3 Key Ingredients of Effective Website Tip Centers

• Base Content on Keyword Research: Don’t rely on opinion to decide what type of information to include in your tip center. Conduct key word research to identify the terminology that is likely to attract the right people to your website. Choose the topics for your tips carefully, focusing on topics that people are actively searching for online and that will appeal to individuals who are likely to need what your company has to offer.
• Provide Value to Readers: Tips are only valuable if they provide useful information to members of your target audience. For example, if you determine that the phrase “social media” is an appropriate key phrase for your audience, don’t just define what social media is. Instead, give readers ideas for how they can utilize social media effectively or provide criteria for determining which social media sites they need to participate in. Focus on sharing other interesting tidbits that they can use.
• Project a Professional Image: The quality of the content published on your website – on every single page of it – will have an impact on how people perceive your company. Effective tip centers must feature content that is well-written, factual, grammatically correct, and free from spelling mistakes.

Mary Gormandy White is co-founder of Mobile Technical Institute, where she works with clients throughout the U.S. as a professional trainer, consultant, and speaker, focusing on topics related to HR, management, and public relations. She has extensive professional writing experience and is the author of 101 Human Resource Management Tips and 101 Successful PR Campaign Tips in the LifeTips book series.

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Step Back:

Assuming you already have a variety of social media presences on the web, figure out which ones bear the most fruit. Where are the conversations taking place? Which community has the most active users? These are your targets for finding new blood, people who are already taking part.

Sync Your Profiles:

By interlinking your profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube, et. al), you have a unified front. You can connect with a variety of people on a variety of platforms in this way, as well as access their information on those same platforms.

Share Your Needs:

Use your established platforms to put your needs out there. Those who respond aren’t simply trolling job boards or resume reservoirs for work, but actually taking part in your online conversations. These writers are more likely to already have a firm grasp on your audience (themselves) and will likely be able to write web content that fits your needs.

Lou Perseghin lives in Providence, RI and works for a non-profit managing volunteers, recruiting members and handling marketing efforts.

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1. Do your SEO homework. You can’t create newsworthy and relevant website content if you don’t know what is newsworthy and relevant. Take a look at the posts and news stories people are re-tweeting. What’s on the front page of Yahoo and other sites today? Once you find the top trends, use Google’s Keyword Tool to pinpoint the best search terms.
2. Find a unique slant. If the news story doesn’t relate to your industry, your article will sound like you’re just capitalizing on hot news trends to get hits. You may have to stretch to find the relevance, but with creative thinking, most stories can be slanted to any industry. For instance, on the anniversary of September 11, I wrote an article for a freelance writing site about how to cover disasters and death tactfully. A writer friend of mine employed SEO brilliance and cultural relevance when she wrote a blog post for a hair-products retailer about how hair has been used in the past to soak up oil spills, and government officials are contemplating this technique for the Gulf oil spill.
3. Hire a freelance writer. Freelance writers have a unique eye view on the world. They can keep up-to-date on search trends so you don’t have to. It’s their job to come up with original story ideas that are relevant to their clients’ target market. You can use our website content tips to do it yourself—or you can trust a professional to give you the SEO results you need.

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

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An Alternative to Cold Calling

In the past, a blind e-mail to a name in a large directory was the standard way to source new work. With Twitter, it’s now easier to gain direct access to those same people without a filter. Responding to their tweets through @ replying and re-tweeting is your in, and building your own informative feed that blends your current work with your unique voice is your sell. It shows your work and unique personality, something lost in a one-shot e-mail.

Build Your Sources/Employers

Sharing your current work through your twitter feed serves a two-fold purpose. It shows that you’re busy (and reliable), and showcases the topics you cover. If you’ve done your due diligence connecting with editors, content managers and marketers in position to hire freelancers, they know you’re out there and more importantly, know how to connect with you. As well, connecting with other freelancers in your industry is a great way to gather new sources and information for your current projects by asking pointed questions and responding in kind.

Utilizing a few minutes of your time a day building a network in 140 characters or less could yield work and sources down the road.

Lou Perseghin lives in Providence, RI and works for a non-profit managing volunteers, recruiting members and handling marketing efforts.

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With poor grammar running rampant, it makes people wonder if SEO content even needs to be written properly. The truth is, SEO content doesn’t have to be grammatically perfect—and sometimes, probably shouldn’t be.

When Poor Grammar Helps Your SEO Content

SEO content should be written the way we speak. In real life, people don’t always speak like English professors. For instance, it’s okay to end a sentence with a preposition if re-wording it to be “proper English” would sound awkward. It’s also okay to use slang if it helps your audience relate to your message.

When Poor Grammar Hurts Your SEO Content

How much is too much when it comes to poor grammar? If your grammar is so bad it distracts from your message, you’ve crossed the line from “good SEO content” into “bad writing.” If your SEO content is riddled with spelling errors, your company looks unprofessional.

When You Hire a Freelance Writer, Appropriate Grammar is Part of the Package

A freelance writer knows when it’s okay to break the rules to reach your target market. But that same professional will make sure there are no embarrassing errors that distract your customers or make them think you don’t care about your SEO content.

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

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Proper Preparation

1. Find out what keywords search engines rank your current site and copy for by using the Google keyword tool.
2. Choose a small number of keywords to target with each page’s website content. This will help the search engines send the best traffic to your site based on exactly the information each page offers.
3. Decide if the new website copy will be linked to in copy that already exists. Often new website content is written to expand on something that is written about on an existing page. When this is the case be sure to know the exact keyword phrase to be linked so it can be properly incorporated into the keyword strategy.

