Writing: Permission to Write with Casual Abandon

Posted on February 6, 2012 by AlanE

Writing Around Some of the Rules
by Alan Eggleston

Writing is not an exercise in rote. That’s why, try as they may, computers will never perfect the art of writing. And that’s why rules meant to be observed strictly should be broken regularly.

Much of writing skill is in the talent and artistry of the writer. So, when someone asks a question like, “Should you ever end a sentence with a preposition?” or “Should you ever begin a sentence with and, but, or so?” (a conjunction) I say, I know what the rules say but ease up on the rules and go with your intuition.

One of the first things they tell you when you learn to write is, “Write like you talk.” Way more people speak by beginning a sentence with and, but, and so than don’t. Way more people speak by ending a sentence with to or with or from than don’t. Now, I can see that there would be instances in which you wouldn’t begin a sentence with a conjunction or end a sentence with a preposition – formal writing, for instance. But in casual use, in informal writing as in personal correspondence, advertising, many books and opinion pieces there would be plenty of instances in which you would.

So, you have my permission, within tolerable reason, to break the rules and write with casual abandon. Be prepared for the hardnosed critic to chastise you over it, but send him or her my way (link them to this page, for instance). I’ll defend you.

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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SEO and Web Editors – the Basics IX

Posted on January 31, 2012 by AlanE

SEO: Maximizing Your Opportunity to Win

by Alan Eggleston

SEO (search engine optimization) should be a long-term commitment. It isn’t something you plan to do once and then forget about, any more than you would train once for a season of running marathons. However, to ease your mind, there are some things that take more labor than others.

I always advise my clients to put their highest priority on their highest level pages. You should still do meta tags (or meta data) on the deeper pages, but when you are competing with other sites you should vary your data based on your positioning and your page content to maximize search engine indexing. That takes constant vigilance and a watchful eye on how your competition is ranking. In addition, search engines don’t like to give all the top rankings to the same sites, so put your effort into the pages that will feed readers to the other content anyway and that carry the most links and probably the most keyword power – the higher level pages.

As in other aspects of life, don’t fret over the things you can’t control and put your energy into the things you can control. Here are lists of some of each in the world of search.

Things you can control Things you can’t control
What’s on your site What’s on competitor’s site
Number of competitors
How search engines view and display competitive sites as results
How well you optimize your site Whether competitors optimize their sites
Search engine algorithm tweaks
The amount of keyword research you do Keywords users actually use
Eliminating barriers to searches Individual user search experiences
Creating optimal user experience on your site Individual user habits
Search engine beta tests of search enhancements

Again, think of SEO as a series of marathons in which the conditions on the course change, the weather varies, and the runners aren’t consistent. The only control you have as a competitor is how you run and, ultimately, how you prepare yourself. Maximize yourself and you maximize your opportunity to win (or at least make it through the race).

Topics I have recently discussed on SEO include:

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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SEO and Web Editors – the Basics VIII

Posted on January 18, 2012 by AlanE

SEO: Resources for Staying “Clued Up”

by Alan Eggleston

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a dynamic subject. There are always a lot of articles about it in blogs, chat rooms, and social media. However, “the basics,” which I maintain are the real key to successfully setting up your website for effective search rankings, remain stable. So, if you find a few standard information sources to tap, you can avoid the fear headlines and keep your cool.

Here are my reading recommendations to staying on top of SEO as a Web Editor.

My Reading Recommendations

Books

Websites

(I would avoid the forums and question areas in these sites until you become familiar with SEO and can sort out the “black hat” techniques some readers will suggest.)

News

Blogs

Feel free to disagree with this list and suggest different sources. However, my criteria for choosing these are that they are professionals who write about the subject objectively and don’t try to sell you anything. These are very trustworthy sources, including Matt Cutt’s blog, which seeks to answer your questions about Google objectives and criteria. Avoid suggesting sources that are high on hyperbole and offer quick fixes and miracle cures.

Topics I have discussed in this series in days past include:

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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SEO and Web Editors – the Basics VII

Posted on January 11, 2012 by AlanE

SEO: Site Prep Paves the Way

by Alan Eggleston

Site Prep for SEO isn’t necessarily something that the Web Editor has a lot of influence over or that the Web Editor necessarily is aware of without some effort. However, the condition of the site “under the hood” can have a huge influence over site indexing and the resulting ranking of pages. Thus, as Web Editor, you should take interest in it and try to influence it.

