Search Engine Optimisation

Believe it or not, copy is read by your readers …see you are reading my copy!… and copy is what sells your services.

No really, it is. 

When you visit a website in order to purchase a product or service, you want to be assured the company is professional, of high a high skill level. If that wasn’t enough the visitors are also looking for that personal touch, and looking for honesty… this can inlude the fact you have failed a client for whatever reason.

When writing copy you need to think that there is no friendly or personal sales person to help the prospective consumer… Just your copy – So make it pay.

So your copy must not only be grammatically correct (not always…depends on your website) but also be able to reach and every reader on an individual level. Take yourself for instace, is this article reaching out to you? is this article what you expected? and further more is this article making you want to look at our services? Further than this your copy must be written in such a way that it will assist your SEO efforts.

So with this in mind, Does your SEO measure up? For your potential clients, current clients and for search engines? or is your copy failing you?

A professional and expert copy writer will give you a new perspective, within a few minutes of conversation. Writers block is often what causes repetitive language within text, making it seem forced and un-natural both to users and your search engine. A great copy writer can spend 2 minutes looking at 100 words and soon after write a much better, highly convertable script which will sell your products and services. 

Comprehensive Copywriting Services

Whether you need one page or 1 million pages writing or re-scripting AK Designs offer SEO copy writing at all levels, from copy-writing as part of our monthly packages to getting single pages re-written, or maybe you just want some consulting on your copy on how to make it better. Contact us today about our services, and get low-cost and effective SEO services from AK Designs.

Suggested Reading: Teach Yourself Copywriting: (Teach Yourself Business Skills) – £7.99

Ever had an issue with problem with someone who has copied your website? All of it or maybe just some of it! It doesn’t matter they took it, without your permission. So today I look at the big advance taken by Google, MSN & Yahoo, and some other friends in early Feb (2009) to help us all out a little.

Canonical Tagging

It’s a pretty simple tag really, and it belongs with the META tags in your head script

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://andykinsey.com/”/>

Generally the advice is to use this only on dynamic websites, see Matt Cutts initial blog post.

So for example, before url re-writing the links for posts was of the format .com/?p=somenumber in the canonical tagging system this would become .com/ all children would be “owned” by this website.

Warning – becareful use of Canonical tagging especially on large-scale websites, use it incorrectly then your search engine rank can be severely damaged!!! – Not sure? Contact Me for individual advice

Other Options ???

Well yes there are other options, infact in Matts presentation (see his blog linked above) you will see he advises that if you can first exhaust other options in preventing duplicate content, both within your own website and from other websites.

However, since we can’t help you with removing duplicates from your own site other than the above tagging system I suggest that you use the following steps.

1. Check if someone has copied your site, in part or full using CopyScape.
2. Contact Site Owners / Editors (use whois to find the owner if you can’t contact through the site itself).
3. Contact the websites host (again use whois for this).
4. Contact a the Search Engines (through webmaster portals), tell them what you have found and mention you are of course the real owner. The effect of doing this maybe limited but at least you are alerting them.
5. Actually this should be – 1,  re-write / re-script your content. This should be done on a regular basis anyhow.

In order to be an effective SEO technician for any website, you will need to know a lot of things. I’ve seen some self-proclaimed experts struggle when asked the simplest questions which they should really know, but in reality these so-called experts are really just looking to make a quick bit of money and do so at your expense!

Here is a quick check list of what you SEO should know.
Use this list to check your SEO is as Professional as they claim.

• HTML – An intgral part of being an SEO is knowledge of your sites scripting (This is why a lot of SEO’s start of life as developers / coders). Your SEO should also know how a search engine will view your code and therefor be able to structure the code correctly, removing “waste” code.
• CSS – Along with HTML comes CSS, the “seo expert” doesnt need to be a CSS expert by any means, but rather should have a knowledge which means they can remove all styling attributes from your code, making the most of a search engines time.
• Basic Design / Development Skills – ALL seo experts should be able to design and build a simple, small-scale website without any hassle. If they can’t or don’t even have a website themselves they aren’t usually worth a look at.
• How a Search Engine Works – Whilst this would appear to be simple, knowing how a search engine works (which changes every few weeks for all major search engines) is a MUST. It takes time and study to gain any real expertise with search engine algorithms, and most SEOs will show case this knowledge in the results of work, or in a blog such as this.
• Trust of Search Engines – SEO experts should have a grasp of basic filtering systems within search engines such as Google Sandbox (and others of which some are trade secrets).
• User Experience – The SEO expert should have a great knowledge about how a user will use a site and view a site. This can be from both a psychological and physical stand-point. The SEO should be able to give you an outline from just a quick glance about how a user views your site.
• On-Page Factors – Most of my initial seo articles contain information about internal SEO factors, this includes everything from page structure, heading tags, meta tags, images, various other attributes to getting the most from your links, and use of anchor text.
• Off-Page Factors – Your seo expert should also be willing to discuss off-site attributes to your SEO efforts, from submissions to directories and search engines to use of twitter for SEO, and other social networking sites.
• Search Rankings – Your SEO should have a great knowledge of how to improve your search rank (not just PageRank). Search Ranking is the effect of all SEO efforts, and PageRank is considered to be around 1% of ranking information for ALL major search engines, including google!.
• Basic Penalty Knowledge – Any SEO Expert should have a basic knowledge of how penalties will work from within any major search engine. However, don’t expect them to share too much information about this as some knowledge is gained through contacts within search engines! This does NOT mean they have any special realtionship with a search engine.
• Use of Stats – ALL SEOs should be using your statistics to improve your website and develop some great leads to your site. Your SEO should provide a monthly or bi-monthly report telling you how your site is progressing and what the new targets are (as all our monthly packages do) …if your SEO expert refuses to make any targets chuck them!
• Research – If your SEO ever claims to not to need to do any research into your market they are lieing! Even if they are themselves experts in your field they should be doing some real competitor research. Though again don’t expect to see any written proof of what they find, this is often classed as trade secrets.
• Copy Writing / Editing – ALL real SEO Experts will be able to write and edit your copy to target your audience and address them correctly. ALL copy can be edited to target your market better, its the little tweaks that make all the difference.
• ALL of the above & more …. this list is by no means exhaustive and anyone who claims to supply such a list would be wrong. The needs of an SEO change on an almost daily basis, your SEO Expert should be updating their knowledge on a regular basis.

