In a quite informative session at the Search Engine Strategies Conference, Heather Lloyd-Martin, director of search strategies for WebSourced Inc., and Jill Whalen, owner of HighRankings.com, dealt with one of the most fundamental, but perhaps most important aspect of the search engine industry: producing web copy that it is appealing to your target audience while at the same time being search engine friendly.

WebProNews' Chris Richardson was in attendance, and will be all week, funneling the most up-to-date information to us as the conference progresses.

Effectively writing optimized copy is no easy task, but Jill and Heather assured the audience that it gets easier with practice.

While the goal, as Bob Bly put it, is "creating copy that makes the argument so convincingly the customer can't help but want to buy the product being advertised," the argument many raise is that it’s easier said than done. After all, that’s what we all want to accomplish, right?

Though it’s fairly obvious, it still needs to be said that the first step to creating such compelling content is to delve into the mind of the audience and understand what these eyeballs are searching for.

Point of fact: good copy equals conversions. And by Jill’s estimation good optimized copy with the right balance of keyword content is 1/3 of SEO.

It’s tricky to know where to place and how to place your targeted keywords, so based on Jill and Heather’s presentation, we’ve put together this handy Dos and Don’ts list for effective content optimization.

DOs

DO create a page title that is intriguing and eye catching. This is the window to your shop. Compelling titles entice potential customers to choose your site over others. The higher number of clicks will pull weight the search engines as well, giving your site more relevance. Think of your webpage titles as headlines and, as a guideline, limit your title to 50-75 characters (with spaces).

DO think of keyword variations. Be creative with keyword choices. Brainstorm all variations of the words by adding “-ing” “-ed,” and any other prefix or suffix combination. Also look for synonyms and include those in your copy (dining, eatery). Even multiple spellings and misspellings can help (web cam, webcam, behavior, behaviour).

Do use keyphrases in hyperlinks—think of it as a persuasion benefit, like pushing a user to take action.

DO a description tag. This is important regardless of search engine weight, although search engines can give credence to well-written ones. A good description is equivalent to a good sales pitch to the reader.

DO use the 80/20 rule when choosing which page to optimize. Optimize first the pages that cover the most important 20% of your products (i.e., top products, or best-selling items). Optimize the remaining 80% incrementally.

DO create supplemental content like FAQ pages, how-to pages, related product articles, manufacturer info pages, and blogs.

DO think like a reporter, asking the five W questions (who, what, when, where, why).

DO highlight your location. This is especially recommended if you are a location sensitive business.

DONTs

DON’T wait to implement copy changes for expected seasonal sales. Give yourself a 6-month window when optimizing seasonal content to give the engines time to adjust to your alterations.

DON’T insert keywords into copyrighted material. Look for creative ways to place keywords around these items.

DON’T forget your audience and what they are looking for. This can’t be stressed enough.

DON’T forget title tags.

DON’T rely on graphics. Text is much more important as spiders don’t read graphics, they read actual text. Image alt text is not that effective and be aware that WYSIWYGs can turn pages into graphics. Use flash in small doses as it is also not readable by engines. Other things not readable: comment tags and graphic headlines. PDFs, however, are indexable.

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"I never met a Kentuckian who wasn't coming home."--Governor Happy Chandler

Are you serious? If you look at Google's guidelines for webmasters, they suggest a minimum of 200 words per page. So that gives us only 50 words of slop?

JM

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Hey, he's just reporting what was recomended by the "experts"...

I too, take issues with a number of things that were said, with the 250 word limit being one of the more glaring things. But I have to admit that that limitation is not going to "hurt" a site, but just put undo limitation on it.

But it seems like most of what we have in the SEO industry is either some expert's opinion, someone reporting what they thought an expert said, or "guidelines" which is not hard and fast information.

I'm not an expert, but I do have some experience is certain aspects of SEO so I will share this information that was accurate about 6 months ago.

I have a site that has about 1,800 pages of different sized HTML that run as large as 500k-600k each (gasp!).