Prepping the Source Coding

Go to any html, asp, or php Web page and with your mouse right-click on an empty space on the page. Scroll down to “view source” or “view page source” and click on it. You should see a page full of programming (source code) for your Web page.

It is very likely that if your website is written in JavaScript or CSS coding, there will be a lot of programming at the top of the page before you run into what you will recognize as your body text. Even if your page is heavy with videos or images or graphics or other material at the top of the page, you will have a lot of coding at the top of the source coding. Web designers and developers often aren’t aware that this is detrimental to indexing and may well result in a low ranking for the page. They may not even care – their job is to program the page, not market it.

To prep the page for SEO, make sure there is as little separation as possible between your meta data and the content: headlines, subheads, body text. If there is JavaScript or CSS coding, which is usually a lot of code, a search engine spider may decide the whole page is coding and not index your page. You will lose any relevancy you created by writing good content!

To eliminate this problem, all the designer/programmer/developer has to do is write the JavaScript or CSS code as a separate file and then place a simple instruction on the page telling the browser the name of the file and where to retrieve it. The file should be on the website server with the rest of the content files, but the coding doesn’t have to be on your page. If the programmer tells you that will lead to a time delay retrieving the instruction, tell them it’s insignificant – especially compared to people not being able to find the site at all.

I recognize that you may be reading this with a website already in progress or launched some time ago. You may have to keep these in mind for a redesign or relaunch some time in the future.

More Site Prep Hints

Try to make the first thing the search engine spider reads (after the </head> tag) is your main headline, which contains your keywords. (Sometimes things up in the header, left-hand column, navigation, and other spots will precede it in the programming, which means your keywords will be buried.) Work with your designer and programmer to achieve maximum possible placement. Follow that with body text and subheads as closely as possible.

Make sure your designer knows to use H tags (H1, H2, H3…) for headlines, subheads, and so on to maximize indexing. Also ensure that every headline is text – not a graphic or image. Designers will want to use a graphic for special fonts, but you will lose a lot of SEO value without those text headlines. Designers also tend to use a graphic for the site name in the header, but again, you lose SEO value that way. These all add up. If decisions are made above your pay grade to retain the graphic, make sure you give it an alt tag with the same text that’s on the graphic.

Ensure that every page has a page title and description and that they are all unique. Don’t let anyone tell you that it doesn’t matter.

No page should be without some kind of content. Even a page with images/videos or a form should have some kind of introduction that allows you to use keywords. Although the ideal length for indexing quality is 250-500 words, a few words is better than none at all. I’ve seen dropdown navigation that leads to a blank page simply because no one thought a reader might land there – wasted SEO!

Repeat your top navigation at the bottom of each page as hypertext links. This is also a good place to add hypertext links for additional lower-level pages like terms of use, privacy, resources, site map, and so on. Search engines read a page from the bottom up as well as from the top down and this gives the spider a second look at your navigation.

A big enemy to ranking is duplicate text. Sometimes cheaters will simply rip off your content and it may get indexed as the original text. One safeguard is adding canonical tags in the URLs noting that your page is the original text, which should protect you.

Rather than going through the hassle of uploading videos onto your own page and eating up valuable storage space on your server, embedding YouTube videos can actually boost your rankings. Simply create your own YouTube Channel, upload your videos to your channel, and then link to those videos from your website.

If you revise or revamp your website, try not to change the navigation and file names and types. If you have a services.html page on your original site, try to have another services.html page on your new one. This preserves the rank value you built from the original site onto the new site instead of having to start from scratch again.

When you name graphics and image files, and other files, try to name them with keywords – avoid number and random key configurations like you’ll find in automated naming systems, which won’t benefit you for search engine ranking.

Create the convention among your staff – writers, editors, designers, programmers, proofreaders – not to use outdated conventions like “click here” for links. Instead use keyword phrases as anchor text that will benefit you during indexing.

Topics I will introduce you to in the days ahead include:

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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SEO and Web Editors – the Basics VI

Posted on January 7, 2012 by AlanE

SEO: Promotions Implies Relationships

by Alan Eggleston

Promotions breed familiarity, of course, but they also breed popularity. That’s a good thing in the world of search engines and SEO (search engine optimization).

