Let’s be clear, there is no ‘secret’ to writing copy that drives great website engagement plus high levels of traffic with Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

There are literally millions of websites and SEO Guru’s that suggest they have the ‘secret recipe’ and that by engaging these so called Guru’s your site or a page in your site will hit pay dirt by being at the top of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) .

Google has over 200 ‘Signals’ which they use to rank content. The only way to write content that will work for your site is by writing content first and foremost for your audience and write about things that are helpful, easy to understand and most importantly helpful!

That is some of the best SEO content writing advice you can get for you and your business or employer.

Oh, and writing in Plain English aimed at high school level will help too!

Honestly!

Whilst we now know and remember, we should write for our audience first, we can also use some concepts and tools to also help us potentially improve our content further.

But, importantly this is not to degrade the article by ‘stuffing’ in Keywords or Terms.

This example of web content was written by using several free online SEO and Google tools as well as a new marketing cloud service called Inbound Writer.

Let’s get into a fight!

The first thing we checked before we started this article was “who we are picking a fight with“. That sounds pretty terrible doesn’t it.

Believe me it actually is not a bad idea.

Recently I read Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson which in the chapter titled Pick a fight advises you should choose a competitor that you want to target as you believe your have a better product or service etc.

If you think a competitor sucks say so… Taking a stand always stands out

But I added a wee twist to this.

I have been targeting some top ranked Australian Marketing sites since I started Integrati Marketing.

I don’t necessarily think that everything they do is bad but I think there integrated marketing strategies and their website executions suck.

And with Jason and Davids advice on board plus my twist, I targeted three Australian Marketing sites that all suggest they have great content writing, creative writing, organic SEO skill, that will help your business get ranked and outperform the competition blah blah!

Do these top Australian Marketing sites really help you?

But they really don’t provide any practical marketing help or insight on the doing!

And marketing is all about the doing otherwise it is all hot air… or paid for consultancy hot air!

Marketing help – We’re here to help you!

So as we promise to hep you here is some expansion on a service we reviewed a few months back here on our blog known as WooRank and combining this with Inbound Writer to help you with your content.

With a couple of clicks and a WooRank of the competition site by “Site Reviewing” the competition we had 3 target websites to benchmark our SEO content for this articles optimised content.

Let’s show you guys how you can use these tools to help your site and content work harder for you!

Now we have a target list of websites and their competition which we can then compare the content writing on their sites to the article we are writing.

Inbound Writer let’s us add 3 websites to the new document we are dynamically creating in Inbound Writer which helps us as SEO Copywriters.

Next we add in Focus Terms of what we will be writing about in our article.

I have used very generic terms as this article is for learning outcomes not to boost our SEO… we’re actually more interested in sharing this new marketing cloud service with you!

Then we add in the 3 target websites just so…

So that is our methodology to start with, but the first rule always still applies write for your audience.

Next, Inbound Writer heads off to the web and starts analysing over 35 different sites and also your target sites for either target content or who you have defined as competition for the article your writing.

When Inbound Writer has finished, you will be presented with what looks and is an online editing tool that you can start to write your articles content into.

The team at Inbound Writer allow you to write up to 8 articles a month which we also think is pretty cool. Then you can go to work on your article and start writing.

As we have done with our ‘live article’ here, which is a creative writing process in itself, for this blog post about content writing with Inbound Writer.

Write and learn

Now you can write a document prior starting the Inbound Writer process or you can write one in the editor as you go which I have done here to show you some tips and I guess “How to’s”.

When we first started the article Inbound Writer presented us with this information about our document as we had no content.

But it does have all the information we have aggregated from our Focus Terms and the Sites we added in.

So with this information I can now target Keywords and Focus Terms.

Here comes the dynamic Content Writing assistance

The “Document Tips” and “Relevant Terms” is the information which has been assessed by Inbound Writer and presented to us in the editor.

So as we write we can now start to weave into the copy to improve our SEO content with helpful keywords and for our organic SEO in our web content strategy.

