make sure your primary school web site is well optimized before trying to boost the SEO performance of a minisite.

The key is to have a good online presence on the web, and a minisite can help with that, as long as a proper online marketing strategy is implemented.