Boy, that is a mouth full.

As an affiliate marketer, one of the things that you need to be able to do is write good pre-sales copy with great SEO properties.  This is hard to do sometimes, but it can make or break your affiliate campaigns when you are counting on search engine traffic.  It's so important (and so misunderstood -- especially by beginners), I felt like we should talk about it here.

I was discussing this with my friend Karon Thackston, and she could not agree more.  Now make no mistake, Karon is a famous SEO copywriter.    If you know anything about Karon, you understand that she's been writing high-ranking and converting copy for clients including Gorton's Seafood and the American Boating Association for over 25 years.    I talked Karon into offering a free hour-long teleclass on SEO copywriting exclusively for you (people on my list).

Free SEO Copywriting Teleseminar

Teleclass: The Simple SEO Copywriting Framework
Signup Link: Just click here! Format:  Audio (via teleconference bridge)
Date:   August 26, 2010
Time: 2:00pm Eastern Time   Length:  Approx. 1 hour

What you'll learn:  In this one-hour teleclass, Karon Thackston presents a simple framework for writing SEO copy including:

• Which keyphrases to use
• How to use them without ruining the flow of your copy
• Precisely where to place keyphrases for maximum impact with Google and other engines
• Which popular advice is a useless, outdated myth you should avoid
• How to organize/outline each page for SEO copy so you don't miss a thing
• And more!

In the mean time, I wanted to share with you the following tips from Karon.  You'll get a lot more stuff like this on the call.

Thanks,
Mark

7 Don'ts for SEO Copywriting

By Karon Thackston © 2010, All Rights Reserved

There is no shortage of don'ts when it comes to SEO copywriting.  It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade.  Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy.

1. Don't shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible.  It's not about the sheer volume of search terms you include.  Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about.  Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher's query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio.  When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience.

2.  Don't lose site of balance.  If SEO copywriting isn't about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about?  Balance.  You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors.  But surprisingly, the balance doesn't come with serving both masters well.  The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines.  You see, your site visitors always come first.  However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won't see good rankings.  If you put too much focus on the engines, you'll start to lose your target audience.  Balance… always balance.

3.  Don't let someone else choose the keywords.  If keyword research isn't a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research.  Don't just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way.  Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically.  Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy.

4.  Don't sacrifice flow for numbers.  This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting.  SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don't work in a normal sentence. An example?  "Candies samples free."  Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers.  The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, "If you're looking for candies samples free, you've come to the right place!"  Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well.

5.  Don't use keyphrases that don't apply to the page.  If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don't try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic.  (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won't be applicable.  (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It's a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience.

6.  Don't use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page.  I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms.  However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you've got a bunch of typos in the content. It's just not professional.  Some writers will go for the old, "We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town."  I don't care for that approach. It's just not natural.  Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way?  I think not.

7.  Don't use keyphrases the exact same way every time.  This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it.  (See #4.)  There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one.  In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use.  One way is to break up phrases using punctuation.  Since search engines don't pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: "Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate.  Hawaii listings can be…"  See?  "Real estate" is at the end of the first sentence and "Hawaii" is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there's no problem.

And Here Are Three More Bonus Mistakes To Avoid

8. Don't use all types of search phrases for every situation.  There are many ways in which this "don't" applies.  One quick example is that of an ecommerce site.  It wouldn't be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site.  They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages.  Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page.  If you don't understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you're likely to have lackluster results.

9. Don't neglect ALT tags/image attributes.  These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link.  The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link.  Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6.

10. Don't forget the chain of protocol.  There's a method to the SEO copywriting madness.  The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible.  Just the opposite, in fact.  Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page.  The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes.  Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.

Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn't likely to do a lot of good.  Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.

When you avoid making common mistakes, you'll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too.

Did you get a lot out of this article? Then you'll want to join Karon as my guest during a FREE SEO copywriting teleclass August 26, 2010 at 2:00pm Eastern time. This call - exclusively for MasonWorld readers - will give you a simple framework for writing great SEO copy.  Register today at http://www.copywritingcourse.com/mason-registration.html.

I am secretly testing two new semi-automated backlinking tools, so I have had “links on the brain” this week.  (Don’t worry – I will be revealing at least one of them to you in the next few days.)

I know I sound like a broken record, but this deserves to be repeated.  If you want visitors to your site, you need to make sure that Google knows what your site is about, and you need to have backlinks.  Period.

