How to Write Great Content for SEO

Posted on by AK Anderson

The current wisdom is that we should be writing content for our website’s visitors, and not for search engines. That great content is great, no matter what we do for SEO.  I agree with that – for the most part.

The point that that particular wisdom is missing is that search best practices, by and large, are a checklist of how to write articles that are great for web users.

Search Engine Best Practices Are Meant for Web Users

Where best practices are concerned, they are talking about making content user-friendly, meeting user intent, answering a question completely, and having the design of the site be so intuitive it doesn’t cause friction in the user’s understanding.

The title of this page is wrapped in an “H1” HTML tag, which should be used to signify the title of a page.  The bold subheading above is wrapped in “H2” which says that’s a section break, subheading, and less important than the title.  Were you, the reader, at all confused by this use of H1s and H2s on this page?  Nopity nope. In fact, it made perfect sense to you.

I tend to type in short bursts of sentences and paragraph break more often than I would in fiction or academic prose.  That’s really common for web writing, because we are using a different visual medium, and internet users tend to skim.  In fact, they skim a lot. They will jump to bold words and bullet points!

How People Really Read the Web:

  • Skim titles, things in bold
  • Read the first few sentences of the first paragraph
  • (Or the TL;DR if there is one)
  • Jump to pulled out quotes, photo captions and bulleted lists
  • If they are really interested, they might go back and read the whole thing
  • … but probably not.

Writing your content to get the maximum depth of understanding based upon people’s web skimming tactics is a great way to ensure you’ve covered all of the topics you need to cover.  Oh, and before I forget to mention it, all of these things are also on that list of best practices that your SEO person gave you.

Don’t Be Intimidated By the Word Jumble Game, Please

Google has read everyone’s content, and they have graded all the papers. They know which content includes all of the details necessary to show a complete answer to a user query.  That’s their job.

If we want to compete, then, we need to also use all of the pieces of a complete answer to a question.   Tactically, an SEO whiz can tell what words, phrases and questions should be included in an article by gazing at Search Engine Result pages, the pages of top-ranking competitors, and by brainstorming all of the things we need to know about a topic.  They then hand a list of words to a writer.

This is like the writing exercise in school where you have to fit those words into a page. It’s a creative challenge, not a constraint.  Synonyms are our friends, and we don’t need every one of them jammed on a single page.

What the word jumble does is allows us to ensure – checklist style – that we’ve answered all of the facets of the questions that people have about a topic.

But What about Keywords?

You know how we call it “rolling down the window” in the car, but we’re talking about pushing a little button. Or the meaninglessness of the “save” icon to a kid who has never seen a 3 1/2″ floppy diskette?  What about the phone receiver icon that we press on our smart phones to pick up or “hang up” a call?  Those symbolic anachronisms are about as relevant to modern SEO as the word “keyword”.

Yes, we still research volume of queries to specific topics, and make prioritization and decisions based on that.  But we don’t use a single keyword or phrase to be the end-all-be-all for the questions that web users have about a topic.  Often, you’ll here “topic” or “semantically related” ideas being bandied about in the SEO world way more than keywords.

The problem is that everyone knows that word, and just like the save icon being a relevant symbol for an obsolete technology, the word lives on.

It’s a Tool – Like a Checklist – Not a Formula

An obsolete SEO joke:

An SEO walks into a bar, tavern, pub, drinking establishment …

A more current SEO joke:

Q: How many SEOs does it take to change a lightbulb. 

A: Well,  it depends. 

Search is holistic, fluid, and really specific to each site’s industry, goals and visitors. Much of SEO is about finesse and improvisation.  The problem comes in when people still mistake it as being formulaic.  “Put this keyword here, and here, then synonym 1 goes here.”   I find that people who want to reduce search to always-do and always-don’t sorts of rules end up being frustrated by the job.  It’s always about trade-offs.

So how do you write great content for SEO?

Well, it depends. What are your visitors asking questions about?

Social Media Tip: Play before Work

Posted on by AK Anderson

This bit of advice surfaced in a discussion at an in-house SEO event I attended last weekend, and I think it merits a note. We were talking about companies selecting people to run their Social Media campaigns and what criteria they should use.  My experience at the car dealership immediately sprang to mind. I selected people who already used each platform.

The best Social Media marketers and salesmen are the ones who are already playing in the medium.

Social Media is not really one easy part of the sales / marketing funnel. It’s better used for building brand-love, and for connecting with fans and customers. Someone who has been on Twitter for a few months for their own purposes knows this. Anyone who scrolls past fan page content on their Facebook newsfeed understands that intuitively.  Casual users understand the culture and the social rules.

I’m following a bunch of authors who get this right. Who let their personalities shine through, who chat with other people. Then, sometimes (and only sometimes), they toss information out there about their books.  This is appropriate. And expected.

