Have you ever wondered what makes sites like Amazon and Wikipedia so addictive? When you visit these sites, you can’t stop clicking; one link leads to another, and each page is more intriguing than the last. This is accomplished using a simple technique that you can mimic on your own website or blog: an effective internal linking strategy.

Think about it; in Wikipedia, practically every significant word or phrase in every article is linked to another article that deals exclusively with that subject. You might intend to read up on World War II and end up following a trail of links to an article about pirates or Romanian folklore. As far as website content tips go, leading your visitors deeper and deeper into your site—treating them to one wonder after another, like Alice as she tumbled down the rabbit hole—is at the top of the list.

Amazon takes this gem of content marketing even further; it recommends products to you based on those you have already looked at, lets you know what other people have ordered after viewing  those products, and provides you with lists of similar products—lists created not by Amazon itself as a marketing tool, but for fun and by customers like you. This strategy is based on a solid hypothesis: that if you happen to like one gothic romance, Marvel comic book, or young-adult urban-fantasy novel, you will like more of the same.

If you want to improve conversion, there is no better strategy than linking every page of your website to half a dozen other pages that tackle similar material from a fresh angle. Updates to one part of your site should be advertised on every other part, and it doesn’t hurt to have an interactive section where your customers can share their favorite products or services with visitors who are still on the fence.

Remember, interesting links keep your visitors clicking, and the more time they spend on your site, the more likely they are to find something they are willing to pay for. Internal links are also an integral part of search-engine optimization. If you want the best possible results, you can hire a marketing agency to help improve your internal linking strategy.

*Image from http://www.thecampussocialite.com/blog/images/alice-falling-down-rabbit-hole.jpg

Emily Robinson is a fiction writer and an editorial intern at ideaLaunch. After her final semester of college, she intends to become a copyeditor and/or a starving novelist.

 

1. Pay attention to quality from the beginning. Curdled milk won’t taste sweet no matter how much chocolate syrup you pour into it, and content marketing won’t succeed if your content is nothing more than a couple of mediocre paragraphs stuffed with keywords. You should hire a freelance writer whose copy is polished, professional, and free of spelling and grammatical errors.
2. Quantity and quality go hand in hand. Too little syrup leaves a glass of chocolate milk pale and underwhelming, while too much just makes you sick. The same goes for SEO content. Hire writers who are able to strike the right balance, optimizing your content with a variety of keywords, but avoiding an overdose that would only leave readers distracted and annoyed.
3. Don’t forget to stir. SEO may be about marketing content, but you also want to improve conversion rates, and potential customers appreciate a company website or blog packed with well-crafted, relevant content, not random keywords. When you’re hiring writers,  find someone with a talent for mixing keywords into good content like chocolate syrup in a glass of milk, till the two are blended seamlessly. The final product is guaranteed to be both delicious and nutritious for your customers and your company.

Whimsical metaphors aside, the quality of the writing and the skillful use of keywords on your site or in your blog should be integral factors in your marketing strategy. If you want to achieve the best possible results, hire a content marketing agency with plenty of experience in blending these ingredients just the right way.

Image from http://preparednesspro.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/chocolatemilk.jpg

Emily Robinson is a fiction writer and an editorial intern at ideaLaunch. After her final semester of college, she intends to become a copyeditor and/or a starving novelist.

What other tasks do you hire out to professionals, in-house or freelance? Web design, traditional marketing, HR… If you’re a large company, you might even get a cleaning service to come in and get your office ship-shape once a week or so. If you pay contractors or employees to complete other tasks, why wouldn’t you hire professional writers to handle your content marketing?

You’ll get more than just writing
Full service content marketing agencies like IdeaLaunch can help you with hiring writers, developing and distributing content and (this is key!) tracking and testing results. Most importantly, you’re guaranteed highly qualified writers who can get to the heart of your marketing message and convey it to your audience in as few words as possible. This is an important aspect of content writing that many hobby writers, conventional marketing departments and employees who want to “try their hands at blogging” may not understand.

Why is hiring writers smart?
You may not have time to keep a blog updated regularly, and you may not have the tools to test the results of your content. We do.

Additionally, hiring writers gives you:

• Better Web content
• Regular content updates
• Results you can track

Hiring writers frees you up to do what you do best—run your business. And that’s the best way to increase your bottom line.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

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Baby Boomers

For many baby boomers who have been laid off during the recession, experience is not an issue in finding a new job. For some, a high level of expertise is working against their efforts to find a new job. These individuals have a great deal of knowledge and experience in the field they have worked in for decades. Freelance writing could be a great outlet for sharing that knowledge.