Since the content of each page; and across all pages was virtually unique, I was in a special position to conduct some analysis of what was and what was not getting indexed, and this is what I found:

By looking for short unique strings in the pages, and seeing at what point I could no longer locate them via search, I was able to ascertain that Google would index up to about 90k of page content before choking. I was not able to locate anything in a page beyond that point. So to facilatate Goog's small stomach, I broke up most the pages so they were about 100k or less.

What was VERY interesting to me was that I did NOT see this limitation at Yahoo! I can't remember what the largest file was that I tested, but Yahoo seemed to have no problem with at least 200k-300k pages.

Now, I will admit that this site is anything but normal(of course...) in that the content is has an ultra-low keyword density, aside from the keyword-stuffing in the meta tags. If you took normal content and had pages as large as these, the results might be different.

If anyone would like to check this out, please contact me for the site URL (no advertising) and you can test it out for yourself. The site's content is about 6.7 million expired domain names, all in HTML pages and makes a pretty nifty test bed for this kind of thing.

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I would like to see some back up to that as well.
I do some consulting on conversion optimization and I always suggest the pages be 200 to 300 words, as to not overwhelm visitors.

We have to get them to read it if we want to convert.

I had believed 250 to be extremely low as well.

I believe a WPW poster did a 9 month test on
"I love tacos" ?
I believe it was member - EliteSkills

If I recall correctly he had found higher rankings with his higher total word count pages, ending at perhaps it was 1000?

Either way, the number seems very low. And agreeing with your point most is re-gurgled hear-say in SEO forums, and aside from personal experience I dont take anything as law.

Of course an expert opinion is as good as the expert is in the viewers eyes, so of course your examples are strong opinions of skilled observers.

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Charlotte newspaper

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...ighlight=tacos

350 words beat 1000 -

BUT

3000 beat 350.

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Charlotte newspaper

The information in this thread is not necessarily what was said in our session, so please take it with a grain of salt.

Neither Heather nor I have EVER said don't go over 250 words per page as that would just be dumb! Heather did mention that 250 words works well for her, but that's all she said regarding that number.

There are other things posted here that I take exception with and don't believe were said in our session.

For instance:

This is silly, and also not said. Yes, we like to optimize for 2 or 3 keyword PHRASES per page (not keywords) but NO, we would never say that you could get tagged for spamming by going over that. I optimize many pages for 5 phrases at times, where it makes sense to do so.

Please note that there are NO absolutes in SEO, which is why you can't simply post list of do's and don'ts like are in this thread. We did not post any do's and don'ts in the session, for that very reason.

Another one that was not said (at least not by me and I'm pretty sure not by Heather):

Where in the world did you get that one from? Certainly not from our session.

Nope, not said by us, and this is something I vehemently disagree with as well.

Not said. It's possible Heather said it, but I don't recall her doing so.

Please, when reporting on a session, then report on a session...it's really not fair to add your own thoughts into your report, which were not necessarily touched upon in the session, because it makes it appear as if the speakers said it. And even though it may be your understanding that you should do something a certain way, it isn't necessarily the speaker's way of doing things (if it was, they would have said it).

Hope this helps clear things up a bit regarding this session.

My apologies to anyone for misrepresenting. The flurry of notes flying my way from the conference and the relative difficulty of communicating directly may have skewed some things or caused me to misinterpret Chris' notes. I didn't judge anything I received, just reported at face value. Again, sorry if you were misled.

link to corrected article

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"I never met a Kentuckian who wasn't coming home."--Governor Happy Chandler

SEO is the process of testing. SES to me, was all built around testing...

Theories are built on failure. Bruce Clay uses well over 250 words of copy and he is sitting pretty on the first page.

The idea is to work around the user. Create copy that engages the user. If you are good enough to keep a user on your page with 500 words, then you have accomplished your goal.

I have found that I can do this with 250-300 words of copy. Some may have other ideas- This is all a test.............

Thanks for the clarification. I've always shot for a minimum of 250 words per page with a maximum of around 800 when possible. The maximum was usability, the minimum SEO. I had this flash of fear that I'd be spending the rest of my summer redoing thousands of pages!!! :-)

Now I can relax and work on current projects.

JM

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If you were ranking with the larger pages, then you wouldn't have any reason to re-do those pages. You're just talking silly here.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Brian.

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