Copywriting

In a post called "What's Up, Internet," writer Amelia Gray answers some of the questions that Googlers have found her blog by asking:

how long does it take to get a warrant

I think you can get one in an afternoon, if you are a police officer and you can find a judge to give you one. (It will take more time if you’re just some guy.)

what sort of rocks are there?

All kinds. Some rocks are very hard and others are so soft you can scratch them with your fingernail. Sometimes rocks float. Once I had a dream I was explaining a quartz rock to my child.

Last week we published the Expert's Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media. This week, we're offering a similar how-to guide for the SEO copywriter.

Many keyword research guides amount to a list of tools, but this guide is all about process. You'll learn exactly when, why and how to do keyword research for blog posts, articles and other content that appears online. If you write for the web (or want to), you don't want to miss it.

One of the best ways to learn how to write engaging and SEO-friendly website copy—and keep up with industry changes—is to read what the experts have to say. Plenty of blogs focus on the topic of online copywriting, but many of those blogs are not updated on a weekly or even monthly basis. Also, many of those blogs are little more than a promotional tool for a company’s product or author’s book.

1. Copyblogger

It's something you hear over and over again from SEOs: Anchor text matters. Chris Brogan relayed this familiar advice this week in a post on decisions we make as bloggers:

By the way, HOW you link to something matters. If you link to chrisbrogan.com by calling it Chris’s blog, then you’re telling Google that people searching for “Chris’s blog” might want chrisbrogan.com. If you link to chrisbrogan.com by calling it social media resources or social media strategy or whatever (frankly, I’ve never known what to bother ranking for in search results), then you are telling Google that people searching for social media whatever might want to find my blog.

1. SEO copywriting sounds forced and mechanical. This myth is almost true: Bad SEO copywriting sounds forced and mechanical. You can spot it from a mile away:

The Benefits of Apple Cider Vinegar

What are the benefits of apple cider vinegar? The benefits of apple cider vinegar are many! The benefits of apple cider vinegar include improved health and boosted immunity. This page is all about the benefits of apple cider vinegar.

I'm sort of surprised that I've never linked to Chris Brogan's blog in a Friday roundup before, since I'm a regular reader. Maybe because his posts tend to be short, to the point and difficult to disagree with, and finding something to disagree with is one of my top ways of brainstorming new blog posts.

It's also one of Chris Brogan's! His "How to Think of Blog Posts" post features the good-old-fashioned rant at #8 (see roundups of Fridays past in which I disagree with Seth Godin, David Powazek and Robert Scoble).

Wired this week published a fascinating profile piece on a company called Demand Media: "The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell." The company's approach to content generation almost sounds like science fiction or satire, but it's real, and it works. It's a purely algorithmic, data-driven method of prioritizing content designed to rank on the first page of the Google SERPs: basically keyword research in hyperdrive. And like it or not, this may be where we're all headed.

Every marketing 101 class worth its salt will have you walking out the door uttering two time-honored maxims where messaging and copy is concerned:

• Benefits, Not Features.
• Unique Value Proposition.

No one really wants to hear about what you do, they want to know what you’ll do for them, right? And you want to make sure that you’re showing unique value; that you offer something no one else does. You want to provide differentiation.

The problem here is that because of strict adherence in marketing copy and creative to the first maxim, just talking about benefits is no longer good enough to achieve the second.

Every company I come in contact with is going to make me better, faster, cheaper, smarter.

These are benefits aimed at the “what’s in it for me”. The problem is everyone says that they do that.