Create a Video Reel

Television and radio media reps want to know that you’ll look and sound great on the air - and that you know your industry. To showcase these, online reputation management specialist Kent Campbell created a video reel and published it on YouTube. The guy is well spoken, funny, sharp and has a great voice. But who would know if they only “read” his content online? Kent set up an interview where he answered some of the most commonly asked questions about online reputation management. The result - an offer to appear on television from a major network.

If video is your bag, you’ll want to learn all you can about video marketing from Gary Vaynerchuk - this guy’s a rockstar!

Show (Not Just Tell) Your Expertise Online

Chris Hanisco, founder of The Dippy Chick, has been approached by several media networks. How did they find her? Through her active participation in the Start Up Nation online forum. Chris wasn’t trying to bait the media - she was just doing what she loves to do - helping other entrepreneurs solve their problems. However, when a major network browsed around Start Up Nation in searh of mom entrepreneurs, Chris’s name, face, and obvious level of experitise was prevalent throughout the community. 

An About Page with a Human Interest Angle

Interviewers are always interested in tying in a personal interest story to their pieces - that’s what makes a story interesting! When the media scouts followed the links from Start Up Nation back to Chris’s ‘About’ page, they learned about the fascinating story behind her business. People want to interview people - not companies. Yet it’s amazing how many company’s ‘About’ pages don’t even include the names of the people behind the business, let alone photos or compelling stories. Your ‘About’ page isn’t just for the media - in my opinion, a compelling ‘About’ page can be one of your most persuasive sales pages.

Publish an Online Press Room

A journalist often knows what type of industry expert they need to interview to enhance a particular story. They will often search the ‘About’ pages of various websites in search of an expert to interivew. Why not take things a step further by creating an online press room with everything that a journalist would need? Your online newsroom might include things such as:

• Executive bios
• Headshots of key people
• A history of the company
• Quotes from the company founders
• News story angles
• Frequently asked questions (from the POV of the media)
• Your most recent press releases

For a daily dose of smart publicity ideas, check out Annie Jenkins. Her regular emails always get my brain turning with new publicity ideas.

Your upgraded press release includes 3 anchor text links, an ad-free page with an SEO friendly title tag, pull quotes, an image upload - and even an iFrame so that readers can navigate to your awesome site right from the press release. (Check out a sample press release that utilizes all the features.)

How To Get Your Free Friend Upgrade

1. Upload your press release as a free version

2. After you upload your press release, just DM one of us with the title and we’ll pay for the upgrade.

How to Get the Most SEO & Aesthetic Value From Your Press Release

Online PR News is loaded with features to make your press release SEO friendly, look great, and convert readers to visitors. Be sure to take a look at this quick slideshow that shows you how to use all of the features on the site.

Connect With Us on Twitter!

Tara: twitter.com/TARAinFL

Christine: twitter.com/SelfMadeChick

Starting an article marketing campaign does not guarantee links. In fact, it is entirely possible to achieve absolutely no linking benefit to your website — and it is amazing how many people are doing just that. Here are some tips to optimize a distribution article for maximum SEO benefit:

Choose Keywords Wisely

Keywords are the search terms that your readers or customers use to find your website. Knowing which keywords you wish to target is one of the single most important components to your Internet marketing campaign. When done correctly, keyword research will be able to pinpoint which keywords your competitors are targeting and which keywords are more easily mastered than others.

Choose one primary keyword to target in your article, as well as 2-4 related keywords to sprinkle throughout. Using these related keywords helps the search engines get an even clearer idea about the topic of your article. Believe it or not, search engines can tell the difference between a keyword that appears on a page of many unrelated terms and one that appears with terms related to its topic.

Using Keywords In Your Title And Summary

You should use the keyword in the title of the article whenever possible — trying to position the keyword toward the first part of the title. For example, a title that reads:

Article Marketing: 3 Things Strategies for Achieving More Visibility

Vs.

3 Things Strategies for Achieving More Visibility with Article Marketing

Using keywords in the title is important because the title often becomes the title tag and sometimes the URL of the web page. The title tag and URL are two of the most important pieces of a webpage that help search engines identify the topic of the content. Not only does the title tag give the search engines a critical tip as to your topic, but the title tag usually becomes the dark blue title that appears in the search engines results page. This is why it is essential to create article titles that not only include keywords, but that also captivate readers. A good, solid, intriguing title can make the difference between your article being seen and being overlooked.

