Part 3: content, copy, adwords, and html  

Writing for the web means writing in different formats and for different audiences. In this part we will focus on different styles of writing that are the most common. How to produce good content Copywriting Copywriting is essentially about writing text in a way that it converts to sales. Using positive words, enticing emotions, and alluding to things rather than writing directly about them, are good techniques to use. Simply put: to awake the imagination in the reader. Often copywriting is about writing as little as possible to remove any words or sentences that are not necessary for the reader. Because the human mind is really good at filling in the blanks, by writing less you can actually evoke more emotions and feelings than when you write a lot. However, writing as little as possible is, as you might assume, in direct conflict with SEO where you want a certain amount of content otherwise it will not rank well. Therefore, copywriting is most relevant in two areas: product descriptions and Adwords, but more on that later. Regardless, the essence of copywriting is good to keep in mind for any content that you produce, so that’s where we start. Tips for writing a good copy: Talk to the reader directly:

Especially in copy texts, don’t be afraid of using “you” and speak to the reader directly. Instead of “this coat will look great on a man”, write “this coat will look great on you”. ● Make “space”: By using multiple paragraphs and spacing out text on the page you make it easier to read, which gives the reader the feeling of a better overview of the content. ● Use subheadings: Just as with multiple paragraphs, subheadings are good as they give the reader a better overview of the text and make it easier to read. ● Straight to the facts: Don’t hesitate to start a piece of content with its essence. Most content is never read in its entirety, so make sure the most important thing comes first and don’t waste your readers time. ● The KISS rule (Keep It Simple Stupid): Don’t use advanced language or industry jargon if you don’t have to. The basic rule of your mother applies here: if your mother would not understand it, then don’t use it. ● Use descriptive or explanatory language: Try to ‘paint pictures’ in the readers mind. Another thing useful in this kind of content is using metaphors to drive your points home or to explain things more clearly. ● Have a writing “rhythm”: Try to alternate between short and long sentences. This makes for a more playful style that often is easier to read. ● Variation: It is important to mention the keywords, but it is also important to be varied in the words you use. Just as with sentences, having a variation in words makes the text more interesting and more fun to read. ● Use lists:

Lists are actually a combination of headline, creating space and variation: by having a list you create all of the above. What’s more: lists are deemed to be good by Google for SEO rankings of content! Copywriting with SEO in mind - the man and the machine As mentioned earlier, there is a conflict between copywriting and SEO, the first wants to be as short as possible, and the latter needs enough content to rank well. This conflict, between man and machine, is always important to have in mind. Any webcontent with SEO focus should be written for a double audience: the visitors of the website, who should be converted into customers, and the search engines, that need to rank the site for the appropriate search term. Both are equally important: what’s good in a website that no one finds and what’s the use of a website that isn’t trustworthy for the reader. Mastering this is what makes a great copywriter. Headlines Good copy is also about a great headline to grab the user’s attention. Here are some rules for what makes interesting ‘attention grabbers’. The first two or three words of your headline are critical. However, for SEO purposes, the keyword should also always be in the headline as well, which can sometimes be a tough challenge. The headline should be written with social sharing and wanting to read more in mind, and also for Google and other search engines. Often a headline includes a number or list: i.e. "The 5 best mobile phones right now!". The key to a good headline is to tell enough to get readers interested, but to allure that you have more where that came from (if you

can, try to address a problem users may have: "how to use your smartphone as a remote control" might not create that many clicks as not that many people would have this problem). Research has proven that certain words or phrases that quickly get the reader involved are the best "stoppers" or attention grabbers for headlines, for example power words or phrases like: ● free ● ●

announcing amazing

● ●

attractive easy

● ●

secret guaranteed

● ● ●

win discover make money

● ●

look younger lose weight

However use grabbers with caution as the words need to be relevant to the article that they belong to. Don't use words that don’t fit with the content. Different kinds of content ● Blog articles / opinion pieces ● ●

Articles Product descriptions

● ● ●

Landing pages / category pages Satellite sites Made For Adsense (MFA)

