BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Due to big changes in the SEO landscape, designers, photographers, videographers and writers have new opportunities to build their reputation, expand brand awareness and generate more leads. This post describes five important developments that content creators should be aware of, and then we’ll outline several ways to capitalize on them.

Five SEO Developments That Favor Content Producers

Thanks to self-publishing and social networks, the world is drowning in content. Google’s response: make it easy for searchers to drill down to exactly what they are looking for. Today, we can perform a search and look at the results all together in one big chunk, or we can carve off just a piece. We can look at search results from complete strangers, from people we know or from both.

In the past, search results simply connected keywords to websites. Today, in pursuit of an easier way to drill down, Google also connects keywords to social networks, user behavior and authors. Here are five ways this is playing out, and why it’s all great news for content creators.

1. Personalized Search

While search engine users are accustomed to getting objective results on search engine results pages (SERPs), Google now serves up “subjective� results as well. When logged into Google and with personalized search turned on, you will see SERPs that include results based on your Web browsing history, as well as content authored or endorsed by your social connections.

Personalization can radically change what you see in regular searches and image searches. Here is a Google image search that demonstrates the difference. My search for “how to use twitter� with personalization turned off yields the following:

Image search without personalization.

With personalization turned on, the results look like this:

Image search with personalization.

Notice that the first two rows of images are completely different. At the top of my personalized search, I see 10 images associated with my Google+ connections. With personalized search turned on, I also have the option to view only my personal results.

This is intriguing. Google is doing everything it can to encourage personalized search. It has a selfish interest in doing so: it wants as many people as possible to be logged into Google for as long as possible, using Google products, providing Google with data and being exposed to personalized Google ads. As personalized search gains traction with users, content creators will be able to gain a lot of search visibility in three ways:

1. Creators become visible to their direct connections.
   Content associated with a particular creator will get top position in personalized searches conducted by people who have circled them. Imagine what would happen if a creator tripled the number of circles they were in, or if Google began to incorporate Twitter and Pinterest follows into its personalized search results.
2. Creators become visible to their indirect connections.
   If a creator’s content is endorsed by someone in the Google+ network, the content could appear in the personalized results of searches conducted by that person’s connections. The ripple effect can extend a considerable distance.
3. Creators become visible to people who visit their website.
   If someone frequents a creator’s website, Google will serve that creator’s content in their personalized searches.

The trend: As time goes on, expect Google to get smarter about how it ranks personalized content, and for Google to cast a wider net across social networks to retrieve it.

Quick tip for creatives: Strengthen and broaden your social connections to give your work more exposure on search engines. Keep looking for better ways to bring new visitors to your website, and to keep them coming back.

2. The Importance of Social Shares

One factor that Google considers in evaluating a page of content is its social shares. Google sees likes, +1s, tweets and other types of shares as indicators of content quality and trustworthiness. This is reasonable enough: a blog post with 1500 retweets has more clearly established value than a comparable post with five.

Social sharing is more important than ever.

At the moment, how much value Google accords to social shares is still unclear, which is fair enough because many questions remain unanswered. Is a tweet more or less valuable than a like? How do you evaluate the authority of the person doing the sharing? How are people gaming the system to inflate the number of shares?

Nevertheless, we should expect social sharing to grow in importance for SEO. First, there is demand: people would love to consider social endorsements for certain types of searches, provided they have confidence in the data. Secondly, there is self-interest: Google is committed to its social network, Google+, and isn’t about to ignore it on its own search engine.

The trend: Social sharing now has its biggest impact on standard search results. Expect Google to ratchet up the presence of share-influenced links in personalized results as well. For instance, we could start to see a variety of segmented search options that display content shared by a defined subset of your connections.

Quick tip for creatives: Make social-sharing buttons prominent to make it easy for people to share content on your website; actively engage in social media; and publish your content on websites where content is widely shared.

3. The Rise Of Search Segmentation

In the old days, there weren’t too many ways to slice and dice search results. Today, there are scores. Tomorrow, there will be hundreds.

Multiple search options create opportunities.

More segmentation means more opportunity for freelance authors to improve their search visibility based on the nature of their content. When results are lumped together in one big mass, it’s challenging for a small enterprise to stand out. However, if creatives focus their content efforts on, for example, standing out in a particular segment, then they could capture a larger share of segmented searches. (An example of how to go about this appears in the “Reading Level� segment in the next section.)

Note, too, that segmented search offers a “personalized� option, where, again, users can zero in on content based on their browsing history and social connections.

The trend: Google will continue to categorize content to help users drill down to search results that are precisely relevant to their intent, rather than broadly relevant to their keywords. In particular, segmented search options for images and video will become much more sophisticated, in response to our insatiable appetite for visual content.

Quick tip for creatives: Stay current on how Google segments content, and shape yours to stand out in segments that are natural homes for your work.

4. More Emphasis on Quality and More Transparency

For years, creatives have complained that “black hatâ€� SEO tactics pollute rankings, pushing high-quality content down the page. However, as Google’s algorithm grows more sophisticated, it gets better at combatting black-hat practices — more great news for content producers.

Google is sending clearer SEO signals.

Google fights content spam by emphasizing quality in its algorithm and by being transparent in how quality is calculated. Quality has always been a focus; the current level of transparency is something new.

Google’s Panda update, released in 2011, was a declaration of war against content manipulators. A primary goal of this algorithm change — and of many that followed — was to decisively penalize worthless content and to reward highly relevant, meaningful and trustworthy content.

In addition to the algorithmic measures, Google is taking the smoke and mirrors out of search by more openly communicating algorithm changes to SEOs and the general public.

Why? In some cases, black-hat tactics were inadvertent, caused by website administrators using outdated techniques or misinterpreting Google’s algorithmic intent. Furthermore, a good deal of high-quality content gets lost in the search shuffle because creators simply ignore SEO. More than ever, Google wants every website to be optimized and optimized properly. The more high-caliber content Google can serve up to users in SERPs, the more business it will do.