If your unsure if your SEO has this knowledge ask them, if they don’t have even one part of it question why and if there isn’t a valid reason then dumb that SEO.

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As with many things in this life, SEO is easier if you can see how it works… So below is a very simplified flow chart and explantation as to what happens at each stage… with the result being a high search engine ranking! Start – This is the start of the whole website process, designing and creating your website. Remember simple things like building in how your page titles will work, if you want or need URL re-writing and also consider the style of coding you will use.

Content – As mentioned in previous posts content is king! If you aren’t a copy writing expert you may want to invest in the services of one. Or maybe you just need to have a consultation from a copy writer. So why the emphasis on copy writers? Well its simple, if you get a professional / expert copy writer what they write will be perfect for marketing, they are marketing writers. Usually a copy writer will be outside of your niche and so can remove your technical jargon, meaning your copy becomes accessible.

Also copy writing should be natural and should be themed on a per page basis, do not concentrate on certain keywords as this will distort your text and search engines will pick up on this. Don’t forget to use images to break up your text and if possible make your pages a little interactive, even if its just a search box.

Links - Building Links is often one of the hardest aspects of getting seen. You should consider trying to find links from; Local Websites, Industry Websites (usually your best bet) and Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo and ZoomInfo etc.). Also consider getting links from Friends, Your site designer, Your suppliers and other business affiliates.

Optimise for SEO – This is where you should consider your keywords and purposefully theming certain pages to attarct certain types of visitors. Also consider long-tail keywords as a method to attarct visitors.

Keyword Advice: Consider domain related keywords, topic related keywords (best results), both commercial and non-commercial keywords. Most of all do your research into your niche, see what is bringing others the best results and try them, after you try them for a month or two see if its actually helped you and if not remove it.

Getting Indexed – The first time you are indexed can take anywhere from 1 week to 3 months, maybe even longer (it depends on the above factors!). To speed up this process you may wish to submit your website to search engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN all have submission pages). Remember though, you are likely to be found first in Google and MSN Live than Yahoo. You will appear first in Google Local than Google.com (if you use google local business centre).

Repeat the process for each page

High Search Rank – In addition to the above factors you should remember search engine rankings (including Page Rank) are also based on factors such as domain age and backlink authority (are your back links from highly ranked sites). From a high search rank will come great amounts of traffic, more potential customers and if you get your call to action right you will gain a fantastic return on investment (ROI).

Should I out link? I’ve heard out linking is like leaking authority from my site… for FREE!!

This is one of my favourite question at the moment, and i’m asked it many many times a week. Think about it there is nothing more natural thank Linking Out. Look at the Internet, think about if there was never any links… there would be no Internet. “the Internet consists of inter-linked hypertext documents and other resources”[1]. Without linking out it appears as though you have chosen to isolate yourself from the world.

If you read some of my other blogs you will notice my lack of concentration on authority. So tackling the next part of the question is a little harder for me. However, in my opinion a link is a way of allowing your readers to get more information on a particular subject. Looking a little further into this question I believe that if you link out, people will link to you but if your site / articles have zero links then people probably won’t link to you. So you should LOL: Link Out Loud.

After my pages are “SEO’d” how long would it b before search engines re-index them?

Honestly there is no set time. It depends on your site and its attributes (internal and external). Generally it can take a few days but i’ve found for some sites it can be a few hours or it can be upto 6 weeks.

How effective can SEO be?

Again this isn’t such an easy question. If your SEO is performed on a regular basis by someone whom is truly knowledgeable and not just someone who has read about SEO then the results can be very very dramatic. Not just in terms of visitors to your site but also in revenue from your site, if done correctly. If your site is SEO’d by someone not so “expert” then you are likely to find it has no effect, and in some cases can damage your seo.

How many keywords/phrases should I target?

This is another question that is hard to answer, not least because every page is different. I’ve found in some cases zero keywords is the best option, but in some cases upto 10 are required. As a general rule however, I suggest anywhere between 2 and 6 will help. Keywords / phrases are special little things, what you must do over time is play with them and find which keywords for which page best suit, any good SEO will be able to find a few good words for each page without much effort, but perfecting them takes time and expertise.

[1] – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet