How To - Digital Marketing Agency

Writing for Search Engines AND Humans

Make it so both humans and robots can read it! Photo: Courtesy of Franz Steiner

Writing for search engines and writing for human readers are not mutually exclusive exercises. Search engines want to give searchers the best and most relevant results, so they value many of the same things human readers do; copy which is original, easy to read and well laid-out. Following SEO best practices for copy writing should make your website content easier to read and simpler to navigate.

Relevancy is a big component of Google’s search algorithm, so if you want to rank for the term “things to do in Sydney”, you need to make sure you use the term “things to do in Sydney” throughout your site, and especially in prominent places like headlines.

Having said this, using keywords too much is bad for both readers and search engines. Readers may get turned off by badly written sentences or headlines stuffed with keywords, and may not return to your site. Search engines may infer that a keyword stuffed site is spammy, which will negatively affect your search rankings.

The best strategy for any website to achieve a balance of SEO-friendly and human-friendly content is to write your copy as if it was for a human with a short attention span and no assumed knowledge. That is, make it clear and to the point.

Keywords

When you are writing for the web, you are hoping that someone will find your content and read it. To make that happen, you have to make sure that your content contains the kinds of words people will actually search for. By matching your copy to the way people search, you can ensure that more people will find your content.

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Why would you want to optimise your social media profiles and what do we even mean by optimising them?

There are two main reasons; Firstly, optimising your profile means making it discover-able to new and relevant audiences. Secondly, both Bing and Google are increasingly integrating social media into their search results and are taking social signals (like shares and followers) into account as ranking factors. By optimizing your social media profiles you will make the information in them as easy as possible for search engines to understand, and hopefully, influence search results in the future.

General SEO Tips for Social Media

• Good practice for SEO copywriting still applies when you write your updates on your Facebook Page, Google Plus, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms. Whenever you’re writing updates, think about the keywords that other people might be looking for that could lead them to your comments and posts.
• The same rules of good SEO linking still apply on social media networks. Though they may not always be allowed, sometimes they are. Make sure that if you can link with anchor text, you do (e.g. in the notes section of your Facebook page), and that you are linking to pages you want SEO value for (this will mean you need good content on that page!)
• It can be tempting to stick things up quickly and share them, but remember the description on your photos or videos will be up permanently, so you should include relevant keywords in the photo description text where possible. Again bear in mind meeting the needs of both the user and the search engine. You’re talking to your fans first and foremost so include the keywords naturally.

Optimise for Facebook

•  One of the most important places to link from your Page in Facebook is in the ‘About’ box of your page. While you can’t put anchor text here, you can include a standard link. You should also include some keyword rich terms here – but make sure you write for your fans first.
• Configure Your Timeline to make your history more complete and include more relevant content. To do this, write milestones in your company as status updates, then click on the clock icon to backdate it. You might want to do this for press releases, company establishment, when new products were added, when staff joined or when events happened.
• Find other pages where your customers hang out, then go and make comments on those pages to get more visibility for your own page.
• While your page name will be shown in important SEO parts of your page (page title and H1), it is rarely ideal to optimize your Facebook page name for SEO. You want it to be your business name so that people can find it and it has strong branding.
• Ensure you claim your Facebook web address at https://www.facebook.com/username

Twitter

• In your Twitter profile, your ‘bio’ is actually the meta description for your profile page, making it an important aspect of SEO on your Twitter profile. Make sure you’re including relevant keywords here that relate both to the general content of your tweets as well as the website you want to promote.
• If you use a URL shortener, it may be better to use bit.ly which uses a 301 redirect (unless you have strong reasons for using another). You don’t want to use one with a 302 redirect.
• In an individual tweet, the first 27-40 characters count as the title tag within a Google search result. It’s important therefore to include your desired keywords early on in the tweet itself to make it more likely to rank in searches
• The more high profile you are, judging by the number of Twitter followers you have, the more your PageRank will improve within Google, having a positive effect on your search results.
• When uploading your Twitter profile picture, make sure to name it with a relevant keyword that relates to your Twitter profile. Also be sure to use hyphens in between words in the file name, not spaces.
• If you want your Twitter page to rank for your real name, and not just your username, make sure your Name is filled out correctly in your settings (do NOT change your username).

Optimise your YouTube Videos

• Use relevant keywords throughout the title, description and keyword section of your video on Youtube. Make sure they are written for users first and foremost, with SEO reasons being a secondary consideration.
• Consider leaving video replies to related videos within Youtube. When you’ve found the video you want to reply to, click on ‘Leave a video reply’ on the right hand side. This will bring up your videos, which you can select and leave as a video response on the page.
• Make a closed caption file to create a transcript for your video
• Don’t forget to make your video public
• If you link in your description, include http:// or it won’t work.
• Choose the right category for your video, and then further describe it using tags.
• Give the viewer the opportunity to find similar content from you by using video annotations.
• Share the video on as many video sites as possible.

Optimise Google Plus

• (For personal pages) Have your profile photo show in search results for pages you have written. It’s simple to do, find out more
• Content shared on Google Plus may be indexed more quickly, so consider sharing new content on Google Plus.
• Simply setting up a Google Plus page will not do – as it won’t be automatically indexed by Google. You need to put some people in Circles and have some base level of activity to make sure it gets indexed (This shouldn’t be a lot of work, you can just do a small amount in the beginning).
• If your business uses Adwords, you can choose to show your social button in your ads. This helps your ad stand out, but make sure you have a decent page first.

Optimising using LinkedIn

• LinkedIn can be used to help promote a natural links profile for your website. Employees, especially senior/well known employees should link to your website from their public profile page. This will make your website more visible to other LinkedIn members and search engines. These are the instructions they need:
  • Under “Websites”, choose “Other” from the dropdown box, choose a title for your company URL and add in the URL. The reason for choosing “Other” rather than Company Website” is that “Other” allows you to insert a URL title that incorporates your targeted keywords. Save Changes.
  • The profiles must be public for them to add SEO value, although of course you can’t enforce this for all employees.
• If you have a new press release, video or other form of announcement, update your status with a URL and description of the update. Once your update is posted, ask employees to “share” the update to their own profiles by simply clicking the “share” button on your update.
• Ensure that pages you own are as complete as possible, with relevant tags and content, so that people can find you or your business if searching within LinkedIn.

With social media on the agenda for over 90% of marketers, you can’t sneeze without finding a tool to monitor your own, or your competitors, social media performance.

For example, take Wildfire, a great free app you can use to monitor the behaviour of up to three Facebook pages and three Twitter profiles. It will show growth in likes, check-ins and followers, allowing you to see how you stack up against the metrics of your competitors.

Open Site Explorer can give you a snapshot of Tweets, followers, +1’s or likes of any website, but these metrics aren’t that accurate, and it is recommended to double-check the numbers on the actual profiles.

But nearly all of these tools have one thing in common – they are mostly reporting on the quantitative aspects of social media – the metrics which can easily be counted. These statistics are fantastic for finding out the number of people a profile is reaching, how much they like things, how much they engage – but this is only half the story. Your quantitative analysis might show amazing volumes, response rates and engagements – but then you might see that all the comments are spam or negative. You really need the rest of the information.

The qualitative analysis is harder to outsource to a third party tool, and in fact, why would you even want to? Looking first hand through your competitor’s profiles to get qualitative information may take a lot more time, but it will also tell you a lot more. It can give you insights into what works and what doesn’t. It can inspire your own campaigns. It can alert you to relationships you didn’t know existed.

To look into the qualitative side of social media performance, you might want to ask some of the following questions;
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