Same Old Stuff
Creating an extremely useful web-based tool, or paying a programmer to create one
for you, is one of the most effective ways to build content, which will, in turn, help
you build natural linkage data. Writing articles will also help you build up your link
popularity.
Many websites blindly add large sums of free content to their site because they
think it will help them for low cost. The problems with adding exact copies of
low-quality articles are the following:
• Since the articles exist elsewhere, yours probably will not rank as well
as one of the other copies on the web.

low-quality content reflects poorly on you and wastes your link equity
that could be going toward getting unique content pages ranked.
• Many people add unfocused garbage to their site, which loses the
interest of their visitors.
• Some unscrupulous parties copy the contents of other websites
without asking. Tools such as CopyScape make this easy to detect,
although legal enforcement is cost prohibitive and too time consuming
for most publishers.
• Many tools scrape various RSS feeds and mix them to create many
content pages. Content generation tools such as these will require
search engines to place even greater trust on linkage data.
Some people also clutter up the Internet with search result screen scrapers and
other auto content generation crap. I am generally against generating low-quality
automated content, as I feel it lowers the quality and functionality of the web as a
whole, though I suppose some people may find it effective for generating traffic (at
least until their sites get banned).

Comparison Content
Many times, people are interested in the difference between two similar or
competing products. I created pages comparing Overture (now known as Yahoo!
Search Marketing) to Google AdWords, and many people search to find the pages
comparing and contrasting those two systems.
Content Format
Sometimes the format of information is as important as its quality. By distributing
information in different formats, it might become easier to pick up inbound links.
For example, good blog posts are often viral marketing link magnets.
Radio is not very competitive in many markets. SEO Rockstars and SEO Radio
are a few SEO-related radio programs that pick up many inbound links. There is
one quarterly print magazine about search marketing; as such, it is easy for them to
gain links because they are the only people distributing content in that format.
Ideal Content
If you can create something that becomes a well-cited authoritative work in your
field, it is worth far more than creating dozens of low-quality pages. The authority
granted by one well-referenced document will help boost the rankings of every
page on your site.
It is a good idea to create day-to-day content, but it is smart from a business
perspective to also try to create a few industry-standard pieces of work. Some
examples of well cited things I have done:

Many free SEO tools
• 101 ways to build links in 2006
• SEO for Firefox
• Industry event calendar
• This book

Deep Linkable Content
If you build a large website and large brand, it is a good idea to try to create nichespecific,
high-quality content that many people will directly reference/link to. This
will help search engines spider your sites better and help them understand that your
site is an authority on much more than just whatever is on the home page.
Free Decent Content
There is a ton of good, free content out there, but you need to do a bit of research
to find it. If you are building a long-term business, quality is usually more
important than quantity. Creative reintegration of other content with some fresh
new content or other features can make your site much more useful to your site
visitors, but you do not want to push it too far, as duplicate content filters improve
daily.
• If you sell products, make sure you grab the official specifications from
the manufacturers.
• Incorporate user feedback into the pages. These can add value to your
shopping experience and give you unique content.
• When you write articles, remember to quote and link to websites of
topical authorities.
• Incorporate product recommendations and related/compatible items
into pages.
• If you have a web-related idea or are researching the history of
something that may have appeared on the web, you can view what a
site looked like in the past from the Internet Archive. You may not be
able to use the old web copy, but screenshots might be acceptable and
how things change certainly makes for good article information.
• Integrate topic-specific RSS feeds into your website.
• Ask a friend to write an article for you or interview an industry expert.
• Search for articles on your topic in search engines. In addition, you
may want to look at article/e-zine directories and glance at industry
hub sites to see if the authors allow you to repost their articles. Many
people who know a decent amount about marketing will let you post
their articles in exchange for a link back to their site.
• Sometimes, it is worth the cost to hire a professional writer. Some of
my friends hire people to write press releases and articles to promote
each new site they create.

Common Content and Copyleft are two projects that aim to help the
free flow of information by allowing people to reuse various registered
content. Yahoo! created a free Creative Commons search.
• Content from prior to 1923 should usually be usable. Material from
1923 to 1963 may be usable depending on whether or not it was
copyrighted, published with a copyright notice, and whether or not the
copyright was renewed.
• The U.S. Government has a bunch of free copy on a variety of topics.
When in doubt, check with Copyright.gov or your local laws. A variety
of government resources are referenced at the end of the chapter.

Optimize Each Page
One of the most important things to understand is that each page is its own unit
and has its own ranking potential and its own relevant keywords. Usually a home
page has more value than the other pages, since it is typically the easiest place to
build links to. Home pages should generally be optimized for the most relevant
competitive keyword phrases in your market that you feel you would be able to
rank for. Interior pages should be optimized for other relevant phrases that relate
to the content of each page.
There are many things to optimize on each page. We already went through how to
choose your keywords, page titles, and meta tags. Within each page, there is also
content that can be optimized.

On-the-Page Optimization Only Goes So Far

When optimizing a page for competitive terms, the bulk of the ranking algorithm
will be based upon link analysis. Effective link building has no limit to how
much it can help your rankings.
Some people think that more is better, and more is better, and more is better. This
is not true with on-the-page keyword density, and additionally, some search
algorithms may discount artificial links that are created in quick bursts.
The algorithms for grading page copy are based on a bell curve. Some pages will
have near-perfect term weights. But after some point, added placement of certain
words does not make a page any more relevant; in fact, it can make a page become
less relevant.
Imagine a page that starts its page title, meta description, first header, first
paragraph, and second paragraph all with the same word. Does that sound like
natural quality information? Or perhaps more like someone trying to game the
relevancy algorithms?
So the point is, you have to mix it up. Sure, make the page title ultra-relevant, but
don’t forget to use a few subheaders that might not be keyword rich, and don’t

forget to use modifiers and related terms in some of your subheaders and
throughout the page copy.
The more your writing sounds like it was crafted for humans instead of bots,
generally the better it will rank. Search engines want to rank high-quality
information. Think news articles more than optimized pages. If your content
looks more like a newspaper article than a piece of obviously SEOed text, you are
on the right track.
Each search engine has its own algorithms, and they do not all align with one
another. Thus, the most effective way to improve your rankings on all search
engines will be via link building, but proper page structure and on-the-page
optimization play important roles in gaining targeted inbound traffic, especially for
non-competitive keyword phrases or in search engines that rely heavily on page
content.

Text is Important
Almost every page is going to have navigation and design elements. It’s impossible
to have just usability or copywriting or SEO; you need them all. Building a page
and a site is a balancing act. For search engines, the portions of the page that
matter most, and that you have the most control over, are the text parts. Some
places try SEO so hard that the copy reads like rubbish. Obviously, that is no
good. Traffic means nothing if people do not convert.

Use Keywords in Headings

Use keywords in headings and subheadings throughout the page—this heading
should capture the person’s attention and tell them they are in the right place.
Think of these headings like you would a heading in a newspaper; a classic, straight
SEO approach might be
<H1>Optimize Web Pages – Learn SEO Copywriting</H1>
You may wish to use something with a call to action as well. That would appear
more like
<H1>Learn SEO Copywriting Techniques that Drive Killer
Converting Search Engine Traffic </H1>.
Heading tags go from H1 to H6, with the biggest tags being the smallest number
(i.e., H1 renders the biggest font). You can change how the text appears with CSS.
I usually try to get some of my primary and secondary keyword phrases and similar
phrases in my page heading as well as in many subheadings. The rest of the page
copy is usually written with sales conversion in mind, and I do not pay too much
attention to optimizing it for search engines. Natural writing should cause you to
use your keywords throughout the text.

I recommend using a single H1 tag on each page. I also try to use many H2 or H3
tags to break up the page copy and help structure the data.
Break the page into subgroups
h1 (consisting of primary keywords and a modifier or call to action) Only use one
h1 tag per page and do not bold or emphasize it. It probably works best if it
is slightly different than your page title.
Examples of subheadings can be as follows:
h2 (similar subtopic idea with some related keyword phrases in it)
paragraph blah blah blah
h2 (another subtopic with some semantically related words)
paragraph blah blah
paragraph blah blah blah
h2 (Many subtopics do not have the same keywords as the page title and
main heading. If you are writing for conversion, not all of them will,
which is also good for SEO. If your page title and your headings
contain the exact same keyword phrase it may look like an attempt to
manipulate search relevancy. Mix it up. Keep it natural looking.)
h2 (Don’t forget to change word order and use plural and singular
versions)
unordered list
paragraph blah blah
h2 (another subtopic focused on another niche)
paragraph blah blah blah
paragraph blah blah blah
Usually the subheadings will focus on a keyword phrase that is slightly more
specific than the main heading.
The next example set is going to contain a bit of self-promotion, but that is not
really the intent. It is hard for me to think of structuring content without thinking
about a topic, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to tell people to copy any of
my pages or client sites.
If I wrote a page about applying for a job, the page title and headers might look
something like this:
<title>Search Engine Optimization Guru Looks to Help 1 Lucky
Client</title>
<h1>Online Search Engine Optimization Expert for Hire</h1>
<h2>Aaron Wall: Your SEO Expert</h2><h2>History in the Search Community</h2>
<h3>Author of SEO Book: A Well-Known Search
Blog</h3> content
<h3>Top Selling Marketing Book Author</h3>
<h3>Speaker at Search Engine Strategies &
WebmasterWorld</h3> content
<h3>Directory Editor</h3> content
<h3>Moderator at Many Professional Discussion
Forums</h3> content
<h2>Search Engine Ranking Achievements</h2>
<h3>Search Marketing ROI Results</h3> content
<h3>Client Testimonials</h3> content
Descriptive, reader-focused subheadings improve the usability of your website,
both for search engines and human visitors. Remember that the headings help
structure the information, but you shouldn’t overdo it. If you start doing things
like placing all your content in an H1 tag, bolding the H1 tags, or bolding all
occurrences of your keywords, then you are doing things that would give search
engines a reason to discount your page. Thus, the combined effect will be more
likely to hurt your rankings on multiple fronts, since your content may look less
appealing to search engines and site visitors will be less likely to buy from it or link
to it.