Blogs and opinion pieces These are articles that can vary greatly in style, purpose and quality. Blogs are traditionally personal, written by a person and often about a certain theme or with a message that the writer wants to bring across. Blog posts can be of any length, from long and extremely thoroughly written with thousands of words, to short updates (often called micro blogging), that can be as small as few sentences. Twitter is sometimes referred to as micro blogging, since user is restricted in the size of a post. Most blog posts are, however, in the range of 400-800 words. Because of their personal style they also vary a lot in how they are written, and there are no clear-cut rules about what you can and cannot do in a blog post. They are an expression of someone's personality, and possess all the nuances of their author’s voice. As with any great texts, good blog posts are about evoking feelings in the reader, either being angry, happy or surprised, depending on the agenda and the subject. Articles This mostly refers to articles on certain topics, which can be anything from a piece about "top 10 sights to visit in Helsinki" to "5 reasons he dumps you". These articles are often informative and the goal is to be good for SEO and to answer people's questions, preferably questions they are searching answers for. These articles are very frequent on lifestyle and magazine sites but can also be found on other websites with big audiences, such as in the travel, home decoration and cooking sectors. The articles are often written in a classic informative style: easy to read (often with short paragraphs and multiple

subheadings), to the point, and with short sentences that are easy to digest. Articles are usually between 300-800 words long, depending on the subject and website preferences, of course. If the article is longer it is often divided into multiple parts over several pages. This is done both to make it easier to read (if the articles look very long then a lot of people will leave the website), as well as to create more ad views (as reading part 2 counts as a new page visit from an ad perspective). Often no more than 500-1000 words are shown on one page. Articles are very often written to "feel good": their ambitions are to draw readers and make readers feel informed, positive, or surprised. A good article makes the reader go "wow, I didn't know that". Product description This is a somewhat special type of content. Many people do not realize it, but product descriptions are one of the most common types of content that is written on the Internet. The reason is simple: in order for every product in a store to rank well you want to have a special, unique text for each and every product. A standard eCommerce store can have hundreds, thousands, or even more products that quickly add up to a lot of content. Product descriptions are often descriptive, 50-200 words long and focus on the product. Most of the time these are written to be very informative and formal, but sometimes quirky and special. Some websites have made their names by being fun, ironic or youthful in their product descriptions. The norm, however, is to have more informative and selling copy, which usually is easier to write as well.

When writing product descriptions the following things are important to remember: ● Write for the customer: Often when selling products the language the shop owners use is full of complicated words or industry jargon. Try to write for as wide audience as possible. The old mom trick is relevant here too: if your mom wouldn't understand it, don’t use it. ● Use call to action: Use phrases such as "order your copy now", "take the opportunity and get a nice new…." or "place your order today" and similar. These simple call to action greatly increase conversion rates. ● Think about related keywords: What other keywords could be relevant for users buying this product? What could they be searching for in addition to just the product name. ● Make sure that any dimensions, measurements or similar information are written correctly: This is often provided by the manufacturer but may be mentioned in the product descriptions as well. The facts need to be the same everywhere. ● The aim is to sell a product: Avoid negatively charged words and associations, a store and its customers want to feel positive about the product. ● Avoid duplicating content/parts of the content: Product descriptions are often similar because products are related, as well as common sentences such as: "order now, and take advantage of our great prices and shipping offers”. Similar sentences could be used for almost every product, but would be flagged as duplicate content. Avoid them, write new sentences every time!

Landing pages / category pages This category is actually very similar

to

product

descriptions, but with a twist. What if you don't sell a lot of different products, but only a single service such as window cleaning? You can’t have a lot of different product pages for your one product or service. Or can you? The solution is a landing page: a page made for a specific keyword or search phrase where your product is relevant: one page for "cleaning services", one for "window cleaning", one for "clean windows" and so on. Each page article is unique and tailored to the specific keywords. Then when somebody searches for one of the keywords they will land on the keywords specific page, and that's why such pages are called landing pages. The aim of landing pages is the same as with product descriptions: to convert visitors into customers. The texts are usually a little longer: 200-300 words, but can vary quite a bit in their appearance. Usually the longer the better for SEO purposes. Just like all other SEO content, the texts are written for both the customers visiting the site as well as the search engines crawling it. However, as these pages don’t always come with a product image next to the text (as it is almost always the case in an ecommerce store), it is important to make the content as “light”, understandable, and reader friendly as possible. Use multiple paragraphs, not too long sentences, subheadings and, if possible, lists. Satellite sites These types of sites are not widely used anymore, but were frequently used earlier. Here the aim was to set up a small site with a very niched focus: i.e. a site that is only about a specific product or service. By having highly