The trend: Google will push hard in this direction, devising more accurate methods of evaluating the relevance, substance and trustworthiness of content. It will get better at interpreting both the inherent quality of the work itself and the social-sharing data associated with it.

Quick tip for creatives: Stay up to date on how to communicate the quality of your text, images and video to Google. (Links to step-by-step tutorials on how to do this are provided at the end of this post.)

5. Google+ and the rel=author Link

Google enthusiasts see the Google+ social network as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Most everybody else thinks Google+ is less useful for marketing than sliced bread. But whether or not you like Google+, the network cannot be ignored for SEO. Content creators ought to take note of two particular aspects of the network.

The rel=author link builds a creator’s brand and search visibility.

First, Google+ content gets indexed and ranked. In fact, when you publish original content on Google+, not only is it indexed and ranked, but it is given prime positioning in personalized SERPs. Images and video that are stored on Google or associated with personal pages on Google+ also receive greater exposure in search, as demonstrated earlier in the screen captures for image search.

Secondly, the rel=author link associates a page of Web content with its author’s personal Google+ profile. This is a technical mouthful, but it’s a big deal for creatives. Google has begun to link content to its creators as well as its publishers. “Authorship markup,â€� or “author rank,â€� is being developed at a furious rate because people sometimes want the option of searching for content by a particular creator or want results ranked according to the authority or expertise of the creators.

The trend: High-authority creators will see their content become more visible in search results, and for that reason, publishers will need to seek out high-authority creators to boost traffic to their websites.

Quick tip for creatives: Set up a personal Google+ profile and incorporate the rel=author link into your published content. (Instructions on how to do this are provided in the next section.)

How To Capitalize On The New SEO

Given these recent developments, let’s look at how authors can manage their content to increase its visibility and obtain all of the benefits that go along with that. Some of the following suggestions are technical in nature, while others are creative techniques that are not always thought of as aspects of SEO. However, with Google getting better at evaluating the quality of content, people are now less able to inflate the ranking of inferior content through technical manipulation and must instead treat the quality of their content itself as the linchpin of their SEO program.

Create Highly Sharable Content

SEO is no longer a game of mechanical keyword placement. In fact, SEO has moved even beyond a game of relevance and substance. For content to succeed in search today, it must be relevant, substantive and sharable. Content creators can use a variety of stylistic and marketing techniques to enhance social interest in their content, including the following:

1. Convert dry text into visually engaging content to generate immediate interest;
2. Provide consistently informative, well-researched and enlightening content that generates long-term interest;
3. Develop a unique voice and style;
4. Take a provocative stance or add humor when appropriate and compatible with the corporate style;
5. Provide detailed content on a topic that has not been widely covered (scarcity of information increases demand);
6. Attribute information to factual sources (trustworthy content is more confidently shared);
7. Link generously (encourage sharing by setting a good example);
8. Title content creatively to spark curiosity;
9. Use Web design and typographic best practices to optimize readability and scannability;
10. Embed video in blog posts and Web pages;
11. Display attractive and intuitive social-sharing buttons;
12. Give users an incentive to share.

Set-Up Methods and Benefits: Use The rel=author Link

Here’s a basic outline of how to set up rel=author links for your content. Google has a more thorough rundown.

1. Create a personal Google+ profile page with a high-quality headshot;
2. Validate your email address;
3. In the byline of any content that you create, set the anchor text to be your name as it appears in your Google+ profile, and link to your profile with a URL that looks like this: https://plus.google.com/102318046680468697385?rel=author.
4. When your content is published, link back to its URL from the “Contributor to� section of your Google+ profile.

Once your content is indexed, your Google+ profile picture and name, along with the publication date, title and description, will (sometimes) appear in SERPs, in both standard and personalized results. This gives you more exposure, and it instills trust in users that the content has a human author, and that the author is reputable. This adds up to higher ranking and more people clicking through to your content.

Please note: Author attribution is still in the early stages of development. Google frequently changes both the procedures for setting up links and the presentation of author information in SERPs. The instructional link above should be up to date whenever you are ready to dive in.

How to set up different types of content:

• Guest blog posts
  Set up a rel=author link somewhere in your content. The most sensible place to do this is either in the byline or in the bio area. If the blog doesn’t accommodate such placement, then a rel=author link in the body of the post would work, too.
• Infographics
  If you create an infographic, add a blurb below the image saying, “Infographic by [your name],â€� with a rel=author link.
• Video
  Follow the same procedure as described above for infographics.
• Dual authorship
  What if an article is coauthored or the author wants to credit a photographer? The best practice is to use only one rel=author link per page. If more than one link appears on a page, the first that appears in the markup will be the one whose name and image are featured in SERPs.

Bring Back Blog Marketing

Blogs are back. In terms of social sharing, blog posts are far more likely to be shared than standard Web pages. In terms of segmentation, blog posts figure prominently in search segments such as news, time ranges and, of course, blogs. Here are some blogging techniques that fit especially well in today’s SEO environment:

• Incorporate the rel=author link into the byline of every post in your archive.
  This establishes you as the author and gives all of your existing content an SEO boost. Several WordPress plugins are available to automatically set up the links for single- and multi-author blogs. If you are using another CMS, check with the developer to see whether and how it supports rel=author linking.
• Ramp up guest blogging efforts.
  Getting published on highly authoritative, highly shared blogs has always been useful, and adding the rel=author link to your guest posts delivers even more value.
• Blog directly on Google+.
  Earlier, we mentioned that Google indexes and ranks original Google+ posts. To take advantage of this, some “plussers� are actually writing lengthy original posts on the network. This strategy could be well worth testing, especially if you already have an active presence on the network. And it could work particularly well for photographers, designers and videographers, who can surround their visual content with keyword-optimized text.

Consider the Reading Level When Composing

Let’s consider an example of creating targeted content to capitalize on Google’s segmented search.

