So why do so many people do this with their SEO?

It’s an all too common sight in the field of search engine optimisation to see websites, often promoted by SEO agencies, being optimised for the wrong keywords. Businesses can spend a lot of money, often thousands or tens of thousands of pounds, targeting keywords that are of no use to them in any capacity, or ones they have no hope of ever ranking for.

Let’s give you a for instance.

Say your business is in the divorce industry, and you’re a divorce solicitor offering quick online divorces. What words instantly come to mind when you think of divorce?

There’s the obvious, ‘divorce’, for example. But how competitive is that to rank for? You would need a sizable budget to be able to rank for such a generic keyword, or an already very established website, and how many people who were looking for your kind of service would simply use the word ‘divorce’ for their search?

No, that’s not the keyword you should be investing your time, effort and money into optimising for – although you will find that by optimising for the correct keywords, your rankings for ‘divorce’ would improve anyway.

How about other keywords such as ‘marriage breakdown’, ‘break-ups’, ‘split’ and ‘annulment’?

These keywords are all relevant to your business, and they’re the sort of words that should be appearing on your website, yes, but again they’re not the sort of keywords that you should be optimising for as such. Imagine that you’re looking for the services of a divorce solicitor, one that offers online divorce – what are the benefits of that service? What words would you use to find a service such as that?

More relevant keywords would be ‘divorce solicitors’, ‘online divorce’, ‘quickie divorce’, ‘cheap divorce’ and ‘divorce advice’.

Notice how they all contain the word ‘divorce’ anyway, so by optimising for keywords such as these you would be optimising for divorce as well?

Remember, when choosing keywords you need to ensure:

• Keywords are not too competitive
• Keywords are not too generic
• Keywords are relevant to your service
• Keywords will convert

Cheshire

Now, while it’s true that you don’t want to publish your daily gripes and annoyances on your company’s website, by removing any opinionated content from your site you’re merely stripping your content down to the bare bones, being left with nothing more than a ‘vanilla’ flavour. This is arguably worse than adding the most opinionated, close to the wire content that you can, because flavourless, ‘safe’ content isn’t going to entice anyone into reading it – and it certainly isn’t going to attract any links (which is one of the major benefits of using content for SEO in the first place.

Rather than playing it safe and adding the same old dry, humourless, posts to your website every day, you need to inject some fresh blood into it. Make your content stand out from the (very large) crowd and grab people by the ears before rubbing their face in what you write.

This applies to any industry too, as no matter in which industry your business is involved, you can still find areas that people disagree on, areas for discussion, debate and revolution (not the political kind, we don’t need to go that far). By injecting a little of yourself into your website’s content you’re making your website more personable which, in this faceless digital age, will mark you out from your competitors.

Be bold, be opinionated and let your website reap the rewards.

A phishing email, in case you didn’t know, is an email that is sent by a fraudster attempting to steal vital information from you by deception. The fraudster will send the email as though it has come from your bank, from eBay, from PayPal or from some lottery agency proclaiming that you’ve won several million Ugandan dollars. You get the idea.

When you click on the link within the email, or reply to it, you will be providing your information to the fraudster. Some of these fraudulent emails are very clever, and look very convincing, and often come with websites that are perfect replicas of the actual websites in question (such as a copy of Lloyds TSB’s website, which the email I received had).

You’re supposed to be fooled into thinking that the website is genuine, and attempt to log in as prompted. In doing so, rather than logging in, your details are being stored by the fraudster so that they can log in to your bank account and do what they wish with it (clear it out usually).

It’s all very straightforward, and all highly illegal. Of course, the success of these phishing emails depends on their authenticity – which is where copywriting services come in. Luckily, most fraudsters who use this form of phishing email don’t use English as a first language, and their grasp of the English language is very poor. They also don’t know the difference between UK English, and US English (note the reference in this email to ATM machines).