The summary of your article often becomes the Meta description for the page on which it’s published. The Meta description is usually the short summary that appears in the search engine results page beneath the title. The same logic that applies to writing captivating, keyword-rich titles also applies to writing summaries.

Using Keywords In The Body And Author Bio

When writing articles for article marketing, a good target keyword density is between 1.0% and 1.3%. Trying to “over optimize” by using keywords at a higher percent density can cause the article to be rejected by many publishers.

It is also very important that you use your main keywords as anchor text whenever the online article distribution site will allow. Google uses anchor text to determine page ranking. When you use your keyword as an anchor text, you are essentially telling Google (and the reader) what your website is all about.

The author bio is the most important place to use keywords. Many article submission sites allow for anchor text in the ‘about the author’ bio - and taking this opportunity critical. When creating a bio with anchor text, it is beneficial to include two links: one link to the homepage in a main keyword, and a link to an internal page using the keyword the internal page is targeting.

We see many businesses make the mistake of only building links to their homepages. This is a missed opportunity! It is very important to build links to a site’s internal pages — in fact we recommend that an article be written and distributed linking to any new pages created. The backlinks generated by that article will help establish the new page with the search engines.

By choosing to target the right keywords, using your main keyword in the titles and subheads of an article and of course linking to your website with anchor text keywords, you will effectively be using article marketing to build a backlink campaign for your website.

Many clients want to know why article marketing is helpful if it doesn’t promote their particular products or services. It may seem counterproductive to create articles that don’t specifically reference your company, but in fact, article marketing promotes your company by being highly useful to readers.

Benefits of Objective Articles

Even when an article doesn’t directly reference your company in the text, it will discuss some aspect of your products or services. Efficient article marketing may mean a “how-to” or “benefits of” article that leads the reader to desire what you provide. Regardless of the topic or content, all articles directly benefit you by:

• Providing backlinks to your site in the “about the author” portion of the article
• Establishing you - and your company - as an authority on the topic
• “Selling” the reader on need for the product. Once a need for your product has been established, your link is right in the footer and able to supply.

Using Keywords to Inspire Interesting Topics

One of the most commonly made mistakes in article marketing is choosing a bad topic. Many writers have difficulty looking beyond the marketing aspect of the article to the objectivity, and end up with articles that are too self-promoting or simply not interesting. When writing an article, creating interesting content is absolutely vital.

When search engines consider articles, they always look for how useful a particular article is to a user. The most self-promotional articles are usually the worst ranked: search engines know the difference, and act accordingly. In this age where search engines are smarter, the old rules of marketing no longer apply.

The goal of your article should always be to provide useful information to searchers - don’t worry about promoting your company in the article. Leave that for the author bio.

Some good article topics include:

• How To…
• 3 Ways To…
• Comparisons of 3 or more different products/solutions
• 3 Things to Consider Before…
• 4 Reasons Why…
• A Unique Solution for…
• A Guide to…
• X vs. Y: Which is Right for You?

Even if a topic isn’t obviously promotional, it should always be slanted toward the product your company offers. If it’s comparing two items, simply have the article conclude that your company’s item is superior. Build up the need for a given product or service through your topic and body text, and you will effectively increase demand and traffic on your company’s website without mentioning them once in the text.

Just the other day, I read a very effective article that focused on how to create an effective display at a trade show. As I was reading through, the article made me realize that I didn’t have the necessary skills or experience to make a professional looking trade display. So I promptly followed the link in the author bio at the bottom of the article and looked at a website that could create one for me.

For this reason, how to articles are particularly useful for service industries, or companies offering products that are hard to make or inefficient to produce anywhere else. Many people think they can do something themselves fairly easily. But if they discover how truly complex a process is, or how potentially substandard their results could be, they may very well decide to hire a professional. And to reach a professional, they have to look no further than the bio of that very same article for a convenient link.

The Importance of the Title in Article Marketing

Once you have an interesting and informative topic, you need a title to match. Make sure that your title contains the keywords for your article: these titles often become part of the URL or title tags for the article’s webpage, making them a powerful indicator to search engines. Many search engine web crawlers use title tags to get an idea of the topic of the article. Search engine spiders need to recognize that your article has relevant, interesting content for their searchers. More importantly, your headline should appeal to humans. Brian Clark has a fantastic post on Writing Killer Headlines that is definitely worth reading.

The title tag is also commonly used as the linked title of the page itself. It needs to be compelling, because it is often this title that searchers use to decide whether or not to visit a page. If you write an interesting and relevant title, searchers are much more likely to click through and read your text.