As we build up the content Inbound Writer let’s us know how we are going and gives us Document Tips and also an overall Document Score.

So, after we had been writing for a while we started to get document advice and assistance from Inbound Writer which is really helpful.

This helps us check we are on track, you can also highlight your Focus Terms and Keywords in the document and see the changes real-time.

Even better as the content builds out you get even more helpful advice from Inbound Writer to improve the new document with Document Tips.

More than one SEO Content Strategy?

Also we can choose different strategies which we can employ with the Inbound Writer content writer.

The SEO Content, Keyword and optimised content can be targeted with different weightings by selecting a distinct strategy such as; Balanced Strategy, Maximizing Search Strategy and Minimize Search Competition.

There are 2 more strategies of Maximise Social Strategy and Custom Strategy but the team at Inbound Writer are still working on these.

As you write you can keep highlighting the Relevant Terms and Focus Terms which your have decided your document should be targeting.

But this does not change the rules of writing to the audience and making sure your writing in Plain English!

Does this help you?

Hopefully you will find this article of interest and maybe you will even give Inbound Writer a go and try our strategy or even better your own.

By the way we have no association with Inbound Writer or Referral Tracking on our site to them, we just thought that you might like to try it for yourself.

If you do need any help with your site and would likes my assistance with SEO or rather Search Engine Optimization without the marketing puffery we are happy to help.

We love to talk marketing, but we love making it real even more!

/Slashtag the web and make your searches meaningful with a “/“

There is a new Search Engine in town and we have been playing with it for a while. It is liberating and so open about their data and tools for looking at how your site is ranked it will blow you away! In fact you can have a look at how we are ranked here: integrati marketing /rank this is way too cool for school and blows away the protective barriers other search engines use like Google Webmaster and Bing Webmaster Central fro instance.

The great thing about the web is all the data right?!

Well since I started using the web in 1995 (yeah that was a while ago now and yes I was on a browser called mosaic!) the web has exploded content wise with billions of pages.

So how do you make all that content relevant again?

You filter, slice and dice it with Blekko and their Slashtags!

Blekko is Social Search

Even better the way you can use Blekko is very similar to using Social Media and you can share slashtags and your slashtag searches with other like-minded searching peoples on the web!

Awesome.

OK… so I don’t write a novel about how it all works and because video is way cooler and quicker let’s have the crew at Blekko explain how it all work on their video here for you.

blekko: how to slash the web from blekko on Vimeo.

Thank you Blekko!

The new Google search index now with Google Caffeine

There has been much discussion and consternation amongst the ‘Weberati’ about the new search index from Google called Caffeine.

Concerns have been raised about the impact on static content and SEO optimising strategies. With the release of the new search index which is over 100 million gigabytes of storage and grows at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. It is absolutely massive. And yet the improvements mean that it is actually faster. Quite a feat indeed.

Google have built the new Caffeine index to accommodate the ever growing types of content on the world wide web such as video, tweets, blog content, imagery, and of course we all want to find it now!

The old Google index was actually far slower moving, a ‘busy’ amount of content was analyzed at the top of the pile but the remaining pile of pages was up-dated much slower almost like the Pareto Principle with 80-20 rule. Now though, the world wide web content is indexed in small digestible chunks and well so fast now that pretty much as soon as the content is published it is potentially being indexed. This is certainly true of Twitter and ‘tweets’ which get precedence as real time results – particularly for clusters with breaking news and breakout terms that the web is interested in at a particular moment in time.

Anyhoo, our discussion is never as good as a picture so with compliments to Google for the image here is their representation of the old index and the new.

We think that Google have no choice but to start to include more dynamic content in their index, the web is ever evolving and Internet time waits for no human! Overall we think that the new index will be of benefit to all web users and increasing the importance on freshness of content will enable a bit of a shake up of the ‘old status quo’ which can not be a bad thing.

Carrie Grimes a software engineer from Google updated Integrati Marketing with this information from Google Webmaster.

As Carrie states, “We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.”

