So. Content and optimization go hand-in-hand. Web content is ideally produced with search engine optimization principles in mind; going back in later and “editing for SEO” generally produces results with which no one is happy.

The first rule is to create good content, quality content, content that says something. Many websites contain contentless verbiage, which will not help either in terms of being user-friendly or in terms of being SEO-friendly. Good content attracts attention, inbound links, and other referrals. When the site is getting discussed on other sites, in blogs and in emails, the search engines notice the activity. More “buzz” brings more people to the site.

Some other SEO considerations to take into account when creating content:

Changing content: the more frequently you can add new content to a site, the better it is for your search engine ranking. A constant influx of new content keeps the web crawlers revising the weight they’re giving your site. One easy way to do this is to maintain a blog, or several blogs, on the site, and update them regularly (daily, if possible; weekly as a minimum). Blogs add additional weight when they’re equipped with RSS feeds and submitted to specialized blog directories. Other options for changing content are articles placed on the site, a rotating set of tips (that can include your targeted keywords), a letter from the CEO, etc.

Remember that search engines crawl every page, so the same attention should be paid to every page as is paid to your home page. Some visitors will deep-link in, meaning that they never even see the home page, so make sure that every page has a point. Great content always answers the question: so what? … and then adds a call to action to that answer.

Great content engages users, stays on-theme, provides users with a logical path for site navigation, and provides high conversion rates. This is obvious in making the site user-friendly, but it also makes the site SEO-friendly in giving each page a “theme” (through a natural use of keywords and other content) onto which the web crawlers can latch.

Make the visitor the focus of each page (in a sense, this goes back to the “so what?” question: what can this page do for me?). When people put keywords into the search field, they’re looking for something specific: make sure that the appropriate page tells them whether or not you can give them what they want, clearly and unequivocally.

Along the same lines, write about benefits for the visitor. This isn’t the place to say how great you are: if you meet a prospect’s needs, then you’re great from their point of view … and that’s all that matters.

One way to make sure that your site is doing what you want it to do is to make a list of all the pages on the site. Look at each one individually. Is each one action-oriented? Does it answer the “so what?” question and provide a clear call to action?

Put it up, try it out. The great thing about websites is their flexibility. If something isn’t working, take it down and try something else. Solicit input from current clients/customers. What other content would they like to see there? What’s helpful and what isn’t?

Forget marketspeak. Those of you accustomed to writing copy IN CAPITAL LETTERS with lots of exclamation marks—lose it. It’s not good SEO and, frankly, it’s not a great use of language either.

You may wish to use a content analyzer at some point in the process. Content analyzers can provide useful data for making your pages more effective. Content analyzers can alert you to broken links and analyze your pages for duplicate content. (The analyzer shows the similarity percentage among all the pages on your site, so you can see what pages are similar enough to trigger a flag in the major search engines. Your site will be penalized if it displays too much duplicate content. The higher the similarity, the more likely you will be penalized.)

Know your audience. Know the people who are likely to be searching for your site, and the phrases and ideas to which they will respond. Again, this makes your site user-friendly … and web crawler-friendly too.

You want to start with great keywords, but be sure not to overuse them. If the content doesn’t sound natural, then chances are you’ve leaned too hard on the same group of keywords. Derivations of your targeted keywords can enlarge your audience, or encourage visitors to dig deeper into the site.

It shouldn’t have to be said, but make sure that all of your content is grammatically correct and conforms to the rules of American English usage. Errors may drive potential customers or clients away. On the other hand, be sure to include common misspellings of terms used in your pages in your meta tags—because people enter all sorts of things into the search fields!

Usability is a design issue, a content issue, and a search optimization issue. On each page, ask yourself: what is the most important thing that you want visitors to do? Make that the easiest thing to do, explained with the most clear and vivid language available.

It’s not only the quality of content that matters; quantity is also very important. People search for a huge variety of words in all sorts of combinations. The more text you have, the more chance that some particular phrase will match the exact phrase being searched for. Moreover, some search engines also place importance on quantity: they assume that a large website has had more effort put into development and is more likely to be high quality. (This may or may not be true, of course; but in this case it’s what the search engines “believe” that matters.) So take care to look for both quality and quantity of website content.

Stay away from the “free content” sites that offer gadgets and miscellaneous information (word of the day, quote of the day, etc.) unless that gadget or that information is clearly relevant to your site. The same goes for newsfeeds. Make sure that all of your content is both relevant and of good quality, really useful to anyone who might be a customer or client.

What about if your site isn’t naturally content-rich? Business sites in particular (both B-to-B and B-to-C) may see their sites as not being content-based. Be creative! Whatever you sell, there’s something you can say about it. A florist can provide articles about flowers; a furniture store can do a series on cleaning or repair. You can write about semiconductors, at a pinch. Look for the movers and shakers in your industry and invite them to write for you. If you really think about it, there are very few sites whose raison d’etre cannot generate some content.

Will this bring visitors to your site? You’d be surprised. Being seen as an information and authority site gets you bookmarked in customers’ browsers, and they will buy from sites they have learned to trust. If you cannot find content out there, and don’t have the time/skills to write it yourself, hire a copywriter to help you out.

Conclusion? Google is clearly rewarding good content, and a lot of the best-ranked sites out there have one thing in common—good writing. Make sure that you make it a priority. Content-based search engine optimization is usually hard work in the initial stages and—here’s your warning!—slow to show results. It is likely, however, to give you the best and most stable long-term results; and, once established, is relatively easy to maintain.

Want more? Be sure to visit Customline Wordware and sign up for Content Central, a free newsletter filled with tips, examples, and articles about providing SEO-friendly content! Or contact me at info@customline.com for your own content consultation. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

How does it work?