“Promotions” are the way you spread the word about your website. So, that may include blogs, social networking, media, professional directories, Yellow Pages ads, PPC (pay per click) ads, search ads, and so on. Search engines give less credence to paid connections, but they love connections to your site by other sources. Thus, one way to increase your link authority and your ranking is by building on relationships.

The more organic the relationships, the better, and the more authority you gain. One way to build organic relationships is through social media. Establishing an active presence on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, for instance, with links to your website pages and lots of other-user interaction is good. Another way to build strong relationships is through activity on blogs and forums, again interacting with users and citing your Web pages. Best of all is when your readers cite your pages in all these and other places.

This all gets down to the concept of popularity, which weighs heavily in your favor with search engines. This is especially important in link strategy, where having a lot of people link to your pages or use links to your pages weighs heavily in your ranking favor. And high page-view counts also indicate popularity. If your pages are popular, they must be important and read-worthy, therefore they should be ranked higher in search than pages that get less traffic.

Whether you as a Web Editor are active in promoting your pages among your audience, or your staff or writers do it, is less important than that someone engage readers in promoting your site. As this illustrates, it doesn’t have to be in advertising. It can be as powerful as word-of-mouth marketing if it’s done well.

Topics I will introduce you to in the days ahead include:

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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SEO and Web Editors – the Basics V

Posted on January 4, 2012 by AlanE

SEO: Keywords for Planning and Clarity

by Alan Eggleston

Keywords are the essence of SEO (search engine optimization). That’s because everything you do to optimize a Web page should be based on a set of keywords that define that page.  No two pages should involve the same set.

Most Web pages – most websites – should begin by defining what keywords you need to work with and then writing content around them. Sometimes, Web pages are written and the keywords are gathered later. The latter can work (especially when it’s for a news oriented or subject related page in which the object of publication is to get the news or information out and SEO is a secondary goal), but the former is better.

Use Keywords Your Audience Will Use to Find You

Keywords aren’t just the main subject words for the page. The keywords are the words someone will most likely use to search for information that will result in finding your page. Therefore, you need to know your audience and your topic pretty well before you choose your keywords. If your subject is “hats,” you shouldn’t choose “chapeau,” unless your audience is chiefly French or French Canadian. You shouldn’t choose “caps” unless your audience is chiefly baseball fans, nor helmets unless your audience is into cycling or football, or perhaps spelunking. If it makes sense to use “hats” it may make sense to make it more meaningful with “blue hats” or “casual hats” or “dress hats.”

Keep your list of keywords down to four or five. Define them well for your audience and use them early in your content. Although Google doesn’t index a keyword list (meta data), other search engines do – in particular, I have found Yahoo valuable for keywords lists. Therefore, I suggest that you include a keyword list, even if you focus mainly on Google for your search strategy. (Some in your audience may like Bing or Yahoo as a search engine and you will miss out their finding you, if you don’t.)

If you do a keyword list in your meta data, some people will advise you to separate them with commas. I have found through experience that it doesn’t matter. I don’t use the commas and my sites place well. However, when I don’t use commas I make sure I list them in order that they appear in the copy, and I place keywords together that are associated (appropriate for keywords with multiple associations) in order of association. Don’t repeat words – use each word only once.

Keywords Shouldn’t Be Strangers

The keywords that you arrive at in your list should be reflected throughout your page: In your content, anchor text (links), alt tags, file names, domain paths, image names, navigation names, and most important, in your meta data – page title and description. All these together create relevancy that the search engines want to find during indexing.

Do not use keywords in your list that do not appear in your content. That’s keyword stuffing. If you have keywords in your page title and description that don’t appear in your content, there won’t be relevancy and you won’t be ranked for them. If there are keywords in your content that aren’t in your page title and description, you won’t be ranked for them. Thus, if someone searches for “blue formal hats,” they may find lots of sites listed well ahead of yours and perhaps not yours at all if “blue formal hats” isn’t coordinated in your meta data.

Be Local to Be Competitive in a Tight Field

Local search is very important for competitive businesses. Make sure you incorporate locale into your meta data and content if that will be key for setting you off from your competition. City or regional information is especially helpful.

Keywords can be a huge tool for making sure your audiences can find you in a search. All it takes is knowing what you’re doing and where to use them.

Topics I will introduce you to in the days ahead include:

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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SEO and Web Editors – the Basics IV

Posted on January 1, 2012 by AlanE

SEO: Links Add Value and Authority

by Alan Eggleston

Links like fruits and vegetables come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are also good for SEO (search engine optimization). To be healthy, wealthy, and wise, you will want to use links on your site both to aid your reader (provide access to information) and benefit you (add authority for ranking). Linking is an area of great weakness for Web Editors, in my view.