targeted content on a satellite site you could get it to rank higher on a keyword. You could then link it to your main site, which would create a link that the search engine deemed as relevant further improving your score. However, as the use of this method spread the effectiveness of it went down. Google Penguin updates have also made the use of links from satellite sites a lot less powerful. Because these sites were often quite quickly put together, the content for them was usually not of the best quality. When websites are small and niched, the content can be written in more or less any style as long as the keyword is mentioned. In this regard content for satellite sites is more similar to blogging as it can vary a lot in how it is written. Length of content here is usually 200-400 words, anything less would not be enough to have a good impact on SEO, but more content is often not needed. MFA sites MFA stands for "made for adwords", and, similarly to satellite sites, these sites were a lot more popular earlier. MFA sites were often of low quality, and did not aim to link to other sites, but rather to fill them with ads and make money just through clicks from visitors. However, since Google implemented the Panda update these kinds of sites struggle to rank high and are a lot less frequently used nowadays. Content here is similar to satellite sites: highly varied in format, and often 200-400 words in length. AdWords AdWords are the ads that are shown next to/above the search results on Google. This is a very special kind of web content since you are paying to put it there to begin with! This kind of content is very short, more a headline than an

article, and there is no need to be unique, as it will never be ranked in SEO. The amount of characters for an ad is very limited, you only get to play with 35 characters per line, a total of 70 characters, as well a headline which can be 25 characters long. That limit is counting all the blank spaces as well, which means that you’ll have as little as 8-15 words in total to work with. Here the copywriting aspect is important, on a level that did not even exist before the Internet. Write as much as possible with as few words and characters as possible! Another thing that sets AdWords apart is that you actually don't want to oversell. Because as an advertiser you pay a cost per click on the ad, you only want relevant clicks. You don't want an ad that says "free Ferrari, click here!", unless you are giving away free Ferrari’s. If you don’t, then a lot of visitors that click on the ad will be disappointed and leave when they come to your site (because there is no Ferrari), but you will still need to pay Google for every click. For that reason good AdWords actually do two things at the same time: sell and filter. They should invite visitors to buy a product, but only those that are actually willing to buy. This is, as you might guess, not the easiest thing to achieve in 8-15 words. An AdWords text can, in one way, be viewed as the headline of an article. However, as mentioned earlier, the aim is not to make as many visitors as possible click, but rather to get as many relevant buyers as possible to click. Still, the use of numbers and "power words" are relevant and often give better results. Also, as with headlines, it is a good idea to remove common words such as "a, an, in, on, it etc”. The human reader can often fill in these words without needing to take up valuable character space.

HTML The last bit of this lecture is about HTML. HTML is a coding language, the language that is used for much of what you can see on the Internet. The browser you are using is actually reading HTML files that tell the browser where on the screen the image, content, and headline should be, as well as what is a link and what isn't. The aim here for you is not to learn HTML, but to understand the basics because it is often used in SEO content. HTML in text In HTML you can mark up words or characters. These markups are signals to the browser that some words or characters should have different styles. For text, these are the most common ones: ● marks a link ● marks bold text ● marks headline 1 (main headline) ● marks headline 2 (often subheading) ● marks italics ● marks a paragraph ● is used for telling the browser to show a picture HTML works this way: you write a tag (the one with ), then the text you want to mark, and when you want to end the formatting you write a closing tag: . For example, if you want to mark the word "juice" in bold, you should write: “this juice is delicious!" Then the word juice will be bold when shown on a website. You can visit this link and play a little and see the results directly: http://www.hscripts.com/tutorials/html/textp.php (at the bottom of the page, write your own tests or just paste the sentence written above and click "show".)

Some important things to notice with HTML tags ● A tag only ends with : This means if you get it

wrong

and

write

"this

juice is delicious!" (notice the missing “/“), then the entire text will become bold! Try on the website linked above and you will see the difference. This is very important because if the tags are not closed properly, then the entire text of the website may have the wrong format! ● The tag is actually a lot longer: The tag is for links, and you need to tell the browser where to link to as well! Therefore the tag is actually written like this: a link with http:// in the URL, and a link without http://. ● The tag should only be used once in a text. ● is not always used: The paragraph tag is not always used, but is a common way to mark which sentences are part of the same paragraph. The tag opens at the start of the paragraph and closes after the last sentence in the paragraph. This tag can also include “parameters” (styling commands), for example when opening with