Making it Happen

1. Start by looking over the keywords and phrases that the website copy will target. Double check the tense and part of speech of the specific phrase to make sure that they will easily be incorporated into the same website content.
2. Don’t overuse the keyword phrases. One on the most common mistakes is to attempt to include the targeted keyword phrases as many times as possible in the content. Keywords should make sense in context and should not stand out to the user who is reading the copy. As a rule of thumb the keyword should appear once in the first paragraph and one to three other times in the page, depending on the length of the copy.
3. Remember the goal of the copy. Writing only for the search engines can hinder the user’s experience.

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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Thank god we still have blogs though, right? No character limits here, just sweet sweet freedom to share our musings with the world. Not so, says Chris Garrett in a recent post for Copyblogger.  Brevity is a virtue for blogs and tweets alike. If you blog for your business, be sure to deliberate over each post just as you would over a tweet.  You may have successfully piqued your followers’ interest on Twitter and lured them to the bulk of your content, but don’t assume you’ve won them over just because they’re on your  site.  Each blog post should show that you value your readers’ time. That’s not to say you can’t indulge in a few linguistic flourishes, but make sure that you have a clear point—that you have something of use to share with your readers.

Successful content marketing should benefit producer and consumer alike.  Blogging on its own can be a massive time commitment, but effective, succinct, well-edited blogging is even more so. If you aren’t sure you’re up to the task, or as Chris Garrett puts it, you are just “too lazy to write less,” you may want to consider outsourcing your content marketing efforts by hiring writers who have the time, energy, and expertise to tackle your blogging needs.

Nicola Fairhead is an ideaLaunch editorial intern with a ferocious appetite for writing, editing, and consuming content.  She has quickly become a content marketing evangelist.

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1. Do you consider search engine optimization to be part of writing copy?
2. How many keyword phrases do you typically include in a page’s content?
3. What percentage of the text do you normally have as targeted keywords?
4. How do you proceed if the keywords a client provides will not fit into the text due to tense or part of speech?
5. How would you proceed if you realize the client has provided you with keywords that do not seem to match the industry or subject of the webpage the content is being written for?
6. If you finish the copy for a page and realize that you overused the keywords due to the subject how will you modify the copy?

As more copy writing is focused on the web, it is more important to make sure that when hiring writers they understand the basics of SEO and are able to write to optimize for the keyword phrases that are being targeted.

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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Last week, I enlightened you all on keyphrase research, and this week we finally get to do some writing. My favorite! SuccessWorks’ copywriting course contains some great tips on where your keyphrases should go, how many times they should appear and how to implement them into your copy, both old and new.

Where Do Keyphrases Belong?

• Headlines
• Sub-headlines
• Hyperlinks
• Sprinkled organically throughout your copy

See that word up there? Organically. Heather says there’s no magic number for how many times your phrases should appear in your copy. If you focus on the flow of your copy rather than technical aspects you and your customers will be much happier. There are two ways to treat your web site once you’ve compiled your keyphrase arsenal: keyphrase editing and original writing.

Keyphrase Editing

Ideal for:

• Articles
• White papers
• FAQ pages
• About Us pages
• Category and Subcategory pages
• Older blog posts

Not ideal for:

• Home pages
• Crucially important sales pages
• Product pages

Original Copywriting

Heather compares this method with building your own house, starting from the ground up. She suggests getting organized before putting your fingers to keys. That thought bubble above your head should say two things: Benefits and Action.

• Take five minutes to brainstorm and outline your ideas
• Jot down relevant links
• Write down essential components of your copy
• List benefits for your customers
• Narrow down the action your customers should take

I love this lesson, particularly because I love writing, but also because she does a great job of highlighting the important aspects of copywriting that sometimes get lost in the SEO craze. She stresses that it’s about the writing, the tone and the information. She brings dignity back to writing copy for (gasp!) marketing purposes. If you can communicate that you care about your product or service, your readers will pick up on that and become customers.

My favorite part of the lesson comes toward the end. I write fiction, and one of the hardest parts (and thus, the most important) of writing is editing. Heather encourages the use of shorter paragraphs with white space, efficient language (“Don’t say in five words what you can say in three.”), bulleted lists and engaging copy. After all, it doesn’t matter how easy your site is to read if it puts your readers to sleep.

Next week, we’ll be traveling back in time to that keyphrase editing I mentioned earlier. Come join me. Back in time.

For many copywriters the overall concepts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are like a foreign language. So asking a writer who is unfamiliar with SEO to understand the nitty-gritty specifics may mean you need a PhD in SEO in order to train your writer, and that’s going to take more time than you have to give.

But if you understand a few misconceptions, you can make sure your copywriter doesn’t do more harm than good when they beef up your copy via SEO through content creation.

More is Not Better
The first misconception is that more is better. Just because the search engines say their search spiders will read up to 30 keywords per page does not mean that every page should have 30 different keywords stuffed into the website copy. Search engines look at keyword relevance - not just how many times a particular keyword is used or how many similar keywords are used on a particular page.

Match Your Tags
The second misconception is how the search engines use meta data and tags. Search engines each use different meta data such as the title, keyword, and description tags in different ways. Each of these engines is trying to use this data to improve the user’s experience and provide better search results. SEO writers need to make sure the copy they write promotes the same keywords and content in these tags.

Not Just for Search Engines
The third misconception in SEO copywriting is that the SEO copywriting is being done exclusively for the search engines. SEO writers need to stay aware of the user’s experience and how their SEO content will improve the visitors ability to use the site, find the information they are looking for, and trust the company’s expertise.

Many marketing companies also make sure they have writers skilled in SEO writing. These writers already know how to write good SEO copy without overdoing it. Sometimes it’s easier to give the job to someone that knows how to do it rather than learn it all yourself in order to teach it to someone.

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.