Outbound and Inbound Links

There are two main kinds of links: outbound and inbound. Outbound links are those you make to other websites; inbound links are those made from other websites to yours. A “link mesh” is a reciprocal outbound or inbound link, whether intended or not.

You can also look at links as internal (links to within your site) and external (links to outside your site). One more link that doesn’t add much SEO value but may bring in income is the double-lined links for advertising. (To me, the double-lined links are link spam and devalue your brand. It’s totally up to you if you want to use them, but they interrupt the flow of reading and bring little value to your reader. )

Why Links Are Good

Search engines view links as good. They like to see lots of links in your content. If you have a lot of internal links in your content, it means that your site has a lot of depth and readers will find great value in your site. If you have a lot of outbound links, it means you provide readers with resources to additional information and readers will find you a valuable resource to return to for access. If you have lots of inbound links, it shows without a doubt that others find you an important site. A well organized mesh shows you have great authority. All these should result in great overall page ranking, if you haven’t been penalized for something else.

Some sites are automatically viewed as having authority – dictionary sites, news media sites, Wikipedia-type sites, and other information-rich sites. If you link to them, you can tap their authority. If they link back to you, that adds to your authority. If you are a Web Editor for one of these sites, you can create tremendous good will and value with a more liberal outbound linking policy – most authority sites seem to savor their power to withhold links.

Kinds of Links

What kinds of links should you consider? So much depends on what kind of site you have, of course, but keeping your links natural to your content is important to impressing search engines. If you have a choice between simply linking to a home page and linking to an internal page, deep link to the page that has the highest SERP ranking – Google in particular prefers internal site pages, because that’s actual content. Of course, the best page to link to is the page that makes the most sense for your content.

  • Glossary, dictionary, or encyclopedia
  • Additional information (internal or external)
  • Extended content (mostly internal)
  • News articles or commentary
  • Blog articles
  • White papers and Wikipedia-type articles
  • Authoritative sources like for acronyms or statistics or science information
  • Government resources
  • Source material
  • Business or company websites*
  • Organization or association sites
  • University and research sites
  • Author pages (internal or – even better – external with a link back)
  • Advertiser sites* (external – even better, with a link back!)

*Authority sites miss a huge opportunity for goodwill in their communities by not linking to business or organization sites when they mention them in an article or advertiser sites when a business or person buys an ad. Negotiate a “See our mention in such and such an article” reciprocal link on their site.

What to Avoid

You have probably received e-mails offering to trade links with other sites. Many if not most of those are with external “link farms” or “doorway sites,” which search engines view as attempts to circumvent their algorithms and they will penalize you heavily if they catch you. Adding your site to a random list of other sites simply doesn’t make sense. Where is the value to the reader?

But Do Consider…

The other side of the issue is, do add your site to lists of external directories that your business or organization logically fits into. If your website is for a pharmacy, for instance, list your site with a pharmacy directory (and there are probably multiple ones). List with local business directories, such as LocalFirst. Do list your site in the online Yellow Pages. Do register with Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Bing Maps if you have a single or main or even local locations that allow for that, and add your website. Search engines all recognize these as legitimate inbound links to your website. Where possible, do reciprocal links back to pages, such as in a Resources page, perhaps with a notation like “Find us listed in…” or “Proudly listed in…” or “Member of Xxxxx Directory under Xxxxxx…” (preferably listed under a keyword category).

Adding links takes some research and some time, but doing it well adds SEO value and can improve your page ranking. It also requires some occasional backend checking with a link checker to ensure the links remain good over time.

Topics I will introduce you to in the days ahead include:

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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SEO and Web Editors – the Basics III

Posted on December 29, 2011 by AlanE

SEO: Content and the Role of Relevancy

by Alan Eggleston

Content relevancy is as important to SEO (search engine optimization) as is meta data. Content relevancy says that what is in your page text is directly related to what is in your meta data, verifying that your Web page deserves a high page rank compared to others. The purer your relevancy, the better your page rank. Theoretically. Search engines use proprietary algorithms, which they constantly tweak, to figure out your relevancy, but follow some basics and you should remain relevant whatever they do to their algorithms.