When you unite a compelling title with interesting and objective text, you will produce an article that is accepted by distribution sites and attractive to readers. With the right touches, article marketing is a crucial component of any SEO strategy.

There are options in Word which look great on a computer screen, but become jumbled and confused when translated into web programming language. Before you start writing, it is best to begin by making a few small but vital changes to the setup of MS Word.

Apostrophes, Dashes, and So-Called “Smart Quotes”

Have you ever noticed how apostrophes and quotation marks become bent so that they frame a quote, rather than simple and straight as they appear on the keyboard? This is the work of MS Word’s “Smart Quotes” system. This system is beneficial to your document’s appearance in the text, but causes problems when you try to transfer that text to the web.

In the same way, whenever you type one or two dashes, MS Word will automatically turn those dashes into one elongated dash. This is useful when you’re only worried about how your content will look in MS Word or as a printed document. But when you are writing as part of an SEO strategy, it can be problematic.

Whenever your document includes Smart Quotes or elongated dashes, weird text will show up when it is transferred to your website. If you have ever seen a site with “??” in the middle of a word, or “//” where quotes should be, then you know what I am talking about! That is the result of improperly formatted MS Word text. More often than not, the company doesn’t even know the embarrassing problem exists.

Luckily, we can completely avoid this problem by changing a few simple settings:

1. Go the “Tools” menu and select “Auto Correct”
2. Select the “Format as You Type” Tab.
3. Under the “Replace As You Type” heading uncheck: “Straight Quotes” with “Smart Quotes” and “Symbol Characters (–) with symbols”

With a few clicks, your SEO strategy will be protected with proper formatting of every future document you create.

Proper Web Style Formatting in Word

Your writing style may be excellent, but if you don’t have the style formatting toolbar in web set up properly, you’ll be causing hours of work for the other members of your SEO strategy team. Whenever you are doing SEO writing, resist the temptation to touch that style formatting bar.

Always set your formatting style to NORMAL when you use Word.

All too often, SEO copywriters use tricks that look nice in Word - things like putting double spaces after single returns, or adding additional spaces after lines. This looks nice in the typed text, but none of it transfers into the HTML editor.

Whoever is tasked with implementing the web development part of the SEO strategy will have to completely reformat the text, a time consuming process that can be easily avoided. Simply use the settings recommended before, and then highlight your text after it is written to check for any irregularities. If you see extra spaces around the line breaks, something has gone wrong with your settings.

To ensure that your document does not have any extra Word Doc formatting:

1. Select “Format” and “Paragraph” from your toolbar
2. The “Indents and Spacing” tab should be set to single spacing with 0 spacing before and after lines.
3. The “Line and Page Breaks” tab should have nothing checked other than “window/orphan control”

From MS Word to the World Wide Web

Once you have set up word properly for your SEO strategy and written the content, the last step is actually transferring your text onto the internet. When you work with a site such as Wordpress or Joomla, you will be working with a type of text editor known as WYSIWYG. WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get - but to an SEO copywriter, it means make sure that you put your content in the HTML tab, NOT the visual editor. If you paste your text directly into the visual editor, Microsoft Word will automatically add a lot of confusing and undesirable HTML code without your knowledge.

When you paste directly into the HTML tab instead, you avoid all of this useless and confusing extra content. If you don’t use the HTML tab, the extra code will make it more difficult for search engine web crawlers to access your site, making your entire SEO strategy less effective. The extra code effectively becomes a roadblock, masking your true keyword density. If the web crawlers can’t determine keyword density, then they won’t read your content as it was written.

A Few Small Steps Make One Big Difference

When you make these few changes to your MS Word formatting and internet upload practices, you will save your programmers hours of work in the long run. Your content will be readable by the search engines, allowing for proper ranking and effective SEO strategy.

Calculating keyword density while your content is still in the draft phase is useful not only for SEO copywriters, but for anyone writing content for their own website that wants to flesh out their content first rather than making changes once the content is already live.

You could count keywords by hand - but that’s time consuming and opens the door for error. I’ll show you how to calculate keyword density in your blog posts, web content, and articles using a method that is fast and simple.

Measuring Keyword Density

The best way to measure keyword distribution is through keyword density analysis. Keyword density observes occurrences of your particular keyword and the total word count of your text. From this, a figure representing keywords per 100 words of text is created. This is the figure known in SEO copywriting as the keyword density: it is represented as a percentage, such as 1.0%, or 1 keyword per 100 other words. When I write an article for distribution for a service, I usually look for a density between 1.0% and 1.3%. When I write web content, I try to get my density between 2.0% and 3.0%.