Depending on the topic, writing at a particular reading level could be quite advantageous for SEO. For instance, here is how Google categorizes content that matches a search for “social media marketing�:

If you wrote a post about social media marketing at an advanced reading level, Google would probably rank it very low in its fully aggregated SERPs. Because the vast majority of content (82%) is written at an intermediate level, Google assumes that is what searchers are looking for.

However, for segmented searches, it’s a different story. Writing an advanced article would probably make you highly visible to people drilling down to that reading level. And even though it’s a small group (2%), it could include people with a lot of interest and ready to take action.

Another possibility is to write a basic article about social media marketing. Here again, there is less search competition (16%), and there is a good chance that people who are new to social media will want to drill down to basic articles.

Google does not clearly explain how it defines these three reading levels. But its model, according to Google’s Daniel M. Russell, is based primarily on input from teachers who have classified various pages of text. You can read more about Google’s reading level model on Russell’s personal blog.

The New SEO Formula: Relevance + Substance + Shares = Visibility

At one time, SEO was a fairly straightforward exercise in shaping content on a particular domain to rank highly on basically one flavor of SERPs for a given set of queries.

But as we’ve seen, Google now considers who created the content in addition to where the content lives, and query options have expanded thanks to the segmentation of search options. On top of all this, personalized search options enable users to view results based on the online behavior of themselves and their social media connections.

While technical expertise still matters tremendously in SEO, authorship is gaining ground, and quickly. Google is attempting to cut out the SEO middleman and make search a matter of directly connecting great content creators (as defined by the inherent quality of their work and their popularity) with searchers who will find great value in their content. This explains why Google is being more forthcoming about its algorithm: the maneuver levels the technical playing field and forces SEO practitioners to differentiate themselves through the content itself. What more could content creators ask for?

Resources

Below are resources containing detailed information on content-related SEO techniques that should be of interest to creatives who market themselves and their work.

• “Author Information in Search Results,â€� Google Webmaster Tools
  Instructions on setting up rel=author links.
• “Google Evaluates Reading Level?!?,â€� Pure Visibility
  How Google evaluates reading levels and why it matters to writers.
• “Webmaster Guidelines: Quality Guidelines,â€� Google Webmaster Tools
  Best practices for content quality.
• “Image Publishing Guidelines,â€� Google Webmaster Tools
• “Video Best Practices,â€� Google Webmaster Tools
• “Search by Image,â€� Google
  How image search works.
• “Facebook + Twitter’s Influence on Google’s Search Rankings,â€� Rand Fishkin, The Daily SEO Blog

Note: All images used for this post have exclusively been created by Straight North.

(al) (il)

© Brad Shorr for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

Due to big changes in the SEO landscape, designers, photographers, videographers and writers have new opportunities to build their reputation, expand brand awareness and generate more leads. This post describes five important developments that content creators should be aware of, and then we’ll outline several ways to capitalize on them.

Five SEO Developments That Favor Content Producers

Thanks to self-publishing and social networks, the world is drowning in content. Google’s response: make it easy for searchers to drill down to exactly what they are looking for. Today, we can perform a search and look at the results all together in one big chunk, or we can carve off just a piece. We can look at search results from complete strangers, from people we know or from both.

In the past, search results simply connected keywords to websites. Today, in pursuit of an easier way to drill down, Google also connects keywords to social networks, user behavior and authors. Here are five ways this is playing out, and why it’s all great news for content creators.

1. Personalized Search

While search engine users are accustomed to getting objective results on search engine results pages (SERPs), Google now serves up “subjective� results as well. When logged into Google and with personalized search turned on, you will see SERPs that include results based on your Web browsing history, as well as content authored or endorsed by your social connections.

Personalization can radically change what you see in regular searches and image searches. Here is a Google image search that demonstrates the difference. My search for “how to use twitter� with personalization turned off yields the following:

Image search without personalization.

With personalization turned on, the results look like this:

Image search with personalization.

Notice that the first two rows of images are completely different. At the top of my personalized search, I see 10 images associated with my Google+ connections. With personalized search turned on, I also have the option to view only my personal results.

This is intriguing. Google is doing everything it can to encourage personalized search. It has a selfish interest in doing so: it wants as many people as possible to be logged into Google for as long as possible, using Google products, providing Google with data and being exposed to personalized Google ads. As personalized search gains traction with users, content creators will be able to gain a lot of search visibility in three ways:

1. Creators become visible to their direct connections.
   Content associated with a particular creator will get top position in personalized searches conducted by people who have circled them. Imagine what would happen if a creator tripled the number of circles they were in, or if Google began to incorporate Twitter and Pinterest follows into its personalized search results.
2. Creators become visible to their indirect connections.
   If a creator’s content is endorsed by someone in the Google+ network, the content could appear in the personalized results of searches conducted by that person’s connections. The ripple effect can extend a considerable distance.
3. Creators become visible to people who visit their website.
   If someone frequents a creator’s website, Google will serve that creator’s content in their personalized searches.

The trend: As time goes on, expect Google to get smarter about how it ranks personalized content, and for Google to cast a wider net across social networks to retrieve it.

Quick tip for creatives: Strengthen and broaden your social connections to give your work more exposure on search engines. Keep looking for better ways to bring new visitors to your website, and to keep them coming back.

2. The Importance of Social Shares

One factor that Google considers in evaluating a page of content is its social shares. Google sees likes, +1s, tweets and other types of shares as indicators of content quality and trustworthiness. This is reasonable enough: a blog post with 1500 retweets has more clearly established value than a comparable post with five.

Social sharing is more important than ever.

At the moment, how much value Google accords to social shares is still unclear, which is fair enough because many questions remain unanswered. Is a tweet more or less valuable than a like? How do you evaluate the authority of the person doing the sharing? How are people gaming the system to inflate the number of shares?

Nevertheless, we should expect social sharing to grow in importance for SEO. First, there is demand: people would love to consider social endorsements for certain types of searches, provided they have confidence in the data. Secondly, there is self-interest: Google is committed to its social network, Google+, and isn’t about to ignore it on its own search engine.

The trend: Social sharing now has its biggest impact on standard search results. Expect Google to ratchet up the presence of share-influenced links in personalized results as well. For instance, we could start to see a variety of segmented search options that display content shared by a defined subset of your connections.

Quick tip for creatives: Make social-sharing buttons prominent to make it easy for people to share content on your website; actively engage in social media; and publish your content on websites where content is widely shared.

3. The Rise Of Search Segmentation

In the old days, there weren’t too many ways to slice and dice search results. Today, there are scores. Tomorrow, there will be hundreds.

Multiple search options create opportunities.

More segmentation means more opportunity for freelance authors to improve their search visibility based on the nature of their content. When results are lumped together in one big mass, it’s challenging for a small enterprise to stand out. However, if creatives focus their content efforts on, for example, standing out in a particular segment, then they could capture a larger share of segmented searches. (An example of how to go about this appears in the “Reading Level� segment in the next section.)

Note, too, that segmented search offers a “personalized� option, where, again, users can zero in on content based on their browsing history and social connections.

The trend: Google will continue to categorize content to help users drill down to search results that are precisely relevant to their intent, rather than broadly relevant to their keywords. In particular, segmented search options for images and video will become much more sophisticated, in response to our insatiable appetite for visual content.

Quick tip for creatives: Stay current on how Google segments content, and shape yours to stand out in segments that are natural homes for your work.

4. More Emphasis on Quality and More Transparency

For years, creatives have complained that “black hatâ€� SEO tactics pollute rankings, pushing high-quality content down the page. However, as Google’s algorithm grows more sophisticated, it gets better at combatting black-hat practices — more great news for content producers.

Google is sending clearer SEO signals.

Google fights content spam by emphasizing quality in its algorithm and by being transparent in how quality is calculated. Quality has always been a focus; the current level of transparency is something new.

Google’s Panda update, released in 2011, was a declaration of war against content manipulators. A primary goal of this algorithm change — and of many that followed — was to decisively penalize worthless content and to reward highly relevant, meaningful and trustworthy content.

In addition to the algorithmic measures, Google is taking the smoke and mirrors out of search by more openly communicating algorithm changes to SEOs and the general public.

Why? In some cases, black-hat tactics were inadvertent, caused by website administrators using outdated techniques or misinterpreting Google’s algorithmic intent. Furthermore, a good deal of high-quality content gets lost in the search shuffle because creators simply ignore SEO. More than ever, Google wants every website to be optimized and optimized properly. The more high-caliber content Google can serve up to users in SERPs, the more business it will do.

The trend: Google will push hard in this direction, devising more accurate methods of evaluating the relevance, substance and trustworthiness of content. It will get better at interpreting both the inherent quality of the work itself and the social-sharing data associated with it.

Quick tip for creatives: Stay up to date on how to communicate the quality of your text, images and video to Google. (Links to step-by-step tutorials on how to do this are provided at the end of this post.)

5. Google+ and the rel=author Link

Google enthusiasts see the Google+ social network as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Most everybody else thinks Google+ is less useful for marketing than sliced bread. But whether or not you like Google+, the network cannot be ignored for SEO. Content creators ought to take note of two particular aspects of the network.

The rel=author link builds a creator’s brand and search visibility.

First, Google+ content gets indexed and ranked. In fact, when you publish original content on Google+, not only is it indexed and ranked, but it is given prime positioning in personalized SERPs. Images and video that are stored on Google or associated with personal pages on Google+ also receive greater exposure in search, as demonstrated earlier in the screen captures for image search.

Secondly, the rel=author link associates a page of Web content with its author’s personal Google+ profile. This is a technical mouthful, but it’s a big deal for creatives. Google has begun to link content to its creators as well as its publishers. “Authorship markup,â€� or “author rank,â€� is being developed at a furious rate because people sometimes want the option of searching for content by a particular creator or want results ranked according to the authority or expertise of the creators.

The trend: High-authority creators will see their content become more visible in search results, and for that reason, publishers will need to seek out high-authority creators to boost traffic to their websites.

Quick tip for creatives: Set up a personal Google+ profile and incorporate the rel=author link into your published content. (Instructions on how to do this are provided in the next section.)

How To Capitalize On The New SEO

Given these recent developments, let’s look at how authors can manage their content to increase its visibility and obtain all of the benefits that go along with that. Some of the following suggestions are technical in nature, while others are creative techniques that are not always thought of as aspects of SEO. However, with Google getting better at evaluating the quality of content, people are now less able to inflate the ranking of inferior content through technical manipulation and must instead treat the quality of their content itself as the linchpin of their SEO program.

Create Highly Sharable Content

SEO is no longer a game of mechanical keyword placement. In fact, SEO has moved even beyond a game of relevance and substance. For content to succeed in search today, it must be relevant, substantive and sharable. Content creators can use a variety of stylistic and marketing techniques to enhance social interest in their content, including the following:

1. Convert dry text into visually engaging content to generate immediate interest;
2. Provide consistently informative, well-researched and enlightening content that generates long-term interest;
3. Develop a unique voice and style;
4. Take a provocative stance or add humor when appropriate and compatible with the corporate style;
5. Provide detailed content on a topic that has not been widely covered (scarcity of information increases demand);
6. Attribute information to factual sources (trustworthy content is more confidently shared);
7. Link generously (encourage sharing by setting a good example);
8. Title content creatively to spark curiosity;
9. Use Web design and typographic best practices to optimize readability and scannability;
10. Embed video in blog posts and Web pages;
11. Display attractive and intuitive social-sharing buttons;
12. Give users an incentive to share.

Set-Up Methods and Benefits: Use The rel=author Link

Here’s a basic outline of how to set up rel=author links for your content. Google has a more thorough rundown.