I’m also following a bunch of authors who get this terribly wrong. They seem to have a lot of followers, and they seem to be retweeted often, but this is deceptive. They are followed by people who follow-back automatically. They are retweeted by people who use their accounts exclusively to push their own books or retweet others.  No one is reading this. No one is responding to it. No one cares.

If you want to schedule a whole bunch of repetitive tweets that will get lost in the noise and never generate a sale. By all means, build your platform that way.

If you want to actually have fans and people who care about you and your success, it’s time to change the game.

My advice: Don’t try to sell anything – yours or anyone else’s anything – for two months.

Log in every day. Send out notes and @-replies every day. But don’t try to sell anything.  Make friends. This will help you learn how the medium works. It will let you see examples of what not to do in your own feed, because they will irritate and distract you.  It will help you intuit how to improve your own interactions.  You’ll learn the culture.

After two months, you can start selling again, but I guarantee that if you try this experiment, you will change your tactics.

Related post: Why I’ve Unfollowed You On Twitter

Why I’ve Unfollowed You On Twitter

Posted on by AK Anderson

I enjoy Twitter. This is my umpteenth account, and I really like being able to finally be myself in the space. I’m writing this to “you”, an unspecified Twitter user who just figured out that I’ve unfollowed you for some reason.

I also enjoy teaching people. I want everyone to succeed, and grow and learn. To that end, I’ve created this post for you.  If you’re willing to reform and want me back as a follower, just comment, and I’ll come back. I promise.

What Did I Do?!

Twitter follower numbers turn me into an angsty 13 year old. I want to know what I did wrong. I’m going on the assumption that you might want to know that, too.

First, if you want to see the cardinal sins of Twitter that you’re committing, go run Twittcleaner, and then click the option “How do I look on Twitcleaner?” to have it look at your own feed. See what it has to say.

Even if you do nothing with the report, Twitcleaner catches all sorts of issues:

  • inactivity
  • tweeting the same link too often
  • never retweets
  • never at-replies
  • ONLY retweets
  • posts too many “follow all of my friends” posts with multiple @s
  • tweeting only links
  • repeating the same tweet too often
  • uses ad networks (paid tweets)
  • follow back fewer than 10% of their followers
  • “all talk, all the time”
  • self-obsessed

I use twit cleaner about once every 2 weeks or so (usually after a Follow-Friday binge) and check to see where I stand. I don’t unfollow everyone for breaking these rules, but I do take into account why each of them do so. (e.g. “He’s a celebrity, of course he doesn’t follow anyone back”, or “They are a magazine, of course they link the their own site a lot.” and “Her account is brand-new. Give her a chance to get started.”)

I’m going to caveat this, though. There are other things that drive me batty that are not caught by Twitcleaner’s impressive scans.

Here are additional reasons why I might unfollow someone:

  • Salesmen.  I taught a car dealership how to use Twitter without coming off like a car salesman. If they can do it, so can you. Stop selling and start interacting. I chase down the products and books of people I consider my Twitter friends. I don’t do that with people who only promote their wares.
  • Overly tweetative.  I myself might fall into this category when I’m in a particularly chatty mood. If people like my tweets regardless of that, they stick around.   I follow nearly a thousand people from all over the world.  Many of them are writers, and chatty. If your pre-scheduled push-tweets show up more often than the faces of the people I interact with, I get annoyed.  I might actually find value in your tweets, and keep you around for a while. But secretly, I’m seething. Eventually. I will unfollow just to save my teeth from further grinding.   There is no rule of thumb on how often is “too often”.  I personally feel that @replies – because they don’t get spewed out to everyone all of the time – are an exception, and that’s where I go tweet-happy.
  • The Gurus.  There are some very nice people in my Twitter feed that I like as human beings. I want to support their endeavors. But they are novices tweeting as experts. Writing Tips should come from editors, publishers, and writers with some books under their belt. Neil Gaiman can tell me how to edit. An unpublished novice who has no more experience than me? Um. No thanks. And if you do this all the time? I’m going to unfollow you.  Being inspiring, encouraging. These things will make me happy with you. Acting like a voice of authority when you have no authority? That makes you the bossy kid on the playground.
    • I want you to notice that I’m writing this from a subjective point of view. I’m stating, in this post why I, personally, unfollow people. What is true for me is often true for other people. I’ve run over 20 Twitter accounts, so I’m fairly aware of the way the tool works. But I’m not claiming to be an expert. I’m stating my opinion. You might consider using this as an example of how to give advice.
  • Hash-o-matics. Twitter hashtags have a variety of formal and informal uses. In my opinion, none of them are wrong, but some are misused.
    • One informal use is to smash a snarky comment or punchline into a hash and use it for comedy. I’m fine with this, honestly, as long as it’s not overused. I often think it’s funny. I use it occasionally (though I’m often not all that clever).
    • The formal purpose is discovery.  The reason Twitter created the function was for people who don’t know one another to connect. People will search on a hashtag, or click a tag to get an aggregation of all of the tweets including that tag. This is how chats work. The tag combines all of the tweets for everyone taking part in the chat.   This is also how people with similar interests discover one another. Popular tags like city names, team names, or activities like #amwriting are great for this.
    • Here’s the problem scenario:  I’m going to talk about the #book I #amwriting. It’s a #sci-fi #novel that is a #dystopia set in the #future.   Do you see how hard that was to read?  It’s even harder when your interface turns them all hyperlink blue.  When added to a tweet with a link, my brain screams SPAM!   When this is the only style of tweet you send? It’s a turnoff. Hashtags are for sprinkling on the 1-2 most important words in a tweet. They are the categories you want that one tweet to fall under in the massive index of tweets.
  • *YAWN* Twitcleaner can’t tell if you’re boring. I don’t unfollow people when they offend me. I’m a big girl, I can take it.  I’d rather be offended by you than bored by you, honestly.  If you are a one-topic, one-trick pony, SNORE. If you use twitter as your personal whine-stream and only that, I will unfollow. (I’m okay with bad days and complaints, we all have them. Just not exclusively bad days and complaints.)
  • Unresponsiveness.  I don’t mind the automatic DMs welcoming me. I don’t love them, but they don’t annoy me like they seem to do a lot of people. I do write back to you when you DM me, though.  And I judge you if you don’t reply. Harrumph. This is not an automatic unfollow, but it is noted in case you continue to rack up negative marks.  I will also attempt to engage you via @-reply. If both of these attempts fail to prove that you are a human being using a social media account, I’ll be seeing you later.
  • ALL CAPS. I get shouty when I get excited, and we often use CAPS for titles due to lack of italics. But if your whole feed has the caps lock on… no thanks.