It’s really that simple.  Aside from making sure that your page is targeted at a keyword, link building is the most important step in search engine optimization. I am amazed at how many people will build a website, and then fail to take the time to promote it.

See, when you build backlinks to your site, the site becomes stronger, and the search engines (especially Google) will find it more easily.

What Is Linking?

I remember being frustrated by all this “internet marketing speak” when I first started out, so let me cover one thing really quickly for all you new people out there (sorry, but this is important).

What is “Linking?”  Linking and gaining backlinks is an important part of search engine optimization.   Linking is simply adding a hypertext link that leads from one site to another website. When we link out to other sites, we’re showing people that these sites should be seen, or that we may recommend them.

If you are gaining links back to your site from another website, this is called backlinking.

Deep linking (a feature of both of the tools that I am currently testing) is linking to a page that is deeper in your website. A link to your home page would not be considered a deep link. A page such as an individual blog post, or a page not on the surface of your site is considered a deep link.

In SEO, backlinks are vitally important in helping you gain better visibility for your website. When you work to acquire links for your website, this is called link building. Make no mistake about it, link building is extremely important, and people are paid good money to do this professionally!

But How To Get Those Links?

The question is how do you build backlinks? Where do you get back links from? There are a lot of different places where you can gain back links (I’ve talked about several of them before).

• You can ask other similar websites if they’d like to exchange links.
• You can write articles and submit them to directories, adding in your links.
• You can submit your website to directories.
• You can create special pages like Squidoo pages or Hub pages and add back links to your site
• You can join “on-line carnivals” where similar topics come together and link to each other
• You can add your link as your signature on forums and message boards
• You can do a press release to gain back links
• You can comment on other websites and blogs to get back links.
• And on and on and on…

When it comes to building your backlinks there are a few things to remember. First you want to build as many quality incoming links as possible. Do not waste your time on junk sites, or sites that are considered “bad neighborhoods”. An example of a bad site is a link farm, or a gambling or porn website.

Another thing that seems to help when it comes to link building is to gain as many links that are relevant to your site. That means trying to stay on the same topic. I don’t actually have hard data to support this, but I know that many “experts” believe this is true.  If your site is about dogs, links coming from baseball sites aren’t relevant. The more incoming relevant, quality links you have (so say the experts), the better your website will do in the search engines.

If you have the ability to request how a site links to you, suggest that they link’s anchor text coming into you matches your primary keyword (or a slight variation) that describes your website. Another thing you might want to suggest is that they link using a deep link. Remember, a deep link is a link deeper than your home page. This is seen as desirable.

Also note that while link exchanges will help build your links, one way links are even better! If you can get incoming links to your site, while not having to link back to the site linking into you, these are seen as stronger links.

Diversity Is Key

One thing that I have found is that getting links from lots of different sources seems to help.  I think this is especially true if you are using automated systems.  Mixing up where your links come from helps to avoid footprints that might be detected by search engines.

That’s why I am testing two new tools (link diversity).  If they work as well as I think they will, I’ll be reporting on at least one of them here next week (maybe sooner!)

Talk to you then!

Just a quick note today to call your attention to some discussion going on in the link building space.

Everyone wants to talk about how to beat the Google ranking algorithm.  And if you are a professional search engine optimizer (SEO), that is a lot of fun to talk about.    In fact, the guys over at SEOmoz recently wrote a great post about their study on Google ranking algorithm. The problem is, you need a Ph.D. in math and statistics to understand the post (well, almost).

See, most of us are just trying to get traffic from Google.  I was talking to Jon Leger about the SEOMoz post last night, and he made me laugh.  During the discussion, he pointed out a few key things missing from the SEOMoz results (and he wrote a post).

Bottom line for me after all that discussion: there are really only two things that you need to know:

Thing 1:  Make sure your keyword is in the title tag of your page. Yes, you should use your keyword phrase elsewhere.  No, keyword meta tags tags don't matter to Google.  Sure, it can help to have the keyword in the page filename.  No, header tags are not very important.  And yes, there are a thousand other details that don't really matter.  You can write a book about on-page SEO -- but it is not very important.  The thing that really seems to matter regarding on-page SEO is the title tag.