1. Create a personal Google+ profile page with a high-quality headshot;
2. Validate your email address;
3. In the byline of any content that you create, set the anchor text to be your name as it appears in your Google+ profile, and link to your profile with a URL that looks like this: https://plus.google.com/102318046680468697385?rel=author.
4. When your content is published, link back to its URL from the “Contributor to� section of your Google+ profile.

Once your content is indexed, your Google+ profile picture and name, along with the publication date, title and description, will (sometimes) appear in SERPs, in both standard and personalized results. This gives you more exposure, and it instills trust in users that the content has a human author, and that the author is reputable. This adds up to higher ranking and more people clicking through to your content.

Please note: Author attribution is still in the early stages of development. Google frequently changes both the procedures for setting up links and the presentation of author information in SERPs. The instructional link above should be up to date whenever you are ready to dive in.

How to set up different types of content:

• Guest blog posts
  Set up a rel=author link somewhere in your content. The most sensible place to do this is either in the byline or in the bio area. If the blog doesn’t accommodate such placement, then a rel=author link in the body of the post would work, too.
• Infographics
  If you create an infographic, add a blurb below the image saying, “Infographic by [your name],â€� with a rel=author link.
• Video
  Follow the same procedure as described above for infographics.
• Dual authorship
  What if an article is coauthored or the author wants to credit a photographer? The best practice is to use only one rel=author link per page. If more than one link appears on a page, the first that appears in the markup will be the one whose name and image are featured in SERPs.

Bring Back Blog Marketing

Blogs are back. In terms of social sharing, blog posts are far more likely to be shared than standard Web pages. In terms of segmentation, blog posts figure prominently in search segments such as news, time ranges and, of course, blogs. Here are some blogging techniques that fit especially well in today’s SEO environment:

• Incorporate the rel=author link into the byline of every post in your archive.
  This establishes you as the author and gives all of your existing content an SEO boost. Several WordPress plugins are available to automatically set up the links for single- and multi-author blogs. If you are using another CMS, check with the developer to see whether and how it supports rel=author linking.
• Ramp up guest blogging efforts.
  Getting published on highly authoritative, highly shared blogs has always been useful, and adding the rel=author link to your guest posts delivers even more value.
• Blog directly on Google+.
  Earlier, we mentioned that Google indexes and ranks original Google+ posts. To take advantage of this, some “plussers� are actually writing lengthy original posts on the network. This strategy could be well worth testing, especially if you already have an active presence on the network. And it could work particularly well for photographers, designers and videographers, who can surround their visual content with keyword-optimized text.

Consider the Reading Level When Composing

Let’s consider an example of creating targeted content to capitalize on Google’s segmented search.

Depending on the topic, writing at a particular reading level could be quite advantageous for SEO. For instance, here is how Google categorizes content that matches a search for “social media marketing�:

If you wrote a post about social media marketing at an advanced reading level, Google would probably rank it very low in its fully aggregated SERPs. Because the vast majority of content (82%) is written at an intermediate level, Google assumes that is what searchers are looking for.

However, for segmented searches, it’s a different story. Writing an advanced article would probably make you highly visible to people drilling down to that reading level. And even though it’s a small group (2%), it could include people with a lot of interest and ready to take action.

Another possibility is to write a basic article about social media marketing. Here again, there is less search competition (16%), and there is a good chance that people who are new to social media will want to drill down to basic articles.

Google does not clearly explain how it defines these three reading levels. But its model, according to Google’s Daniel M. Russell, is based primarily on input from teachers who have classified various pages of text. You can read more about Google’s reading level model on Russell’s personal blog.

The New SEO Formula: Relevance + Substance + Shares = Visibility

At one time, SEO was a fairly straightforward exercise in shaping content on a particular domain to rank highly on basically one flavor of SERPs for a given set of queries.

But as we’ve seen, Google now considers who created the content in addition to where the content lives, and query options have expanded thanks to the segmentation of search options. On top of all this, personalized search options enable users to view results based on the online behavior of themselves and their social media connections.

While technical expertise still matters tremendously in SEO, authorship is gaining ground, and quickly. Google is attempting to cut out the SEO middleman and make search a matter of directly connecting great content creators (as defined by the inherent quality of their work and their popularity) with searchers who will find great value in their content. This explains why Google is being more forthcoming about its algorithm: the maneuver levels the technical playing field and forces SEO practitioners to differentiate themselves through the content itself. What more could content creators ask for?

Resources

Below are resources containing detailed information on content-related SEO techniques that should be of interest to creatives who market themselves and their work.

• “Author Information in Search Results,â€� Google Webmaster Tools
  Instructions on setting up rel=author links.
• “Google Evaluates Reading Level?!?,â€� Pure Visibility
  How Google evaluates reading levels and why it matters to writers.
• “Webmaster Guidelines: Quality Guidelines,â€� Google Webmaster Tools
  Best practices for content quality.
• “Image Publishing Guidelines,â€� Google Webmaster Tools
• “Video Best Practices,â€� Google Webmaster Tools
• “Search by Image,â€� Google
  How image search works.
• “Facebook + Twitter’s Influence on Google’s Search Rankings,â€� Rand Fishkin, The Daily SEO Blog

Note: All images used for this post have exclusively been created by Straight North.

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© Brad Shorr for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

The first thing to understand about content strategy is that no two people understand it the same way. It’s a relatively new — and extremely broad — discipline with no single definitive definition. A highly informative Knol on content strategy defines it as follows:

Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production, management, and governance.

This definition is a great place to start. Although the discipline has clearly evolved, this breakdown of its scope makes perfect sense. The aspects of content strategy that matter most to Web designers in this definition are design (obviously!), development, presentation and production. In this article, we’ll concentrate on the relationship between content strategy and design in creating, organizing and displaying Web copy.

As a writer and content strategist myself, I’ve worked with designers in all of these areas and find the creative process highly enriching. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with designers who are quick to challenge ideas that are unclear or unsound, who are brilliant at creating striking visual representations of even the most complex concepts. A lively interplay between design and content is not only fun, but is how spectacular results are achieved. This is why content strategy should matter a great deal to designers.