Clearly this is just the beginning of the improvements to come, we think this will all be for the better for users of the web and Small Medium Business as if your content is fresh, relevant and informative you can take on the big brands on an what look like an evening of the Internet search engine field… well at at least with Google!

After all your hard work building your site have you taken your slice of Search Engine traffic the site deserves?

The web cliché “Build it and they will come” is now no longer true, there are trillions of pages of content on the Internet today. Being found now, and staying ‘found’ is key and will be key to any of your online marketing activities.

If you are starting out in business and have a presence ‘On and Offline’ with a physical store or an e-commerce website then being found is very much like being found on a map with your street address. The only thing is that the online address does not conform to the rules of the real world.

When you build your site you’re looking to ‘woo’ traffic from 3 key sources, they are, Direct Traffic, Referring Sites and Search Engines Traffic. Direct Traffic is exactly what it says on the tin, a visitor has typed in your website name (URL) and gone straight to a page on your site. Whereas a Referring Site(s) is a site which has your link and a user has clicked on the link on their site to get to yours. While lastly there is Search Engine Traffic, which in this example is un-paid and is commonly known as Natural Search. In other words a user typed a search request with a keyword(s) and a list of results came up of which you were one (This is the term “Impressions” how many times you’re listed on a viewed search results page). And the ‘user’ looking at Search Engine Results Page (SERP) then clicked on your website link and ‘Clicked Through’ to your site.

So, whilst you can promote your own Direct Traffic to your site through off and online marketing and networking Referring Sites can be a little harder to build as you need to link with relevant sites that have great reputations. But the most important in regards to relevant traffic with volume is the last one Search Engines Traffic. So how do you optimise your site for Search engine traffic… well it is yet another acronym, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. There is a lot we can do when we talk about SEO but I want you to think of  these rules and play by them:

1.    Good content first – think about the reader
2.    Use strong meaningful keywords that assist your copy and are relevant
3.    Be ethical, do not fall into the trap of buying a service that ‘says’ can make you number one in Google, they can not
4.    Think Incremental, small changes overtime which help you improve your rankings

Ok all good stuff, these SEO rules are simple but highly effective. There is plenty more but we can talk about that another time. Integrati Marketing work by these rules for ourselves and our customers. We never engage in any Black Hat SEO practices at all.

So, where to start, well this is where our friends at WooRank.com come in. The team at WooRank have spent considerable time and effort building an online benchmarking tool that will help you measure your sites SEO relative to the other sites which have been benchmarked on WooRank.com. Now we just want to be clear here, the ranking number is helpful but it is not a number to live or die by. It is an indication of how well your site is presenting to Search Engines and for visitors with their web browsers or your sites usability. Such as; page load times which Google I believe in the next year may start to include in the index tool set for web site ranking. That said we also believe WooRank to be the most accurate on the web today for FREE.

So how does it work?

Simple you head over to WooRank.com and add in your sites URL or canonical name which for us is integrati.com.au and then hit “Generate Report”.  Then the magic starts, your site will be Woo Ranked and you will be able to work through the results and even get an email of the results in pdf. sent to your inbox.

The great thing about WooRank is you can then work through your site over time and ‘tweak’ areas to see how these changes may improve your SEO results. The thing is you do not have to take all the advice from the WooRank report but it has just given you a FREE benchmark of your site relative to all the other sites ranked in WooRank. This simple act of benchmarking now means you can work to either maintain or improve your ‘Woo’. And by improving your Woo you will in effect by increasing (hopefully) the ‘find-ability’ of your website by search engines and improving your sites user experience for your visitors.

Even better the SEO Guru’s at WooRank.com have put together a guide for each result and links so you can learn more about changes you may want to make to your site.

They also have a great page on 7 key areas of SEO with online marketing which I have reproduced here, so thank you to Boris and the team at WooRank for this!

From WooRank:

Now web professionals have an objective yardstick to know what Google looks for when crawling their websites: WooRank.