Easy Keyword Density Calculation: Live Keyword Analysis

Of course, if writers had to figure out keyword density by hand, we would have much less time to focus on our work. Luckily, there is an internet service called Live Keyword Analysis that actually measures your keyword density in real time. Simply enter the keywords you’re looking to optimize for and then start typing in the text box. As you write, it will measure and update the density it lists.

Although Live Keyword Analysis is an excellent SEO copywriting tool, unless you know a few tricks your density calculation can be inaccurate. There are different things to consider for each type of keyword calculation.

Calculating Singular Keywords in Live Keyword Analysis

In SEO copywriting, it can be very tempting to pluralize keywords for easier text integrating. But even the simple act of adding an “s” to the end of a word can dramatically change the search results. Not convinced? Try searching for “real estate agent” and then again for “real estate agents”. See the difference?

When you use Live Keyword Analysis, you have to manually account for that difference. The program doesn’t recognize that the plural word is different from the singular - it just sees the singular word inside the plural word. For instance, if “real estate agent” appears in your text 10 times and “real estate agents” appears 13 times, Live Keyword Analysis will recognize 23 instances of “real estate agent” and calculate the density accordingly.

To correct for this, simply measure the density of both and then subtract singular percentage from plural:

3.2 (singular)
- 0.9 (plural)
——–
2.3 (actual singular density)

Analyzing Two Letter Keywords in Live Keyword Analysis

There are a few more corrections required when your SEO copywriting requires you to include keywords that are only two letters long. Live Keyword Analysis is programmed to completely ignore all keywords with fewer than two letters, which is helpful unless your keyword phrase includes a word with only two letters.

If, for instance, you are working with the keyword phrase “homes in California”, Live Keyword Analysis will give you a reading of 0%, no matter how many times you include the keyword. The two letter “in” will cancel it out every time. With this example, you can get around the problem easily: just remove the “in”. Have Live Keyword Analysis calculate the density of “homes California”, and it will produce a result that is accurate for “homes in California”.

This technique works when the two letter keyword is in the middle of your SEO copywriting phrase. But what happens when it is at the end? Consider the keyword phrase “San Diego CA homes”. When you put it in as is, Live Keyword Analysis gives a density of 0%. But if you remove “CA”, it will calculate for all occurrences of “California” and throw off your results.

To get around this, you have to be a little creative. Put your entire text into a Microsoft Word document and use the find and replace feature. Locate all instances of the two letter word - to continue with our “San Diego CA homes” example, “CA” - and replace it with a three letter word by adding a random letter on the end of the two letter word. We would find all instances of “CA” and replace it with “CAX.”. It doesn’t matter what letter you choose, so long as you keep it constant throughout the text. Once you have found and replaced all instances of the word, put the text back into the Live Keyword Analysis. Then change the SEO copywriting keyword in the upper box to reflect the change you made.

Once you have your density, just hit Ctrl-Z in the Word document to undo the changes, and your text is ready to go.

Apostrophe’s Matter In SEO Copywriting

When your SEO copywriting assignment includes phrases that seem grammatically incorrect, you may think that you can change them. But when keywords are developed, they are chosen for very specific reasons. Grammar - and grammar mistakes - are always deliberate, and you need to keep them in your final text. Usually, the best way to handle this is to optimize for the grammatically correct term, but add in a few instances of the incorrect version. That way, your content will catch the attention of the search engines for both keywords.

Finalizing Your Content

Keep in mind that when the content is actually placed on the website, there will be other words in the HTML code that will be factored into the overall word count - this will lower your keyword density. The amount it will lower it depends on how much extra text is on the page (this is yet another reason to create pages with good, clean code). With the right tools to properly calculate keyword density, you will have greater flexibility and accuracy in your word counts.

**While keyword density is an essential part of SEO copywriting, the most critical focus — which good writers never compromise, is writing quality content for your audience!**

Right away, I noticed that there was a big problem with blogging for other people’s businesses.

That problem is that most business blogs simply don’t have a focus or a personality. Without these things, a blog is virtually just more internet noise. I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand writing just to create more noise that no one will ever read.

Businesses are blogging because they hear that it’s good for search engines and will drive traffic to their website, but they on’t really know why or how. If you’re a writer or SEO, this is where you must at least try to consult businesses on how to make their blog effective.

How to help your clients make their blogs more effective:

Create a mission statement

A blog is a lot like a magazine. It must have a specialization or else it will appeal to no one. Throughout this post, I’ve included some questions that I send out to my clients to help them to nail down a focus for their blog:

• Who is the target audience for your blog?