What Is Content Strategy, And Why Should A Designer Care?

Content strategy is the glue that holds a project together. When content strategy is ambiguous or absent, don’t be surprised if you end up with the Internet equivalent of Ishtar. When content strategy is in place and in its proper place, we’re on our way to producing beautiful and effective results.

Slide from The Language of Interfaces by Des Traynor.

While wrapping one’s head around content strategy might be difficult, the thing that makes it work is very simple: good communication. Sometimes a project moves along like a sports car on a superhighway. Other times, the road is so full of bumps and potholes that it’s a wonder we ever reach our destination. As we explore the relationship between content strategy and design, I’ll detail how I keep the channels of communication open and go over the workflow processes that I’ve used to support that effort. I hope that sharing my experiences (both positive and negative) will help you contribute to and manage projects more effectively and deliver better products to clients.

How To Get Started: The First Step Is The Longest

Project manager: We need a landing page for client X.

Designer: I can’t start the design until I see some content.

Writer: I can’t start writing until I see a design.

You may find this dialogue amusing… until it happens to you! At our firm, we find that the best way to get past such a standoff is to write first. This is because content strategy, at a fundamental level, frames a project for the designer. As a content strategist, my job is to articulate the why, where, who, what and how of the content:

• Why is it important to convey this message? This speaks to purpose.
• Where on the website should the message appear? This speaks to context.
• Who is the audience? This speaks to the precision of the message.
• What are we trying to say? This speaks to clarity.
• How do we convey and sequence the information for maximum impact? This speaks to persuasiveness.

Bringing it down to a more detailed level, let’s consider a landing page. A content strategist will determine such things as the following:

• Audience
  Is the audience sophisticated? Down to earth? College-level? Predominately male? Female? Etc.
• Word count
  Some pitches scream for long copy, while others must be stripped to the bare minimum. SEO might factor into the equation as well.
• Messaging priorities
  What is the most important point to convey? The least important? What needs to be said first (the hook)? What needs to be said just leading up to the call to action?
• Call to action
  What will the precise wording be? What emotional and intellectual factors will motivate the visitor to click through?

Clear direction on these points not only helps the writer write, but helps the designer with layout, color palettes and image selection. When we start with words, we produce designs that are more reflective of the product’s purpose.

Landing pages are a great place to try this workflow, because in terms of content strategy, they are less complex than many other types of Web pages. A product category page, on the other hand, might have a less obvious purpose or multiple purposes, considerably greater word counts, more (and more involved) messaging points, and a variety of SEO considerations, all of which would affect its design.

Quick Tips for Getting Started

• Make sure someone is specifically responsible for content strategy. If strategic responsibility is vague, your final product will be, too.
• Slow down! Everybody, me included, is eager to dive headfirst into a new project. But “ready-aim-fireâ€� is not a winning content strategy. Make sure everyone is on the same page conceptually before cranking out work.
• If content strategy falls on your shoulders as a designer, cultivate an understanding of the discipline. Resources are listed at the end of this article to help you.
• Make sure designers and writers understand what their roles are — and are not. There’s no need for writers to tell designers how to design, or for designers to tell writers how to write.

Perfecting The Process: Break Up Those Bottlenecks

Project manager: How are things coming along?

Developer: I’m waiting on design.

Designer: I’m waiting on content.

Writer: I’m waiting on project management.

Web development projects in particular involve a lot of moving parts, with potential bottlenecks everywhere. The graphic below describes our Web development process, with an emphasis on the design and content components. Chances are, whether you are freelancing or at an agency, at least parts of this should look familiar:

Link: Larger version (Image credit: Chris Depa, Straight North)

The process is by no means perfect, but it is continually improving. In the next section, we’ll look at the many types of content-design difficulties you might experience.

To help our designers lay out text for wireframes and designs, we utilize content templates based on various word counts. These templates also incorporate best practices for typography and SEO. When the designer drops the template into a wireframe, it looks like this:

SEO content template in a wireframe.

The use of content templates not only takes a lot of guesswork out of the designer’s job, but also speeds up client reviews. When clients are able to see what the content will roughly look like in the allotted space, they tend to be more comfortable with the word counts and the placement of text on the page.

Communication can be streamlined using project management software. We use Basecamp, which is a popular system, but many other good ones are available. If you’re a freelancer, getting clients to work on your preferred project management platform can be an uphill battle, to say the least. Still, I encourage you to try; my experience in managing projects via email has been dismal, and many freelance designers I know express the same frustration.

The big advantage of a project management system is that it provides a single place for team members to manage tasks and interact. Internal reviews of design templates is one good example. The project manager can collect feedback from everyone in one place, and each participant can see what others have said and respond to it. Consolidating this information prevents the gaps and miscommunication that can occur when projects are managed through multiple email exchanges. Designers can see all of the feedback in one place — and only one place. This is a big time-saver.

Quick Tips for the Creative Process

• Make sure someone is specifically responsible for project management.
• Whether or not your process is sophisticated, get it down in writing and in front of all team members before the project starts. This really helps to align expectations and keep communication flowing.
• Meet at regular intervals to discuss status and problems. Hold yourself and others accountable.
• Get approvals along the way, rather than dump the completed project in the client’s lap. Having clients sign off on a few pages of content and one or two templates really helps to align the creative process with client expectations, and it reduces the risk of those massive overhauls at the tail end that demolish budgets and blow deadlines.
• Writers and designers should discuss issues as quickly, openly and thoroughly as possible.

Conflict Resolution: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Designer: All these words are boring me.

Writer: All these images are confusing me.

Project manager: All these arguments are killing me.

No matter how clear the strategy, no matter how smooth the process, design and content will conflict somewhere along the line in almost every project. In fact, if creative tension is absent, it may well indicate that the project is in serious trouble. Here are the issues I run into on a fairly regular basis, as well as ideas for getting past them.