Thing 2:  Get more and better links back to your page than your competition. As Josh Spaulding points out, you should avoid the common link building mistake of getting links from just a few places.  You want links from lots of sources.  (For a great free list of ideas on how to get those links, check out this post from Lynn Terry on Effective Link Building Strategy.)  Yes, it helps if the links have related anchor text.  Yes the authority of the domain that the link is coming from matters.  Yes, the authority of your top level domain matters.  And yes, there are a thousand other details that don't really matter.  The thing that really seems to matter is that you have links back to your page (and your domain).

Really that's it.  Want a little known secret boost?  Match your domain name to your keyword as recommended by Jon Leger (make sure it is a .net, .org, or .com).   That is not always possible (depending on your project), but it sure helps when you can do it.

Look -- I know you want things to be more complicated. You want to know guru tricks and ninja SEO secrets.  I get that.  All of those tricks are about details that don't really matter to most of us.  Here is the trick that most of us need to use:

Write great content, put your keyword in your title tag, and get backlinks to that content.

Want more details on how to get links? Check out the Ultimate Link Building Report from Josh Spaulding.  Links are the key to your Google rankings, and Josh shares all of his tricks in this inexpensive report.

I'd love to hear you thoughts on all of this.

Regards,
Mark

Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie #13

The Importance Of Backlinks and NoFollow

It's Wednesday, and you know what that means. It's time for another weekly Internet Business Fortune Cookie.

This week's Internet Business Fortune Cookie caused me to write about a SEO question that I get a lot. When I cracked open the cookie this week, I knew right away what it meant.

Hear the cookie speak:

"Your Friends Speak Kindly Of You"

Obviously, the cookie was refering to the importance of off-page SEO and backlinks.

I have talked about SEO before.  In this article, I'll talk mostly about Google, and I'll comment on what people believe to be true.  No one actually knows exactly what Google is doing in their search algorithms except Google.  If you have a contrary opinion, I would love to hear from you in the comments.

Getting On Google's First Page

When you do a search in Google for a keyword phrase, results are returned to you in order. Google tries to put the "best" results on the first page so that you get the most useful result from their engine. The better the results are, the more people use Google. So it is very important to Google to give users great search results.

To decide which pages to put on the first page of the results, Google considers at least two things what text is on the page and how "important" the page is for your phrase. The first thing is usually called "on-page SEO", and the second thing is usually called "off-page SEO." This last part (off-page SEO or "authority") is determined in part by how many incoming links (links from other pages) a particular page has and what the quality of those links are.

Back Links Make The Difference

Let's say there are 2 pages in the internet that are very similar about "sheep dog training" and you search for "sheep dog training". Which page will you see? All things being equal (similar on-page SEO), you will see the "sheep dog training" page that has more quality pages linking to it ranked above the one with fewer incoming links.

Google figures that if someone took the time to link to a page, it must have good stuff in it. If lots of people linked to that page, it must be really good (better than a page that no one is linking to).

See, the quality of the incoming links is determined (in part) by the authority of the page linking to it. So, if the dog training page has incoming links from CNN and Yahoo News, those links will carry more weight than a link from Bob's brand new blog.

Share The SEO Love

This means that once a page has some "authority" (like the CNN home page in the example above), it can pass that authority to other pages. It is thought that the authority you pass from a page is "split" between the pages that you pass to. So, if you have a page that links out to 5 other pages, you sort of send 1/5 of the authority of that page to each of the pages that you link to.

But, what if you don't want to do that?  What if you only want to send authority to 2 of the pages (maybe they are pages that you own) and send no authority to the other three?

You can do that by putting the rel = "nofollow" attribute in the link text.

This nofollow attribute "theoretically" makes the link pass no (or less) authority.  I say theoretically, because there are lots of good examples and studies that prove the nofollow links actually do impact your rankings in some cases.

So, I hope that helps clear things up on backlinks.  I'd love to hear your questions in the comments below.

As the cookie says, Your Friends Speak Kindly Of You.

Have a great day.
Mark

P.S.  For more on backlinks and SEO, be sure to check out The Ultimate Link Building Report.

Photo credit: Uploaded on July 17, 2006 by headcase

One thing I know for sure about Google search engine rankings is that it is just about impossible to know anything for sure about Google search engine rankings.   Sometimes, it's good to know what you don't know.