Place Your Keywords Where it Makes Sense

Place keywords in paragraphs.
• Place keywords in heading tags.
• Place keywords in img alt tags.
• When the word is part of a small statement making a specific point,
you may bold it or italicize it.
• You may also want to include your keywords a few times in bulleted
lists.
• When possible, place the keywords in links, and don’t forget
navigation.
• Don’t focus on just one core keyword over and over again. Mix in
many variations.
• The key focus of the page should be on readability. If the page does
not make sense to human eyes, then it is no good for a search engine
and it will not make sales. You want to use keywords often, but not
to the point where it sounds like you are writing for the search engine
and not the user.
• When in doubt, ignore the keywords, write your article for people, and
then come back to it and make sure you covered all the important
topics you wanted to cover.

Use Variation
Since latent semantic indexing-type algorithms may be able to detect unnatural
copy that lacks related terms and will score hyper-focused repetitive unnatural text
as being less relevant, it is important to use some mixture of terms and phrases (i.e.,
in some spots you want to use terms related to your keywords and not just your
keywords).
If you took your core keyword out of the page copy and replaced it with blanks,
would humans to be able to understand what the document was about? If they
could, you are in great shape.
Be Creative
There are so many creative ways to mix in your keywords. Again, assuming we
wanted to target eat cheddar, we could write the following:
“Cheddar is one of my favorite foods to eat. Cheddar is…”
Notice how the keywords overlap and are in different sentences. There are many
different ways to get your keywords in the content.
Spread Your Keywords Throughout the Page
Some of the more recent algorithms may have the ability to look for natural
language patterns. In natural language, the different words in a keyword phrase will
appear spread apart from one another.
To boost your rankings in these algorithms, you will want to use the word eat in
some spots and cheddar in other spots. Often your keywords will appear next to
each other naturally. Some words like peanut and butter often occur together, but in
general, all of your occurrences of the keywords should not be together unless that
is how they would appear in a newspaper article about your topic.

Keywords at the Top of the Page

Keywords near the top of the page, and before your navigation, may be weighted
more heavily and enhance your search engine rankings.
Search engines care about the order the content appears in the page code more
than on the screen. Reorganizing the text can easily be accomplished by writing a
sentence above your branding images or through using a floating DIV or another
CSS technique. When using tables, some people use a blank cell technique to make
the search engines see the body content before navigation. If search engines
weight where the keywords are on the page, then they most likely use the order of
the words in the actual page source code and not the visual display of the pages.
Microsoft did research into visual page segmentation, and Google hired some lead
Firefox programmers away from Mozilla. As computer clock cycles get more

Naming File Paths

Usually, you want to use short file names and folder names so that the data is easy
to transmit using various means (such as e-mail). Long file paths may look a bit
spammy to search engine editors or searchers looking through search results.
Generally, you want to use one to a few keywords in each filename or folder. Use
lowercased file paths because some directories & content management systems do
not handle upper-case filenames. Separate words with a hyphen (-) between each
word. If you leave blank spaces, it will look strange in the address bar and if you
use underscores (_), some search engines may not parse the individual words in
each file name. In July of 2007 Google began using underscores as separators.
Some people will be more likely to click relevant looking URLs. Some will cite
your website using the URL as the link text. If you use descriptive URLs, that
should help improve your traffic and rankings. If your site is already built and wellindexed,
there is probably little reason to change filenames, but if you are making a
new site, it is worth the time it takes to use descriptive filenames.