• What common element will each blog post contain that will provide value to your target audience? In other words, what is their ‘reward’ for reading your blog?

Establish a Blog personality

One of the biggest problems when writing for someone else’s blog when you’re not asked to be yourself is developing a writing style. Who are you supposed to be? A blog is a lot like the op-ed section of the newspaper, not written in the stuffy way that most articles are written.

In talking with other freelance blog writers, I’ve found that this is their biggest source of frustration also. The writing really should come from “someone” not some elusive voice. Help company’s understand the value of allow personality to shine through.

If you’re not an expert on the subject, that’s ok. You can do interviews with others who are, get feedback on the staff’s opinions on various topics in the news, or come at the topic from a consumer angle. You can also seek out guest bloggers to occasionally write posts as well.

Question to ask your client:

• What do you envision as being the overall tone of your blog – Light-hearted? Humorous? Scholarly? Ultra-professional? Sarcastic? Straight to the point? Something else? What type of communication do you feel your audience responds to best and tends to trust most?

Explain the value of social networking with blogs

Many people have an “if you build it, they will come” attitude about blogging and that’s just not the case. Businesses need to know that creating a successful blog requires a lot more work than just writing posts. For all of the things required to create a successful blog, check out this post at Pro Blogger.

In order to create buzz, some of your focus should be on getting other, influential blogs to first become aware of the blog, and then perhaps giving a mention to the blog in a post. This can be done though:

• Outbound links to other blogs
• Promoting posts to relevant bloggers

Questions to ask your clients:

• Which influential blogs would you like to link to your blog?

• What type of content would it take to get the top 3 blogs you listed above to find so much value in your blog, that they mention your blog and add you to their blogroll?

Instead of charging per post, consider putting together a blog-building “package” that includes:

• Writing
• Research
• Post promotion
• Finding guest bloggers
• Driving subscriptions
• Reporting

Since one of the main goals for many blogs is to gain a solid readership, set goals for number of subscribers and even build in a monetary bonus system for achieving certain subscriber goals.

Happy blogging!

It appears that the press release titled SEO Copywriting Expert Reveals Secrets to First Page Results hit too close to the truth and didn’t sit well with many PR distributors.

Some made it to the news, but nearly as many as usual.

SEO’s are a group that people love to hate. PR distributors are just another group that can’t stand us – with good reason though.

When advertisers flood the submissions with keyword-spammy ads disguised as press releases, it devalues the integrity of news.

Further, these press release distributors have the privilege of their content appearing on Google News because they have been approved as newsworthy content providers. Start letting lots of advertising through, and they could lose that privilege.

This press release wasn’t spammy or full of advertising lingo. Instead, it was a little too true. In the hands of advertisers that care more about optimizing for search engines as opposed to optimizing for humans, this type of information could cause a nightmare for PR distributors.

As someone who values information more than advertising, I understand this. When writing press releases for SEO, follow the advice in my rejected PR:

“For a press release to truly be successful, it’s critical that it be focused around providing useful information for human readers. Distributing press releases that don’t offer a real value to your target audience is a waste money and effort.”

Press Releases

When optimized for search engines (and of course for humans as is my motto) press releases have a bold presence in the search results. Not only that, but they are a great way to build valuable backlinks.

I’ve spent the last 6 months analyzing scores of press release distribution points to find those with the most value. There are quite a few free press release distribution points that may not give you the wide exposure of a resource like PR Web with its extensive contact list, but that do offer live links, anchor text, images, first page visibility on Google News and sometimes first page exposure on the organic results.

One of my favorite free press release resources is Open PR. The use of images really makes the release stand out in the SERPs.

Here’s a press release that I wrote that took 5 of the top 10 slots on Google’s main search page.

So if you’ve been procrastinating on sending out press releases – stop! Most of the companies I work with publish anywhere from 1-4 press releases a month like clockwork and love the effect.

But this morning, in the early a.m. hours as I was sifting through my email, one headline stood out so much that I couldn’t help but leave my email box behind and click on it.  The headline and summary read: 

“Copywriter Makes Major Marketing Mistake”

Just posted at the Copywriters Blog about a fundamental marketing mistake made by a prominent copywriter that could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Never underestimate the value of good old fashion gossip when creating a headline. We love to hear about someone else’s flaws because we all have them and it’s comforting, if not darn right compelling to read stories about the misfortunes of others. 

For some good reading about titles, check out CopyBlogger’s 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas that Work and Five Common Headline Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.