Copywriting

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This is the final excerpt from Master Class: Keyword Research for Stellar Content Creation, by Angie Nikoleychuk. Click below to get the full article now, including the final section, "Social Media Keywords."

Qualifying Site Visitors

For me, one of the most important steps is qualifying your visitors. For instance, while I work with many different people and businesses, I aim for businesses and professionals who already have a site and are looking to get more from it. So, when I produce content, I use keywords and topics that focus on getting more out of what you already have.

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For the rest of the week, we'll be posting excerpts from a new article: Master Class: Keyword Research for Stellar Content Creation, by Angie Nikoleychuk. Click below to get the full article now.

Different Keywords for Different Purposes

Not all keywords bring the same results, and I don’t mean the difference in the amount of traffic they bring in. Ask any smart businessperson and they’ll tell you traffic and sales are still miles apart. What I mean is that you can’t just say to yourself “OK, now I’m going to become an authority figure,” pound out some content, and expect to get results. It just doesn’t work that way.

Traffic Keywords

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For the rest of the week, we'll be posting excerpts from a new article: Master Class: Keyword Research for Stellar Content Creation, by Angie Nikoleychuk. Click below to get the full article now.

Levels of Keywords

When researching keywords specifically for content, I select three types of keywords:

Primary Keywords — Keywords geared specifically for your main goal. If your goal is social, you’ll want to use various social media tools to find out what words your target audience is using at the moment. What are the hot topics?

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For the rest of the week, we'll be posting excerpts from a new article: Master Class: Keyword Research for Stellar Content Creation, by Angie Nikoleychuk. Click below to get the full article now.

Keyword Research and Content Type

Great content is...well...great. There’s no denying that, but when it doesn’t attract the right people, or achieve results, it’s essentially useless. Of course, you can slam down a list of keywords and requirements, but it simply won’t generate the results many would like to believe. 

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This is a guest post by Caleb Levell, a search marketing consultant at Hanapin Marketing. His interests include search and social marketing, online collaboration, and social media for business and non-profit organizations. He blogs at PPC Hero and SEO Boy.

In anticipation of the new season of Mad Men (which begins later this month), I thought it might be worth exploring the creative side of PPC. Unfortunately, PPC specialists too often forget their creative merits. Amidst all of the researching, monitoring, and overall managing of client expectations, it is easy to downplay the importance of being creative in the search engine marketing industry. Today, I’m here to preach the other side of the story and encourage you to embrace the Don Draper or Peggy Olson that lies within you.

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When it comes to content optimization, I'm a big fan of revisiting and reworking my existing content to take advantage of any traffic opportunities I may be missing out on. Now even though I perform keyword research before writing any blog post or landing page, I often always overlook keyword opportunities (both long tail and any closely-related keyword variations around my core term). 

And being a search marketer, one of my primary goals when writing is to rank. So I don't want to leave any keyword optimization opportunities on the table. That's why, after I've published content, I make it a point to go back and fine tune things, so I can extract every last ounce of SEO benefit.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.