Online marketing The Web doesn’t guarantee visibility. You have to go after it and claim your position by optimising coding and offering solid content. WooRank can help you do that. The seven steps below reflect the main methods to achieve great search positions by understanding how search engines really work.

1. Phrases and Keyword

People search the Web using particular words and phrases they hope will lead them to the sites they want. To be sure they find your site, select words and phrases that are simultaneously popular enough to use, but unique enough to your business to help your target customer find you. A popular phrase that brings up millions of pages will be useless, as will a phrase that might find only your business, but that no one knows or would ever think of when searching.

2. Tempting the Googlebot

All search engines use armies of small programs called “bots” that search the Web, read pages, analyse contents and place their findings in various indexes that supply results to searchers. Your job is to provide the bots with a site-map and to use files, such as robots.txt, to limit where they search your site. Picking the right hosting service for a new site is also important, as is also understanding the crucial role that bandwidth plays in site performance. Run WooRank to get more insights.

3. Getting Your Pages Right

Writing the appropriate keywords and phrases for your site is decisive. Remember Google parses websites differently and presents them with less priority if their pages are very similar to many others. A professional copywriter may be useful to ensure you’re making the best use of every element detailed by WooRank. The challenge is that your pages must be accessible to search engine bots while remaining user-friendly and readable.

4. Linking So that It Counts

Google does not publish its exact algorithm for ranking websites, but it does pay attention to the sites that link to and refer to your site. The route to a good Google ranking is to get a high quantity and quality of links to your pages from important, relevant and reliable sources. Be careful not to run afoul of Google’s spam filters. Don’t use hidden text, pay for inbound links or participate in backlink networks. Make sure you have not inadvertently created suspicious-looking pages or traffic. WooRank will check it for you.

5. Google’s Paid Ads

Keep in mind that a lot of the cost of Web advertising is wasted. If you decide to pursue it, be sure the material is written correctly. To put paid ads in perspective, see them as a useful adjunct to a solid campaign for good organic search-result rankings. Be careful which words you purchase and how much you pay. Don’t get stuck in a situation where you pay for hundreds of thousands of meaningless clicks. Be cautious when you build the landing page, the one that searchers will see first when they click on your ad. Make sure it helps your customers easily access whatever you offered them in the ad.

6. The Rising Power of Maps

Increasingly, search engines emphasize maps and geography-based searches. To boost your website visibility think about such relevant features as declared language and geographic optimization. As many of the WooRank tips suggest use coding standards so that customers from around the globe can find you, read your text in their own languages and learn where your stores are. Don’t forget to target local customers since people are drawn more strongly to Web ads from nearby businesses than to those from distant businesses or those of indeterminate location.

7. Using Google Analytics

Track and analyse the traffic your site generates. Google provides excellent tools to understand how your customers work with your site. You can activate Google Analytics by adding a bit of code to each page you want tracked. Google also supplies Webmaster Tools that help you monitor your search rankings. Like WooRank these tool sets are evolving and continue to be enhanced. When you really know how people use your site, you can fine-tune your organic and paid advertising, as well as revising your site to become more attractive and effective in converting Web searchers into customers.
So, now you are armed with two really great tools you have one of the best SEO tools available online at WooRank.com for FREE and you have this post and the team at WooRank.com  added guide to understanding what is important with the science and art of SEO. In that great copy is art, great keywords and SEO optimisation is the science.

Just so you know, yes we use WooRank, of course, but we had to share this with you!

We love to share and we love WooRank, we know you will to so go on get out there grab your ranking from WooRank and start Wooing the best Search Engines to get your business building the right way online for 2010!

Thank you to the team at WooRank.com and in particular to Boris!

Check out WooRank.com and get your Woo on!

And just for fun, I got ‘Rick-Rolled‘ by WooRank you can too, just test Woorank.com on their site – good one Boris!

*Update* We have received today the new feature to display your Woo on your site with this widget from WooRank, you can get yours here:

Our Woorank today is:

Until next time, happy marketing from the Integrati Marketing team.