To build high relevancy, there needs to be a high correlation between your meta data and the content on your page, focused on use of your keywords in both. Four areas provide opportunities to clue in the search engines about your relevancy as they index your site: headlines, body text, anchor text in links, file names.

Headlines

Headlines (or titles, as some editors prefer to call them) at the top of the page are a search engine’s first cue to what the page is about. Your headline should contain the main keyword or keywords for your page, and the main headline should carry the H1 heading tag to add weight. Subheads may also contain keywords but should carry lesser tags, like H2 or H3, which still add weight. Editors will probably have the greatest difficulty writing main headlines for SEO, because headlines that are good for SEO tend to be less clever or creative; for best ranking potential, place the keyword or keywords as close to the beginning of the headline as possible.

Body Text

Body text should run 250 to 500 words to provide enough indexable content for search engines to evaluate. Less or more is all right, but the 250 to 500 words goal is ideal. Again, place keywords closer to the top or beginning of the article and use them once again at the end. Don’t worry about using a certain percentage of keywords, try for more natural usage, but don’t skimp. Avoid keyword stuffing! Use keywords enough that someone won’t doubt that is the topic they are reading about, without going overboard. To add weight to keywords, add “stress” attributes like bold and italics on first use – but use this minimally to avoid messing up the design.

Editing SEO for non-fiction and news will be much easier than for fiction. Not only will it be harder to adjust body text simply for SEO, it probably doesn’t suit your mandate. Authors will likely not be helpful, either. My suggestion for literary sites is to focus on SEO on the higher-level pages like the Home Page, About Us, Contents, Contact Us, and leave the actual literary content alone except perhaps listing tags like author, genre, title, and subject matter and make sure those are higher on the page itself, as they usually are.

Anchor Text in Links

Anchor text is the wording you use for a link. For instance, if you are going to link to the Google website, you might link to www.google.com using the word Google, and Google would be the “anchor text.” The search engines will see topic relevance between your content and the link you’re providing, and presumably you are talking about Google in your article. Thus, in your article, when you are linking to other pages or other sites, try to use suitably relevant anchor text to the sites or pages to which you are linking. Avoid phrases like “click here” or “read more” or other irrelevant words for links, which add no value.

File Names

File names may seem like an odd thing to worry about, but they’re part of a search engine’s evaluation. They consider things like image file names, html page names, and even audio files. So, when you are thinking through nomenclature for your site, give weight to naming things instead of assigning random numbers as is often the case with content management systems. If you are using a picture of a cat on the page, for instance, name the file cat.jpg (or if there is a way to use a keyword for the page in the file name, use it!) Include the keywords in the URL naming scheme.

As far as file names and URL paths are concerned, you may need to have a talk with your IT people. If nomenclature currently doesn’t support using keywords, you may have to wait for a redesign to invoke it. But eventually, you will need to make them change over to this system if you want to improve ranking.

Anything you can do to show search engines that what’s on the page is related to what you’ve labeled in your meta data, you are providing grist for improved page ranking. And remember, you’re competing with other sites, many of whom are doing the same thing. Don’t forget to look at competitor sites to see what they’re doing, then adjust your relevancy to compete for better ranking! Search engines index sites again and again, so you have multiple opportunities to improve your ranking.

Topics I will introduce you to in the days ahead include:

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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SEO and Web Editors – the Basics II

Posted on December 27, 2011 by AlanE

SEO: Meta Data Makes the Difference

by Alan Eggleston

Meta data is the content hidden in the source coding (Web page programming). Go to any html, asp, or php page and right click on it, then select “view page source” (Google Chrome) or “View Source” (Internet Explorer or Safari) to find some. A meta tag involves things like title, description, and keywords because to get to it, it’s hidden in the coding or programming. Some of it is preceded by: “meta name.” This is important data and as editor, you should have control over it.

Every Web page, and especially every main or home Web page, should have unique meta data. A main or home page (home being different than the Home Page) would include highest level topic pages and Home, About Us, Services, Products, Locations, Contact Us, and so on. No two pages on your site should have the same meta pages. That is so that the search engines can see how much unique content your site contains and what your pages are about. Search engines will discount value for duplicate content. If possible, have meta data for every page of your site, but if you’re updating a site without meta data, begin with the highest level pages – those are the ones you want people to start with and filter down to the other pages.

Titles

The “title” is the page title you see in the tab at the top of your browser when you go to a Web page. It tells the reader or viewer what the page is about. Often, writing this is left to the designer or developer/programmer and it is done wrong. When you know what you’re doing, take command of this and do it right.