Look, I originally followed you for some reason. I liked you enough to click “follow” to begin with, but after seeing you in my feed for a few weeks, it’s time for me to go.

If you have honest questions, if you’re interested in learning more, please comment or contact me.  I am happy to help people who want to learn.   Internet marketing is my day-job, after all.

PS: this post from Rascality about “Good reasons to follow and not follow” folks on Twitter is very useful about making that tricky decision from the get-go.

Back to basics: Baseline Metrics

Posted on by AK Anderson
baseline measurements
Google Webmaster Tools

I’ve spent a lot of time at work the past few weeks cleaning up my baseline reports.

I’ve been there for three months, and the results of the work I did in November are starting to appear in the inbound search trends. This is gratifying, but I also know that what I measure, track and report against now will be what will make or break me going forward.

I cleaned up a lot of those reports to ensure that everything was in place to help me succeed in the project in the next quarter, by the end of the year.

One of the ways that I track my project is simply search engine result rankings for a list of 500 popular and relevant keyword phrases. Once a month, we pull this information from Hitwise, and I’ve got a snapshot of my progress. It’s a little simplistic, but it is good for tracking and trending over time.

Unfortunately about 20% of the words on my original report were things we’d never achieve rankings for, so I had to revise the list. I am pretty confident that the new list supports business goals better, and will more accurately reflect my work. But it got me thinking about baseline metrics, and how incredibly important they are for SEO consultants to prove worth and return on investment.

So much of SEO still comes across as smoke and mirrors. So much of it is guesswork. I freely admit to using my intuition almost as much as my analytical skills in my day to day work. If I’m playing hunches, then how can my boss or his boss or some EVP decide whether I’m any good at this, or just a lucky little gambler? The numbers. The results.

And now at the beginning, when I’m still building my reports, I’ve got the one-time shot to decide how to present this case. This is massively important for my success within the company and my success in my long-term career.

SEO and Gambling on Content

Posted on by AK Anderson

Last night, I had a wacky dream where there were three web content strategists competing on some sort of game show.  They had to pick titles of content and see who could get the most valuable content portfolio, but all they could see were Jeopardy-like 2-word titles.

They were gambling and guessing their way through content strategy. And the winner took home the pot because of one factor alone: luck.

I woke up scribbling a post-it note to myself to write about gambling on content. Because unless you’re doing keyword research, looking at insights and trends, and watching your own analytics to see what your visitors are looking for, that’s exactly what you’re doing. Taking a shot in the dark, and hoping something sticks.

Me, I am not so much of a gambler. In fact, I don’t even play the lottery because I prefer to have a dollar in my pocket than dream about lightning striking someday.

Web content costs money. Whether it’s in resource time to write and edit it, or freelancer hours to translate it, or the time and money to negotiate using someone else’s content. Why would you fritter that away on the hopes that luck will win out and you’ll have what people are searching for?