Have a read of what I received, and see if it would have fooled you:

FROM: Lloyds TSB [onlinebanking@lloydstsb.co.uk]
Subject: Lloyds TSB Alerts : Irregular Check Card Activity

Dear Customer ,

We have informed that you have received unauthorized access to your Lloyds TSB ATM Card by date of April 08 2009 ,
We already put your account on third party until the verification is finish
We ask you now to Log-In to your internet banking and check your statment .
We asking you to Log in immidiatly to your Internet Banking and and follow this steps

1. Log-In to your internet banking by clicking here
2. Check your recent statment

Please make sure to let us know if there is any authorized withdraw from your Lloyds ATM Card

Lebel Operation :
4670659

Your account is on the third party and is will be untill you finish the steps
Lloyds TSB , United Kingdom
************************************************************************************
This message and any attachments are confidential and intended for the named addressee(s) only. If you have received this message in error, please notify immediately the sender, then delete the message. Any unauthorized modification, edition, use or dissemination is prohibited. The sender does not be liable for this message if it has been modified, altered, falsified, infected by a virus or even edited or disseminated without authorization.
************************************************************************************

While the content of this email is clearly very poorly written, and unlikely to fool anyone, it is indicative of the poor quality content that does exist online. This type of content could even exist on your own website if you do not use the correct content provider, or simply leave your website’s content up to the intern.

Would this reflect well on your company’s image?

Search engines rely on titles

Google’s spiders tend to gobble up the first piece of informative text they come across when they access your website, and this is always the title tag (assuming you even have one of course). This is then used as the link text in the SERPs, so it’s vital to spend some time crafting the right title for every page on your site. Remember that every page needs a different title tag, or else how can Google differentiate between the pages, and how will users know what is what they find your site in the SERPs?

Don’t overlook title tags

There has been a fair amount of debate in search engine optimisation circles about optimising meta tags. Early on, it was thought essential to optimise meta tags, as it was a way of communicating directly with the search engines. As some tags got devalued in the algorithm, some SEO experts decided that tags just weren’t bothering with.

Title tags, however, are an absolute must for your web pages. Too many companies leave their title tags exactly as their web designer left them, namely with the business name and nothing else.

Having ‘Joe Smith solutions’ as the title for every page may present a professional image, but it won’t do you much good in the search engine results pages. It’s far better to optimise each title tag with the keywords for that page.

As mentioned earlier, some businesses do worse and don’t even feature a title tag at all, resulting in their listing in the search engines appear as ‘Untitled Document’ – a cardinal sin in SEO.

Most businesses are opting to seek professional assistance for their site’s content. Most business owners also know how to recognise good writing when they read it. All the same, a significant amount of sloppy writing seems to make it through. Here’s what your site should be featuring as part of your search engine optimisation:

• No machine authors. Lots of sites use writing software to churn out keyword-rich content. The trouble with this is that it reads like machine-written content. This is bad for readers, and bad for SEO. The search engines will pick up on the lack of quality, and your website will suffer in the rankings as a consequence.
• Unique articles. A lot of content on the internet is simply copied from somewhere else. If an article reminds you of something you read yesterday, it’s probably going to bore your site users. Strive for a unique take on the subject when you can.
• Interest. Content isn’t just there for the search engines. Your site’s users can help boost your ranking by returning and remaining on your site, linking to pages on your site and sharing them with their friends. Interesting content tends to draw people back.
• Optimisation. All content on your site should be optimised, with keywords that fit your plan. Don’t forget to hyperlink to other pages on your site as well, increasing your internal link strength.

No, we’re not referring to the poet, we’re referring to the more famous Sam Beckett. When you perform a Google Image Search for the name you’re presented with photographs of Scott Bakula from the 1980s, rather than a black and white bloke with a beard; the real Sam Beckett.

