WebProNews » Copy

Google Playing Copy-Cat to Bing

Mike Moran — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:01:25 +0000

If you have been paying attention to what Google has been doing as of late to improve its user experience, you might be noticing something strange. It seems that almost every time that Google makes an improvement in its aesthetic appeal, it looks more and more like Bing. Remember the short-lived attempt to customize the Google home page recently which has since been removed?

Take the latest change to hit the search engine, which is its presentation of image search results. Here is the old look for Google image search results:

Here is the new look:

You also no longer have to click through pages of results as they are now all on one page, although page numbers are assigned to show page breaks.

Now here’s Bing’s image search. A little more white space in Bing, but essentially the same look and feel:

In addition, Google is copying Bing’s use of a mouse-over expansion of each image to give some details about the image.

All in all, I just find it interesting that while Google is the far superior engine in market share AND results, it is playing catch-up with Bing in how it presents itself. It’s not the end of the world, but it does seem like a hat-tip from Google to Microsoft, which is just not natural.

What’s your take?

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The Importance of SEO Copy Writing to High Rankings

Sally Falkow — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:53:07 +0000

In this MSNBC interview the Snr. V.P. of Network Solutions covers what any business needs for page one search rankings.

Content is definitely king. Stephanie suggests writing articles about your product or service as one of the best ways to add good content. SEO copy writing will not only produce content that is written for the search engines, but also information that gets responses from your visitors. She points out that articles online give you the opportunity to educate your public about your products and services.

The next thing you need is links. One strategy Stephanie did not cover was using RSS feeds to syndicate your content If you have someone who does SEO writing you can add links on the keywords in the articles. When your article get picked up and republished in blogs or other websites those links lead traffic back to you..

She mentions meta tags – another important part of SEO copywriting services. Meta tags are the technical text using the right keywords that get progammed into the page, making it possible for a search engine to find your site when a search is done.

SEO is vital for any business. Good content based on keyword research, built-in links on those keywords in the text and syndicated articles should be the stock-in-trade of a good SEO copywriter. It’s a proven strategy that produces high search ranking every time..

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Reputation Management & Legal Threats

Andy Beal — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:08:23 +0000

When a company’s reputation comes under attack, it can be tempting to bring in the company attorney and fire off a "cease and desist" letter. Unless you’re responding to something that is clearly libelous, trying to cover up your mess by threatening the messenger usually backfires–in a big way.

Hercules Technology Growth Capital is learning that lesson the hard way after sending a c&d to The Funded–a site that lets companies anonymously share thoughts about VC firms. VentureBeat has a copy of the letter sent and TechDirt points out why Hercules’ effort will likely backfire.

This seems like a bad idea for a huge number of reasons — all of which Hercules and its lawyers probably should have realized before sending the C&D. First off, as it seems we have to repeat almost weekly around here, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act very, very clearly states that a site is not liable for content its users post, and any law firm should know that. Second, and more importantly…Prior to this, not a whole lot of people would see the review of Hercules. Now, however, many, many, many more entrepreneurs will not only see and remember the negative review, they’ll see how Hercules responded to it, which may be even more damaging to the firm’s reputation.

It’s understandable that Hercules Technology had a knee-jerk reaction–who wants something negative posted about them? But, as they’ll learn, taking such a heavy-handed approach will now leave potential start-ups questioning whether they should take funding from a company that "releases the dogs" first and asks questions later.

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The Secret of Writing Good Copy

Mike Moran — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:43:29 +0000

It would be annoying for me to link to grokdotcom every day, so I don’t. But if you don’t have it in your regular rotation of RSS feeds, what are you waiting for? Here’s a great example—a post that pulls together over a dozen great articles on writing winning Web copy. It’s taking some of us a while, but we’re finally figuring out that Web marketing can really depend on your words.

Direct marketers understand this. Every time you open your mailbox and get a letter offering you yet another credit card, every word in that letter has been tested to evoke the maximum response for its target market. Direct marketers don’t write one letter and send it to a million people—they write dozens of letters and send them to a small list of people to test the response rates. They send the winner to the rest of the million on the list.

Web marketing is no different, except you can do even more testing for less money in a shorter amount of time. You may not need to subject every word on every page to testing—I know that you have a life—but most companies don’t do any testing at all.