1. Write an article first. Make it a decent article, one that contains useful information for people interested in your subject. Make sure to include any keywords you’re targeting in the article, but don’t overdo it — some of the article directories won’t allow overuse of keywords.
2. If you’re an author, what you do want to do is submit fairly short articles highlighting something (an angle about your book perhaps) that it reads like a mini-infomercial. These are then copied by people looking for content for their websites, newsletters, blogs, etc. The trick is that when they copy the article they are required to keep the “resource box” or “author bio” intact. It is here that you list yourself, your book/website/blog, and put in the links (usually a maximum of three). You not only get links via the article directories that you submit to, but if anyone uses your article, you get more links.
3. Submit the article. At the end of the article, there’s usually a space for a signature line of sorts: this is where you can provide the link back to your website. Change the sig line you use so that you can point to specific pages within your website — search engines like that.
4. If you want the same article to be on your blog, go ahead — just be sure to post it to your blog first, before you put it on the article directory site. That will keep you from being penalized for duplicate content. Wait for a couple of weeks before re-posting to the articles sites, and change the title and some of the content.
5. Article directories are generally free, though some will charge for faster service or for more prominent placement. In my experience, it’s not useful to pay these extra charges; just keep a flow of articles going out and providing links back to your blog or website.
6. Remember that these directories aren’t like magazines or journals. There’s some editorial screening, but it’s mostly to be sure that the article is on topic and not over-using keywords. You may not be in great literary company on the sites, but that’s not the point: it’s to get the links to your site. HOWEVER … don’t think this means you can be messy or submit anything but your best work — that sort of thing will come back to haunt you. Besides, you may wish to give the article URL to potential clients, etc., to show your thought leadership in your vertical. Often, as I mentioend above, these articles will be copied by others looking for content, which is good — they’re required to maintain the link back to you and your name on the piece, and this increases both backlinks and your reputation — but it means that you really can’t make this a halfhearted attempt at writing. If you don’t have a writer on staff, contract with a freelance writer: you won’t regret it.

Where do you find these directories? Here as always, Google is your friend: in about thirty seconds I found this list.

Squidoo is its own little world. Here your article takes the form of what they call a “lens,” that’s like a mini-website. You can use photos, videos, all sorts of things in your lens; they’re fun to create and you can use the lens as a calling-card to potential clients or readers.

So there it is. Use article directories to boost your visibility on the web. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Any book proposal, fiction or nonfiction, must include a marketing plan, and the more specific it is, the better. Publishers don’t want to hear that you’ll go along with their ideas, they want to know that you’ll be constantly coming up with ideas of your own, and following through on them. A website. An email list to which you belong. Flyers. Lectures. Giveaways. SEO. Social media. Direct mail. Local cable broadcasts. The list is limited only by your imagination.

And to help that imagination, enter a new blog by PR expert Rebecca Kellogg, Creative Marketing Campaigns. It’s still in its infancy, so don’t expect a plethora of ideas; but I’ve listened to Rebecca’s ideas for some time and I’m excited about the potential for this blog. Try it and see what you think!

An older post (but still relevant) that I think is particularly useful about creative book marketing is called, oddly enough, Creative Book Marketing, and is well worth the read.

If you want a little humor with your research on book marketing, check out the idea of book trailers here.

In any case, remember that it’s no longer up to you to simply write the best book you can. You have to market, market, market. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

And yet I occasionally find that these same smart people do not actually trust the very person … in whom they’ve theoretically put their trust.

It usually has to do with something that they all believe they “know to be true.” In these cases, I apparently play the renegade by trying to change something that everybody “knows” to be correct. And it almost always has to do with the old rule of placing two spaces between sentences. Time and time again I write or edit client copy, placing only one space between sentences, only to have the client gently correct (and, occasionally, admonish) me about it.

I may have pointed you to this site before; if so, bear with me. Read it. Read other articles. Read Robin Williams’ books. You do not have to take it on faith that I’m correct: do your own research.

And then repeat after me: It is incorrect to place two spaces between sentences. In fact, according to a colleague of mine, it has been incorrect in the typesetting world since 1954; if that’s true, then the change in practice is not even due entirely to the advent of computers (and the subsequent demise of monospaced type).

The simple truth is that your eye doesn’t need those two spaces to know that another sentence is about to begin. Your brain is smart enough to sort that out.

So, smart people, unite: learn the rules of usage so that you can write correctly, or — alternately — keep on employing me to do your writing and editing … and trust that I know what I’m doing! And then you’ll be .. beyond the elements of style!

Was it me, or did a cloud just pass in front of the sun?

Now my family, of course, was quick to point out that no-one else in their right mind would have noticed, much less cared that altar is not spelled with an “e.” My spouse quickly envisioned a world in which I’d be the Spelling Queen, sitting on a throne of semicolons and exclamation marks, sentencing to die those who make sloppy mistakes such as those. We all had a good laugh about it.

But the reality is that I’m probably not going to go do yoga at that particular studio, and, yeah, it’s because of the brochure. If someone’s that sloppy about writing/proofing, they may well be sloppy about other things as well. Probably not; but I’m not taking that chance.

When I approach companies about doing marketing communications for them, most people’s first reaction is along the lines of, “I can write; anybody can write; we don’t need you to write.” Well, respectfully, no: many of us have been taught to write (though I’ve seen some of the grammar used by my stepchildren’s teachers and hold out no hope that schools are doing anything to increase correct spelling, usage, and grammar); but that doesn’t mean that we can all do it well. Or even correctly.

That yoga studio just lost a potential client. Can all businesses afford that kind of loss? Paying someone like me to write — or even simply edit — marketing communications is, at the end of the day, a bargain at any price. Those saavy enough to know their limits are the ones who will continue to prosper, even in a recession. And they’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

(Oh, and if you hurry, you can probably still get that brochure out of the rubbish …)