Page Copy Length

Clarity and formatting are more important than shear length of copy. Rather than
aiming for an arbitrary word limit or cut off, you should write pages of varying
length based on the goals of the page. For example, if you want to make a page
look comprehensive and use that idea as part of your marketing strategy it may
make sense to make that page longer than it needs to be. If you are trying to
quickly communicate an important idea it does not hurt to publish that page with
less text on it.

The meta keywords tag is
typically used to highlight
a couple of the main
keyword phrases on which
a page is focused.
The meta description tag
should be a few sentences
to a paragraph of text that
uses various versions of
your keywords and
describes the purpose of a
given page.
Meta tags are only one
small element of current
search engine ranking
algorithms.

When people refer to meta tags, they are talking about the meta description and
meta keyword tags. Some search engines may display the meta description as part
of the search results, but the meta keywords tags generally does not appear in
search results.

Is it Worth it to Create Meta Tags?
I believe creating page specific meta description tags is worthwhile. I generally do
not spend time creating meta keywords tags.
What do Meta Tags Look Like?

<meta name=”keywords” content=”seo book, seo ebook, seo e-book,
seo tutorial, seo tutorial book, search engine optimisation,
search engine optimisation tutorial”>
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Search Engine Optimization
Book is a SEO blog that provides daily search engine news. SEO
Book keeps up with the latest trends in search engine algorithm
changes and provides new SEO tips.”>

Meta Keywords Tag

If your site does not have meta keyword tags, I would probably not recommend
spending the time to add them. If you add meta keywords while you are creating
pages, I wouldn’t spend more than a minute on each page. I probably wouldn’t list
any more than a few of them per page.
The meta keywords tag is not supported by many major search engines. While it is
important to choose the correct keywords for your page, the meta keywords tag
itself is not used by many top SEO experts.
I usually do not use the meta keywords tag on my pages (as it is not usually very
important), but it can help you out if there are many different ways to say your

product names and you are not creative enough to cover the permutations in your
page copy. Usually it is better to cover the permutations in your page copy with
sections like alternate part numbers, etc.
If you use the meta keywords tag, it should be unique for each page upon which
you place it. The keywords tag is a good place to put common misspellings,
synonyms, and alternate versions of a word.

Sample Uses of the Meta Keywords Tag

If you optimized a page for the keyword phrase drop shipping, you may
want to include the word dropshipping in your keywords tag, although if
the term is that competitive, keyword tags are not likely to matter.
• Notice how in my above example meta keyword tag, I spelled the word
optimization with an “s”. I targeted the spelling with a “z” on my page
and am placing “s” versions in my keywords tag. The term is likely
going to be too competitive to compete for using just a meta tag, but
most phrases are not going to be as competitive as search engine
optimisation.
• Some items are model 15-M or 15M or Cannon 15-M or Cannon 15M.
• Prescription is often mistyped as perscription.
If a term is competitive, it is going to need to occur in your page copy and/or
inbound link text for you to rank well for it.

Meta Description Tag

Many search engines will use the meta description as part of the page abstract if the
exact search term that was searched for is found in the meta description tag.
Additionally, it sometimes appears in search results if the search engine cannot
extract meaningful content from the page copy or if the algorithm feels the meta
description will provide a more useful presentation.

This tag should be between a sentance to a paragraph and should not appear
keyword-stuffed. The text should read well to the human eye since this tag is still
used in many search results pages. A good or bad description can be the difference
between a click and being ignored. Google shows ~ 160 characters from the meta
description tag in their search results.
If you write a compelling description, it could boost your click-through
rates and, thus, deliver you more targeted traffic.

The meta description tag can often be used to help craft a good search presentation
for your most popular keyword phrases by complementing the page title, targeting
alternet versions, and display your brand messaging, all while inticing clickthroughs.
You can look at the search results of various search engines to see what
competitors uses and how many characters the engine displays. In the above image
Google displayed around 156 characters.

Meta Tags Are Not an Endless Art

Some people try to make meta tags sound like an art form. They are not. There
are multiple tags that tell a search engine when to revisit or what language it is in.
These tags are usually irrelevant and ignored.
Just about the only useful meta tags other than the description and keywords tags
are those tags used to PREVENT search engines from indexing your content.
Since we usually want our content seen, I only wrote about the tags I typically use.