Back in the 80s Sam Beckett was a time traveller on a TV series called Quantum Leap. Every episode would see Sam leap into the body of someone new, somewhere (and some when) within his own lifetime. He couldn’t control the leaps and every time he did leap he had to change history for the better before he would leap out, and on to the next person – hoping each time that his next leap would be his leap home, etc etc.

On his travels through time Sam was aided by Al (Dean Stockwell), who appeared as a hologram that only Sam could see. Al was really in the future, where the people who Sam leaped into would appear while Sam possessed their bodies in the past. Al would advise Sam on what he thought he needed to change in order to leap out, guided by the super computer named Ziggy.

It all sounds very complicated, but really it’s not. Sam explained the science behind Quantum Leap in several different episodes, and it follows the principals of string theory. If you imagine your life as a piece of string, with a beginning and an end, your life will pass along it in a linear fashion. However, if you scrunch up the string in your hand, so that many different parts of it are touching, you can leap between different parts of your life, and different times in your life. That’s what Sam did, he would ‘leap’ to different times within his own lifespan.

The same principal applies to the Internet. While a person’s journey through the Internet may be linear in the sense that they pass from one website to another, it isn’t linear at all because many websites link to each other, back to themselves and off to dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions and billions of other websites. The Internet is a complicated, intricate stringy thing that links all over the place, allowing users to ‘leap’ from one website to another. While the user may set out with a plan of where they want to go, they will rarely follow that plan as they pass through the Internet, instead being guided by what they see, what they read and what links they find.

Just like Sam Beckett, they need to complete a task before they ‘leap’ onto the next site. This task, unlike Sam’s, isn’t necessarily to ‘put right what once went wrong’, it is more likely to be to find some information, complete a transaction, find the answer to a question or merely to find a link that looks interesting.

What you need to do is to ensure that as many opportunities as possible for them to ‘leap’ to your website exist and, once there, that opportunities also exist for them to leap around within your website, and complete the task that you want them to, before they leap away to another site.

Remember that, just like Sam Beckett, each user is looking for the leap home. This doesn’t mean they’re looking for their homepage, or their Facebook page, but instead they’re looking for the site that will finish their browsing for that session, or day. Whatever website they finish on, will be their leap home – back to the real world. You want them to find your website before their leap home.

The more links you have online, the more content you have on your own website and the more links you have on your own site linking back to relevant sections, the better placed your website will be to receive one of these ‘leapers’.

Oh boy!

Link building is never easy, and social media sites can prove troublesome to site owners who don’t know their workings. It’s not a case of simply approaching the site and asking for links, although hundreds of businesses have made this mistake. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t ask for anything on social media sites. In fact, a call to action generally proves very effective in social media content.

The call to action in question is not the usual internet marketing CTA, which encourages readers to buy whatever product or service is being advertised. Instead, it’s a call for internet users to forward the content to their friends. This is part of what is needed for social media success, and ultimately SEO rewards. If your content stays where it’s put on a social media site, it isn’t achieving anything.

Getting content forwarded is a part of what makes social media campaigns useful for search engine optimisation. Forwarded content can seed your keywords and links all over the net. Many site owners overlook the need for a call to action in their social media content. Don’t let yours be the content that fails to perform. All you have to do is ask.

For example, the following post was written on the official Facebook page for the upcoming Sylvester Stallone film ‘The Expendables’. The post was quite funny, and suggested that men should go and see the film when it comes out because it will make them feel more manly – however, the author of the post made one small, yet very common, content mistake.

This mistake is so small and common in fact that they probably would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for someone pointing it out.

Which wasn’t us, before you ask.

The fact that the mistake was pointed out shows that the content being posted on the official Expendable Facebook page isn’t being carefully checked and edited for spelling and grammar, and the comment from Mr Jusovic makes everyone who reads the comment aware of the mistake.

When you write content to promote your business, wherever it is intended to be published, you need to ensure that it doesn’t reflect badly on your company image. Even a post on Facebook should be checked if it is to represent your brand.

In the interests of levelling things up however, here is the trailer for The Expendables.