How Google decides what websites appear on the front page for any particular search term is like the formula for Coke or the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken -- it's a secret.  We know Coke has caramel in it, but the exact recipe is classified.  The difference between Coke and Google is that the formula for Coke never changes (they tried that once -- what a disaster).  In fact, the formula for Google SERPs is changing periodically as Google works to improve the experience for end users.

Of course, what you hear all the time on blogs just like this one are "stories" about what people did on their web site for their keywords that resulted in page one rankings.  I call this anecdotal evidence. It's usually very interesting, but it is almost never conclusive.  Just because someone got a page one ranking by including their keywords in the footer of their pages in flashing pink with a blue background, does not mean that you will get the same result.

So, let me tell you an anecdote about Google page rank.

Backlinks Do Seem To Be Important

However, some themes keep coming out.  For example, we are pretty sure that Google pays attention to backlinks when determining ranking.  We believe this for at least four reasons:

• The Google search engine was originally called "BackRub" (a reference to the use of backlinks in their algorithm).
• Google Page Rank patents discuss backlinks
• Matt Cutts talks about certain backlinks being important in various blog posts and forums
• We see anecdotal evidence of the importance of backlinks

So it's that last point that I want to talk about today.  I have some anecdotal evidence I want to share.

My PR2 Website

Last January I created a site for my wife called PalsLoft.com.  My wife was going to blog about our new baby and review various baby products.  I got the site up with some bad graphics and posted two sample affilaite landing pages complete with eBay affiliate links and some text.  The home page (where the weekly blog posts were going to live) was basically empty.

Note -- I plan to work on this site some soon, so by the time you read this, it may have changed.  Here is a screen shot of what the site looked line for about nine months between February and October 2008.

To get the site going, I submitted the URL to a directory link submission service.  This particular service submitted links to "brand new directories" as they were announced in Digital Point Forums.   So the backlinks that were created from this service were pretty crummy.  They came from link directories (bad) that had no authority (worse) and were brand spankin' new (terrible).  Basically, they were junk links.

After about a month of that, I forgot about the site.  I ended up with about 70 backlinks.  I literally never touched the site after January of 2008.   Earlier this month, I checked the site and found that the empty home page was PR2 (toolbar PR), and both of the two pages linked from the home page are PR1.  Go figure.  Here is a site that has little real content and Google is ranking it as PR2.  So much for content is King.

So What?  Who Cares About A Toolbar PR2 Ranking

So, what is that worth?  Who cares about a toolbar PR2 site with no content?  Well, as I stated before, it is only anecdotal evidence.  But, it suggests that tools like Firepow, 1WayLinks and 3WayLinks that provide quality links might be worth the investment -- at least in terms of getting page rank.  The problem is, page rank does not convert directly to sales.  Traffic converts to sales.  Is this page rank converting?

Well, I am embarrassed to say that I never finished adding Google Analytics to the site, or properly set up the Commission Junction ID to track clicks and sales.  But, the AWStats seem to suggest that there is some traffic there, and that it has been growing over time.

The Bottom Line on Backlinks

The bottom line -- Build Backlinks.  But you knew that already.  If you are working on sites, your promotion strategy needs to include a backlink plan.   Based on this traffic data, I conclude that tools like Firepow, 1WayLinks and 3WayLinks that provide backlinks links might be worth the investment -- but you need to evaluate this for yourself on your own site.  As I mentioned before, the above evidence is anecdotal, and your mileage may vary.

I always see the same question over and over in the forums. I just answered this question today on Warrior, and thought I should add it here for completeness.

Question: I am new to internet marketing, and I want to know how to get my new web page to rank in Google.

Answer: This is a big question. Here is the "simple" way to think about it.

There are 2 things to consider -- on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page factors are factors like the title of the page, the headings, the keyword density, related content, etc.

Off-page SEO really means how many pages of authority are linking back to you. Think of these as votes of for your site.

So, here is what you might do (simple rules):

1. Make sure your keywords are in your page title tag
2. Make sure your keywords are in your heading (H1) tags
3. Make sure your keywords appear on the page
4. Get sites to link back to your pages using your keywords as the anchor text (the part that you click on).
5. Make sure your description tag (this is the text that shows up in Google) includes your keywords and calls people to action. The description SELLS your page to people.

Remember, you are not competing with Google. You are competing with your competition on the search engine results page.  Look at what they are doing and do it better.

If you do all of that, you will be off to a good start.

Best regards,
Mark