The title is not like the title on a book or catalog page. It isn’t a promotional title. This isn’t a place to be cute or clever or creative. Here’s why: Search engines use this information first to decide what your page is about to match against when someone is looking for a topic. Treat this as a subject or keyword line. Ask yourself what the page is about and what main word or words someone would use to describe it, then use that for the title. Each page must have a unique title.

Descriptions

The “description” is the short paragraph you find on a search that summarizes what is covered on a Web page. If you don’t write one, often a search engine will provide one, sometimes the first or other paragraph from the page. Take control and write one of your own. Each search engine limits the number of characters for this and they all vary, so I average them out to 150 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Include the main keyword or keywords matching what is in your title, favoring the first part of the paragraph. Each page must have a unique description.

Keywords

The “keywords” meta data is the list of a few to several main keywords that represent the content on the Web page. Google insists it doesn’t index for the keywords list, so it isn’t as critical to ranking there. However, other search engines do use it. In my experience, the keywords list was very important for Yahoo!, which some sites use as an internal site search program. Yahoo! and Bing work very closely together. AOL Search uses Yahoo! as well. Even though these and other search engines don’t account for the size of the search market as Google, you can’t afford to miss someone finding your content on another search engine because you were focusing only on Google. There are dozens of search engines, and many have fans who prefer them over Google! Each page must have a unique set of keywords (more on keywords on a later article).

Alt Tags

One more meta data set that most designers, programmers, and by default, editors, miss is the “alt tag.” The alt (alternative) tag is text you can associate with a graphic or image. Graphics and images, even when they have text on them, are not indexable. Some designers want to use a specific font on a page so they will make it a graphic, including – mistakingly – as a headline, which means you lose the power of indexing it as a keyword. Every graphic and image should have an alt tag that includes one or more keyword in it.

For those editors who are Web savvy already, you probably already know that alt tags also help the sight-challenged reader. Their software can read the alt tags back to the reader so they will have the benefit of telling them what the graphic or image says or is about. I will often treat the alt tag for an image like a caption.

Whether your pages are hard wired (build by a developer or programmer in html) or using content management systems (CMS) or WYSIWYG software (such as Dreamweaver or Front Page), there are places to add this information and you should ensure that whoever loads your material loads this information when posting content.

Topics I will introduce you to in the days ahead include:

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

 

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SEO and Web Editors – the Basics I

Posted on December 25, 2011 by AlanE

SEO: Web editors should know it and use it

by Alan Eggleston

Someone on our Web Editors LinkedIn group started a discussion asking, “How clued up on SEO are editors? What impact on writing style?” In my experience, most websites, let alone most Web editors, are not SEO (search engine optimization) savvy, but in particular, most Web editors aren’t and should be. So as a service to Web editors everywhere, I’ve committed to start a short series on SEO for Web editors to bring them up-to-speed.

I started learning about SEO back in 1998 as a Web editor grappling with the concept of meta data. My manager walked up to me and said, “You need to learn about meta data.” I researched search engines on it and couldn’t find anything meaningful. It took me some time back then to learn that meta data meant the hidden content in the coding, the content that browsers and search engines read but that most readers never see. To some, that also includes the page title, because you find it with the rest of the meta data in the source coding, even though it’s visible at the top of the browser when you access the Web page. Over time, learning through others, I came to realize the meta data was the key to maximizing your position with search engines. That was a long time ago.

Today, if you do a search on SEO, you’ll find much more than you need, most often from companies who want to sell you SEM (search engine marketing) services. They will promise to bump up your SERPs (search engine results pages) – many will guarantee top results, even though promising that is like a meteorologist promising to get the weather forecast right every time. Ignore the promises and guarantees. Even if they can bump up your rankings the bump will be temporary at best and may, in fact, end up hurting you in the long run.

I’m not going to sell you anything. I’m going to tell you the basics that you as a seasoned editorial professional can use to optimize your website for the search engines. That’s what SEO is all about. The basics are what you need. From there you can read intelligently through the rest of what you’ll find to decide how best to tweak your site to improve performance.

Topics I will introduce you to in the days ahead include:

Be sure to comment if you have questions or comments. No spamming allowed.

Alan Eggleston is a freelance Web writer and Web editor for E-Messenger Internet Consulting Inc. Join him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

 

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