Put the page up. We’re done.

Well, yeah, you’re "done" but in a different way than you intended. You’re cooked. Your page won’t work. Because it never does on the first try.

So, yes, use all the tips you can to do a better job of creating the right words. But remember too that the most important tip is to get feedback on your customer’s response and try something else. Over and over again. Eventually you will get something that really works. (And then you keep tweaking that, too.)

So stop the "one and done." Pick just one page on your site designed to convert (no, not the home page). Pick a page that you know the purpose of—maybe the latest special offer for your top product. Come up with several versions of that page and use multivariate testing to test them all. You’ll find that some of your new ideas are undoubtedly better than what you have on the page now. Some companies report 30% gains in conversion rate after a year of multivariate testing.

So what are you waiting for?

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Segmentation in Google Analytics for WordPress Readers

Joost de Valk — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:09:41 +0000

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a while seems to be finally nearing completion. Google Analytics allows you to segment users into custom segments, and there’s one segment I’ve been aching for.

I want to be able to segment RSS readers, to be able to see the different browsing behavior of new visitors versus my loyal visitors.

Getting to the point where I actually can acquire that data has been a pretty long ride. I first had to create a way to change the URL’s used in RSS feeds, so I could detect this different URL, 301 redirect it to the right URL, and set a cookie while doing that. To do that I filed a bug in WordPress’ Trac, which I wrote a fix for as well, someone else improved on it, and it was committed into the WordPress core. As of WordPress 2.3, you can apply a filter to the_permalink_rss, which allows me to add ?source=rss to any URL (or &source=rss when the blog uses the default ?p= permalinks).

The next step is detecting that parameter in the URL, and 301 redirecting to the original post URL. Before doing that 301 redirect however, I drop a cookie, which lasts for 30 days, identifying the user as an RSS reader. This allows me to, in the last step, add the following code to the Google Analytics script tag when the user has that cookie:

view plain copy to clipboard print ?

__utmSetVar("RSS");

__utmSetVar("RSS");

I will know if this works tomorrow, and if it does, I’ll release a new version of my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin with this possibility in it. Since I can imagine other people want to identify RSS readers for other purposes, I’ll release that small bit of code as a single plugin as well.

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SES – Yahoo Book Party – Mona Elesseily

Lee Odden — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:14:06 +0000

After a long day of sessions on day three of Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, some attendees mosied on over to the Yahoo Panama Book party for Mona Elesseily of Page Zero.

It was great to see the support for her new report, “Mastering Panama – A special report on Yahoo!’s new search marketing platform”.

While I haven’t had a chance to do a full review of the book since last night, I have paged through it and it appears to be pretty comprehensive and very easy to read with plenty of ordered lists, “Action Items” and “Helpful Hints”. You can get your copy here.

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SES: The Ad Everyone Wants To Read

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:20:20 +0000

Compelling ads don’t have to be a hidden Grail, accessible only to scruffy types in fedoras. At SES San Jose, panelists for the Creating Compelling Ads session emphasized testing and relevance as keys to success.

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media touched on the usual suggestions for building ads. Advertisers should understand their Unique Selling Propositions, and create compelling copy for ads that address them.

Studying the competition can reveal an approach that one has not considered. If an ad has been working well for a competitor, a similar tack could work for others.

The ad copy created for a seller should be appropriate to the feel of the industry category. Entrepreneurs need to understand the buying cycle for their products, as some types of ads will be more effective than others at different times.

Only running a few ads doesn’t have to limit a campaign. Understanding those ads well from a deep analytic standpoint can reveal why a successful ad works.

Brad Geddes of LocalLaunch.com said dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) often leads to higher click-through rates. DKI allows an ad to reflect the query being made that generated the ad’s presentation.

Geddes said DKI brings a one to one relationship to keywords and ad copy. It speeds up the ad creation process, which saves time and energy for the marketer.

Vic Drabicky of Range Online Media said the true challenge comes when trying to build upon an already successful CTR for a brand. He offered five steps as suggestions for improving both creative ads, and their results:

1. Maximize creative to your campaign goals

2. Maximize creative around your business ebbs and flows – seasonality

3. Target your creative to your customers in their locations – geotargeting

4. Effective search branding must be done creatively

5. The goal may not be to get every click, but to get every profitable click The main idea is to get one’s ads in line with what the advertiser wants to accomplish with a conversion. Each ad serves as a call to action, and the campaign should make the call the advertiser wants to see.