Recent College Graduates

Recent college graduates can usually make an easy transition into freelance writing since they are required to do a lot of research and writing to earn their degree, and likely have a strong base of knowledge in the subject they majored in. With this practice fresh in their minds, recent college grads are great candidates when hiring freelance writers.

Traditionally, many freelance writers have been in the middle of their career, after some experience following college and before the maturity of near retirement. These individuals are still a large part of the freelancer pool and each individual brings strengths and weaknesses to their work.

Jennifer Gniadecki loves to write. You can find her on any given day writing lists, blog posts, articles, assignments, outlines or fleshing out story ideas on her laptop.

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Marketing Agency Goals

By knowing what goal you want the marketing agency to achieve, the agency you are considering will be able to tell you what similar goals they have achieved. Many times marketing agency terms vary from company to company and having your own definition of success will allow you to compare apples to apples. There is a very distinct difference between hits and page views, between organic and paid search, and between clicks and click-through-rates. By knowing which metrics are important to your company you can be sure that if a marketing agency has different priorities or less experience in certain areas, they are eliminated early in the process.

Focus of the Marketing Agency

By focusing on how the many different forms of online marketing work together, a marketing agency will work toward the ultimate goal—turning web page visitors into paying customers—from every angle using promotion and content assets such as:
Articles
Blogs
Social Media
Tips
News
Website Content
Widgets
Mobile Applications
Website Content
All of these content assets work toward the goal of converting a visitor into a customer. When a marketing agency aligns all of these tactics, the strategy is made more effective.

Jennifer Gniadecki loves to write. You can find her on any given day writing lists, blog posts, articles, assignments, outlines or fleshing out story ideas on her laptop.

Image from kaushik.net

In the first few lessons, I learned about researching keyphrases instead of keywords. This week, I learned what the heck to do with those keyphrases. The copy writing course covers keyphrases and copy writing for the small business owner. While I don’t own a small business, I am still learning a lot from the perspective of a copy writer. Any copy writer can get a list of keywords or phrases and stick them into a bunch of copy, but truly understanding the purpose of those keyphrases and inbound links ensures better copy. It’s like that whole “Teach a man to fish” thing. You get it. And so,

What the Heck Do I Do with Keyphrases?

1. Develop a Strategy: There’s a myth that you can only use one keyphrase per page and one page per keyphrase. Throw that thinking out! Choose keyphrases that can appear and be relevant on multiple pages. (This is a great opportunity for internal linking as well!)
2. Examine Keyphrases: Are they applicable? Are they grammatically correct? Will you be able to put them in your content in an organic way? (If not, lose them. Readers can see right through awkward phrasing for SEO purposes. Don’t jeopardize your credibility.)
3. Create a List: Organize your keyphrases into type (Brand, Category, Buy Cycle, Subcategory, etc.).
4. Divide and Conquer: Decide which keyphrases to use for specific pages. Map it out in a comprehensible manner for easy reference.
5. This Just In: Update your keyphrase list. Depending on your business, this can happen every month or every quarter or seasonally.

This list is just the bare bones of what the course offers. If you’re new to SEO copy writing, Heather maps out exactly what you should be doing with great examples of ideal home pages. In the key phrase mapping lesson, she provides a template to plug in your specific keyphrases.

Next week’s lesson? WRITING. Stay tuned. Or just hire a writer.

Here are two important style points to look at when hiring writers.

Does your potential writer have style?
Or, more importantly, what style do they write in. When you check the portfolio do you find yourself falling asleep? Or are you laughing so hard you’re afraid your stomach might burst? The style of voice a writer uses to write web content can be anywhere from scientific to humorous to anywhere in between. Be sure to review the writer’s portfolio to be sure they are comfortable writing in the style of voice that will match your other website content.

Active vs. Passive voice.
What voice does your potential writer prefer? Check the writer’s portfolio to make sure they have experience consistently writing in the voice you prefer. Many writers have experience that favors one form of writing and choosing a writer that fits the style you expect can keep you from needing to ask for extra edits through the project.

Jennifer Gniadecki loves to write. You can find her on any given day writing lists, blog posts, articles, assignments, outlines or fleshing out story ideas on her laptop.

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I once took a course on Content Optimization that almost made me give up SEO writing all together.

The information I got about search engine optimization in that three hour afternoon class was so overwhelming, I was pretty sure I’d never be able to master it. I believe the official term is “information overload.”

Search engine optimization is a big, big field. There are countless experts, strategies and factors you can consider in an effort to get a little more Google love. (I’m sorry, Bing, but Google loving is still the best kind.) You have to rethink the navigation and structure of your site; every page needs to be optimized for keywords, you have to decide which keywords you should even be focusing on, and you need to mount a full scale link building campaign.