The Truth about Meta Tags

Meta tags are only one small part of search engine algorithms. In major search
engines, each of the following is typically far more important than meta tags:
• Link popularity and link reputation
• Site age
• Page title
• Page copy
Your meta description tags are still important because they help you
differentiate yourself from the competition and boost your clickthrough rates.

Robots Exclusion Standard

When primitive robots were first created, some of them would crash servers by
requesting too many pages too quickly. A robots exclusion standard was crafted to
allow you to tell any robot (or all of them) that you do not want some of your
pages indexed or that you do not want your links followed. You can do this via a
meta tag on the page copy
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>
or create a robots.txt file that gets placed in the root of your website. The goal of
either of these methods is to tell the robots where NOT to go. The official robots
exclusion protocol document is located at the following URL.

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html

You do not need to use a robots.txt file. By default, search engines will index your
site. If you do create a robots.txt file, it goes in the root level of your domain using
robots.txt as the file name.
This allows all robots to index everything:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
This disallows all robots to your site:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
You also can disallow a folder or a single file in the robots txt file. This disallows a
folder:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /projects/
This disallows a file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cheese/please.html
If you make a robots.txt user-agent command for a specific search engine (e.g.
User-agent:Googlebot) the associated search engine will ignore the more general
rules located in the section for all search engines (User-agent: *).
One problem many dynamic sites have is sending search engines multiple URLs
with nearly identical content. If you have products in different sizes and colors, or
other small differences, it is likely that you could generate lots of near-duplicate
content, which will prevent search engines from fully indexing your sites.
If you place your variables at the start of your URLs, then you can easily block all
of the sorting options using only a few disallow lines. For example, the following
would block search engines from indexing any URLs that start with ‘cart.php?size’
or ‘cart.php?color’.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cart.php?size
Disallow: /cart.php?color
Notice how there is no trailing slash at the end of the above disallow lines. That
means the engines will not index anything that starts with that in the URL. If there
were a trailing slash, search engines would only block a specific folder.
If the sort options were at the end of the URL, you would either need to create an
exceptionally long robots.txt file or place the robots noindex meta tags inside the
sort pages. You also can specify any specific user agent, such as Googlebot, instead
of using the asterisk wild card. Many bad bots will ignore your robots txt files
and/or harvest the blocked information, so you do not want to use robots.txt to
block individuals from finding confidential information.

Googlebot also supports wildcards in the robots.txt. The following would stop
Googlebot from reading any URL that includes the string ‘sort=’ no matter where
that string occurs in the URL:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*sort=
In 2006 Yahoo! also added robots.txt wildcard support. Their example pages is
useful for helping you understand how to structure your robots.txt file

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000372.html

You have to be careful when changing your robots.txt file, because the
following code
Disallow: /*page
also blocks a file like this from being indexed in Google
beauty-pageants.php
Google’s Webmaster Toolset shows you what pages they have tried crawling that
you have already blocked via robots.txt, and they have a robots.txt testing tool
which will show you if a specific URL would end up getting blocked by your
robots.txt file.
In 2007 Google released an unavailable_after meta tag, which tells Google to not
crawl a URL after a specific date. I do not recommend using this. Instead, if one of
your old URLs ranks where you would like a new one to rank I recommend 301
redirecting it to the URL you want to rank.

The best way to know what your competition level is to look at the quality of the
top few sites and their link profiles. Are their sites .edu sites, old well branded sites,
or other highly useful sites? Do they have many editorial links pointing at their
site?
Google primarily relies upon site age and link reputation to determine relevancy for
competitive terms. Links from government or educational sites are more likely to
be well-trusted in search results since, typically, it is harder to influence them than
the average .com website.

SEO for Firefox allows you to view many data points from directly within the
search results to see how competitive a marketplace is. It will help you answer
questions such as the following:
• How old are these sites?
• Do they have quality inbound links?
• Are they listed in the major web directories?
• Are bloggers mentioning their site?
• Are people saving their site on social bookmarking sites?

Other Rough Indications of Perceived Value &
Competition: Top Bid Prices & Search Volume
Other signs of a competitive marketplace are when you notice many leadgeneration
type websites, many exceptionally smooth user-centric highly converting
websites, educational institutions, government agencies, large corporations, or high
bid prices on those keywords in the top pay-per-click search engines.
You can get an extremely rough approximation of the value of a top listing on
major search engines for a keyword by looking at the top listings using the Google
Traffic Estimator tool.

Need Help with Keyword Selection?

If you still need more help understanding keywords, feel free to ask me. In
addition, Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs specializes in doing keyword research
reports for SEOs, web designers, and webmasters.