Headline Creation Quick Tips

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:32:57 +0000

Headlines are tricky – especially when writing for the Web. You want to be search engine friendly, but at the same time, you don’t want to readers (or potential readers) to skim over the headline like it’s part of a technical manual.

The point of a headline is to get everybody’s attention: crawlers and people alike. While crawlers are easy to predict – the structure and timing are quite mechanical – people are in tons of different places with tons of different motivations.

Searchers are looking for something different in a title or headline than regular website visitors, who are browsing differently than the social network audience.

Writing for a spider is easy: Google Crawls Webpages

Simple, direct, clean. Subject, object, verb. Robots aren’t impressed with your cleverness.

Muhammed Saleem over at CopyBlogger says you need to write three different kinds of headlines, one for search engines, one for regular readers, and one for socially driven sites. Writing for all three is difficult.

He gives some good tips for how to that. If you’re especially good, though, you can write for all three simultaneously, though some might say it’s a bad idea to try. There is a bit of craft to it, and you’ll need an extra boost of creativity.

But as a guide:

1. Weight the front. In English, we scan from right to left, but the important keywords first to make the instant connection with whomever is reading – whether they’re reading from the search results, on your site, or on Digg.com.

2. No inside jokes. The headline is funny to you because you know the whole story. If you crack a joke in the headline, make sure it’s readily laughable on its own, or is enticing enough on its own to click.

3. Announce the topic. No busy searcher is going to guess at what you’ve written about.

4. Revisit cranky ol’ William Strunk: Omit needless words.

Is Your Copy Award-winning?

Mike Moran — Wed, 16 May 2007 14:30:38 +0000

Those of you who have followed this blog for any length of time know that I care a lot about copywriting. Good copy is crucial for getting your site found and for getting customers to buy. But most of us, in private moments, might admit that we don’t spend as much time crafting our copy as we should. Are you ready to put yours to the test?

For those of you that are unenthusiastic about tweaking your copy, let’s review why it is so important:

It gets your site found. Using the right words gets your site ranked for your preferred keywords in organic search marketing. But writing the right stories also gets subscribers to your blog and gets links to your Web pages. The right story with the right words gets you found—that is all about your copy.

It gets your products bought. Any direct marketer knows that the right copy makes the sale. If your offer is right, and the words are right, then customers will buy. That is what direct mail and catalogs have depended on for years—the Web works the same way. Often, your copy makes all the difference.

OK, so now that you might be more interested, are you ready to see how your copy stacks up? If so, check out this copywriting contest. Submit your best copy efforts and get a chance to win. If nothing else, the mere effort of entering a contest will get you to focus on your copy more than usual—maybe that will take your offers to the next level. Good luck.

Hat tip to Seth Godin

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Keyword Optimisation or Compelling Copy in Blog Titles?

Christine Parfitt — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 19:30:48 +0000

Brian Clark has some excellent ideas for writing effective titles in his blog copyblogger. He has recently re-written headlines submitted by his readers along with a rationale for the changes. It’s a good way of demonstrating what works.

At the core of his recommendations is the need to use the title to clearly communicate the value of the content to the reader. There are some tried and tested techniques for this such as:

“10 ways to ……”,

“How to (do xyz) and get (some benefit)

“What you need to know about (xyz)”

If you are optimising a page for the search engines the title is important because having keywords in the page title is one of the most important factors contributing to ranking well for those keywords.

So, should you optimise for the search engines by making sure the title contains keywords, or should you make the title persuasive so that the reader is motivated to click through and read the rest of the post or article?

There’s no reason why you can’t have both of course. A title can be both persuasive and contain keywords. That’s always going to be the best result. I would always make sure that consideration is given to keywords in the title for the following reasons:

Using keywords will get more targeted traffic than people clicking a clever headline out of curiosity. Untargeted traffic doesn’t have as much value.

If one of the goals is to get your article republished, publishers will search article directories for relevant content using keywords.

The titles of most interest to your target audience are the ones that have relevance to them. Keywords are exactly that – words that have relevance for your target audience. If you don’t include the keywords the headline is less likely to stand out when someone scans a page.

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