How can you possibly do everything at once to perfectly optimize your web site?

Relax. Don’t even try. (And SEO marketing agencies everywhere are shaking their fists at me, I’m sure.)

But seriously. What I’ve learned is that there is a lot to learn and website optimization is an ongoing process, not a one time project. Trying to master all facets of SEO at once will probably lead to you doing a mediocre job at best, and potentially send you on a mental health vacation.

Instead, pick one aspect or strategy to work on at a time. Maybe you need to start with properly structuring your site to make it more search engine friendly. If you’re lacking in content, focus on developing a content marketing campaign – or hiring trained SEO writers to get you started. If you have a strong content base to work from, put your energy towards cultivating inbound links. There is no wrong way to start, although a good SEO agency may be able to help you prioritize.

Remember the old adage about how long it took to build Rome. Website optimization, like multinational empires, doesn’t happen in a day. It’s not an item to cross off your company’s to do list, but should be seen as an integral part of your overall business plan.

Britt Reints is a freelance writer living in Orlando, Florida.  She really hates it when people tell her life is a “process.”

6 Tips For Web Content That Works

1. Short and to the point. Internet users have notoriously short attention spans. If you go on for too long, you’ll lose them.
2. Get to the point ASAP. Your web content shouldn’t resemble a well told joke with build up to a punchline. You need to tell the reader what you’re talking about as quickly as possible so they’ll stick around.
3. Scannable. Most web users will spend a couple seconds scanning over a page before deciding to read more. You need to make sure they’ll get a decent amount of information in those few short seconds.
4. Use headers, white space, lists and bold text. These style tools will make your web content more scannable and easier to read quickly.
5. Use pictures. Interesting pictures break up your text and make a web page more pleasing to the eye. An article with pictures looks much less overwhelming than a large block of text.
6. Use keywords. Your web content won’t work if no one is reading it. Including keywords will bring readers from search engines.

Keep these web content tips in mind even if you’re hiring a writer or content marketing agency to do the heavy lifting for you. You’ll want to be able to analyze if the product that’s delivered is going to be effective.

Britt Reints is a freelance writer living in Orlando, Florida.  She has the attention span of an average Internet user.

Image courtesy of www.switched.com

Guess again!

Metadata is simply “data about data.” In the SEO world, it’s condensed data that helps search engines understand the data on webpages so that they can categorize and index them appropriately—helping you and me find what we’re looking for on the web. There are three primary metadata tags to optimize in the head section of your webpage HTML:  the page title, description, and keywords attributes.

Page Title

Go to Google.com in another tab/window. Type the keyword phrase “content marketing agency” into the search box. You’ll see that the webpage that got the number-one position on the search engine results page (SERP) has “Content Marketing Solutions For Your Business | Content Marketing Agency” as its page title (in blue). (And guess who it is! IdeaLaunch!) Google places rather significant importance on the webpage title tag; make sure you follow these tips when crafting one:

• Use primary keywords that the landing page is optimized for. There should be content on the page that features these keywords.
• Check to be sure the keywords have a high search volume (we use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool) so that they will apply to a high number of searchers.
• Phrase your title in a way that will make a person want to click on it.
• Use initial caps so it looks like an official title.
• You only have space for roughly 64 characters (including spaces) in your page title, so choose your words wisely!

Page Description

Entice searchers to click on your website with the page description. This is where you get to have a little fun and exercise your copy-writing muscles. The description should describe what’s on the landing page in an engaging way—its intended use is more for humans than it is for search engines, confirming the page’s relevancy with the searcher’s query.

• To increase click-through rate (CTR), use keywords in your description. You’ll see that Google bolds keyword matches in the title and description copy.
• Write unique descriptions for each page on your site.
• Do you change content on your site frequently? Update your page descriptions (and page titles, for that matter) accordingly to reflect the new content. It may take the search engines some time to show the new data on SERPs depending on how often they index your site.
• Descriptions should be about 150 words in length. While 200-250 words will be indexed by the search engine, anything past 150 won’t make it onto the SERP for people to see.

Keywords

The keywords attribute is the red-headed middle stepchild of the metadata family. No one pays much attention to it anymore. Because of widespread abuse (spammers were keyword stuffing in meta tags so search engines readjusted their algorithms), major search engines don’t rank your page according to which/how many keywords are listed in this tag. However, other search engines may use this data for relevancy and SERP placement purposes, so you still want to make sure you fill in the appropriate keywords.

• Choose meta keywords that have high search volume and a competitive PPC price, and be sure to include head and tail keyword phrases.
• Use keyword suggestion tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool, WordTracker, and WordVision for ideas.
• Between 10 and 15 keywords are plenty. Make sure they’re relevant to the landing page!