Making Room for SEO Content

Big chunks of content are bothersome to designers; even as a writer, I worry about high word counts turning off some of our audience. However, when SEO considerations demand a lot of words on a page, there are ways to make everyone happy:

1. Tabs are a nifty way to hide text.
   Tabs allow you to keep the page tight vertically. Even more importantly, they enable visitors to easily find the information they need — and ignore what they don’t need. Below is a tabbed product area in the Apple Store.
   
   The Apple Store
2. Keep SEO content below the fold.
   This is a compromise, because an SEO strategist would prefer optimized content to appear above the fold. However, if a website is to have any hope of converting traffic brought in by SEO, then visitors need to see appealing design, not a 300-word block of text.
   
   The Movies Now landing page.
3. Step up creativity on non-SEO pages.
   For many websites, the pages that are most important to SEO have to do with products and services, where conveying features and benefits is needed more than wowing visitors with design. Conversely, pages on which awesome design matters most are often unimportant for SEO: “About,� bio and customer service pages, for example.
   
   Carsonified’s team pages.

Clarity vs. Creativity

We fight this battle over what I call “design contentâ€� all the time — primarily with navigation labels, home-page headers and call-to-action blocks. At a fundamental level, it is a battle over the question, “Which wins over the hearts and minds of visitors more: awesome design or straightforward information?â€�

Navigation
Making the labels for navigation straightforward is a fairly established best practice. Predictability is important: if visitors are looking for your “About� page, and they finally stumble on it by clicking on “Be Amazed,� then the emotion you will have elicited is irritation, not adoration. Be as creative as you want with the look and feel of the labels, but to maximize the user experience, the text and positioning of the labels must be as vanilla as possible.

For insight on how to achieve clarity, read “The Language of Interfaces.�

Design of the header on the home page
Rotating header images and other types of animation are rather in vogue these days, and they’re a good way to convey a thumbnail sketch of a firm’s capabilities and value proposition. Content must convey information, but the header must work on an emotional level to be effective. Writers must take a back seat to designers! The Ben the Bodyguard home page (below) starts to build a connection using a comic character and storyline. This is different than most sites that simply talk about feature after feature.

The design should tell a story. (Ben the Bodyguard)

Call-to-action blocks
Before all else, make sure your website’s pages even have calls to action, because this is your opportunity to lead visitors to the logical next step. A call to action could be as simple as a text link, such as “Learn more about our Chicago SEO services.� Generally more effective for conversion would be a design element that functions almost as a miniature landing page.

Much like landing pages, the wording of the call-to-action phrase must be crystal clear and be completely relevant to the page to which you are taking visitors. Yet impeccable wording is not enough: the design of the content block must be captivating, and the text laid out in a way that makes it eminently readable.

Designers can get rather snarly when I tell them their design for a call to action needs five more words: it might force them to rethink the entire design. Many times, though, a discussion with the designer will make us realize that we don’t actually need those extra five words; in fact, we’ll sometimes hit on a way to reduce the word count. The creative interplay mentioned earlier makes a huge difference in this all-important area of conversion optimization.

Calls to action require excellent design and content.

Quick Tips for Conflict Resolution

1. Keep the lines of communication open between all team members and the client.
2. Select a project manager with great communication skills and an objective point of view.
3. Stay focused on the purpose of the design: is it to persuade, motivate, inform or something else? Creative disagreements should never be theoretical; they should always be grounded in what will increase the real-world effectiveness of the work at hand.

Long-Winded Writers Vs. Lofty-Minded Designers

One thing I run up against continually is my own tendency to say too much and a designer’s tendency to say too little. Ask a writer what time it is, and they’ll tell you how to make a clock. Ask a designer what time it is, and they’ll give you a stylized image of a pendulum. Neither answer is particularly helpful!

These opposing mentalities pose challenges in Web design. Does an image alone convey enough information about a product’s key benefit? Will the length of a 200-word explanation of that benefit deter people from reading it? How intuitive can we expect visitors to be? How patient?

This is when having a process that encourages communication between team members makes a difference. I wish I had a secret formula for resolving conflict, but I don’t. I know of only two ways to balance design and content philosophies, and one of them is to talk it out as a team. As I said, communication is at the heart of an effective content strategy, and we have to resist the temptation that some of us have to withdraw into a shell when we encounter confrontation.

The other way to resolve conflicts — astoundingly underused, in my experience — is to get feedback from target users. Simply showing people a Web page and then asking for their key takeaways will tell you just about all you need to know about how effective you’ve been in getting the point across. Our opinion of our own work will always be subjective. Furthermore, because we’re emotionally invested is what we’ve created, discussing its flaws calmly and collectedly is difficult. Users are the ultimate judge of any creative effort, so why not take subjectivity and emotion out of the equation by going directly to the source?

Resources

• The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott
  Explains content strategy better than anything I’ve read. The third edition was published in July 2011.
• “Content Strategy,â€� Google Knol
  For a thorough overview of content strategy and links to books, blogs and other resources, check out this fantastic Knol.
• “Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices,â€� Jacob Gube
  To promote creative compatibility, designers and writers alike should study this Smashing Magazine article.
• “Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management,â€� Jakob Nielsen
  For insight into design-related project management, read this post by the brilliant Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen.

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© Brad Shorr for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

No matter how brilliant a website’s design, no matter how elegant its navigation, sooner or later visitors will decide whether to take action because of something they read. In the end, the effectiveness with which a website converts visitors hinges on words. If a new website is going to hit all the right notes, its content must be just as well crafted as its design and programming. However, as you might imagine, there are many ways to go wrong with content in a Web development project.

Image Credit

The errors discussed in this article have the potential to undo a website and are issues that I run up against time and time again in my nearly 12 years of producing Web content. Half the battle in avoiding these traps is simply recognizing them: all too often, content is handled as an afterthought, hurriedly completed to meet a project’s deadline. I hope these content tips will help you stay ahead of the game and build a better website in your next project.

