SEO Content Solutions

As an SEO copywriter or anyone with a blog or a website that drafts content in Word before publishing online, your SEO strategy must begin with your MS Word document. Though you may not realize it, if you don’t have Word set with the proper options, however, it turns from a useful writing tool into a big handicap.

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.

There are a lot of tools for calculating keyword density - AFTER the content is already on the page. But as SEO copywriters, our job is to write content that is optimized BEFORE it goes live on the page.

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!**

A year ago, none of my writing assignments were for blogs. But in the first quarter of this year, lots of my clients started asking me to do blog writing. I’m currently writing for 7 different blogs. One blog, my favorite to write for, allows me to be me and give my expert opinion. On the others, I just provide generalized content.

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!