Error #1: Writing Inwardly

Having worked in-house for many years, I’ve fell victim to the inward-focus syndrome on many occasions. It’s easy to do. You spend all day dealing with the intricacies of your products and services. You’ve made a huge intellectual and emotional investment in every product innovation and point of differentiation. You love thinking about your products, you love improving them, and you love talking about them. It’s only natural that you want to shout from the rooftops and tell the world your product’s story in all its splendor.

Problem is, the rest of the world isn’t interested in your story. Customers don’t have time to admire your greatness. They’re too busy searching for ways to make life better for themselves. A high-level Web page answers one question of the reader above all: What’s in it for me? To illustrate, we’ll stick with products, although this applies to other types of pages as well.

It’s not about you.

A well-written category-level product page talks a bit about features, a little more about benefits and a great deal more about the experience. This last element is especially important and exactly where most pages come up woefully short. Let’s use a mundane example of this principle in action by considering a hypothetical Web page for a packaging machine:

Feature: Up to 100 cycles per minute.

Benefit: Faster production.

Experience: Getting more product out the door per shift means you’ll blow away your productivity goals and be a hero. You might even get a promotion.

A typical Web page written about this machine would be 80% features and 20% benefits. However, if I were writing it, I’d budget 50 words on the features, 100 words on the benefits and 150 words on the experience.

Note:

1. Setting a “word budget� forces discipline. Not only that, it relieves the anxiety over having to determine how to approach each individual product page, thus eliminating one of the biggest causes of delay in Web development projects.
2. Focusing on the experience forces you to think about the target audience of the page in question. The experience I described speaks to an operations person. If my audience is made up of C-level executives or purchasing agents, then I would need to describe a completely different experience. If I’m writing for all three audiences, I may have to rethink my word budget. In any event, having an audience in mind prevents a Web page from devolving into that cursed, watered-down, “everything for everyone� messaging that says absolutely nothing.
3. The purpose of a high-level page is to get people interested in the product. Once they’re interested, they may crave more information about features and benefits. Perfect. Tell the long version of your story on a detail-heavy product sub-page. Companies need not neglect features and benefits; they just need to suppress the urge to hit visitors over the head with them the minute they walk through the door.

To see how this plays out in real life, consider this conversion optimization case study, documented on ABtests.com. A firm achieved a 200% increase in conversions by replacing feature-oriented copy with benefit-oriented copy. The high-converting page focuses on what the applicant wants, rather than what the service (DesignCourse.com) offers:

• “Become an amazing designer.â€�
• “Start earning real money.â€�
• “It’s fun and exciting.â€�
• “No tests, no hassles.â€�

If you’re still not convinced, listen to legendary copywriter John Caples, who is quoted in Made to Stick (page 179) by Chip Heath and Dan Heath:

Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. “The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world’s best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world’s best lawn!).� An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.

Quick Tips for Writing Outwardly

• Before you start writing, collect feedback from customers and prospects. Ask them why they buy from you, why they don’t, and how doing business with you has affected them.
• Start with an outline. Associate every feature with a benefit and every benefit with an experience.
• Have a customer read a draft and then explain to you why they would want to buy the product. If the customer “gets it,â€� you’re a star.
• Do the same thing with a person who knows nothing about your product and industry. If that person gets it, you’re a rock star.

Error #2: Burying The Lead

If they can’t figure it out, you’re dead.

Websites are a poor medium for subtlety. Visitors decide whether to stay on your website within a few seconds. If you can’t communicate why a page is important to them immediately, your conversion opportunities will vanish. Look at the two paragraphs below. Which conveys your most important message more quickly?

Your most important message is here., sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Or:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate your most important message is here. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Online marketers like to sneer at newspapers, but we can learn a lot from print journalists. For instance, they don’t bury the lead. To illustrate, here are a few leads I recently pulled from the Wall Street Journal:

• “Companies cranked up hiring in April to the fastest pace in five years…â€�
• “European markets snapped a three-session losing streak as gains in the banking sector and better-than-expected US jobs data for April sparked a rally.â€�
• “Women may have fared better than men during the recession, but they are not making up lost ground as fast as men in the recovery.â€�

Now look at your Web pages. How do your leads stack up? Are you leading with the main point? Are you giving visitors a reason to read further? If an in-house writer is not familiar with Web writing techniques, they may approach the project as if they were writing a novel, assuming that visitors will read their new website from start to finish.

This assumption is disastrous. People skim and scan Web pages, their eyes bouncing around like pinballs. For any given Web page, visitors are likely to read the headline and the first few lines of text; beyond that, any body content they read is gravy. Expecting someone to read an entire page of content sequentially from beginning to end is wishful thinking, period. The most important words on the page must be the easiest to find, read and comprehend.

Quick Tips for Unburying the Lead

• Before writing, ask, What is the key takeaway I want visitors to have after they visit this page? That’s your lead.
• Highlight your lead idea in a bold font. This is especially helpful when you can’t work it into the first sentence.
• Use plain language.
• Keep your most important points above the fold, as sub-headings, as the first sentence of a paragraph and as bullet points.

Error #3: Mediocre Meta Material

Meta titles appear in browser tabs.

Some of the most important text in a Web document isn’t the on-page content at all. Certain meta elements have an enormous impact on the user experience, brand awareness and conversion. Meta elements are bits of HTML code that are read mainly by search engine robots. However, two meta tags in particular speak to humans as well, and mastering them is critically important for copywriters.

• Meta Title
  The meta title describes the subject matter of the page and is ideally 65 characters or fewer. Visitors see the meta title in their browser tab and in search engine results; it is the most important piece of information that Google and other engines read on a given page.
• Meta Description
  The meta description, ideally 155 characters or fewer, is a snippet of text that is displayed under a link on a search engine results page (SERP). The meta description has little if any SEO value but is important for conversions.

Meta Titles

Because Google values meta titles so highly, including primary keyword phrases in them is imperative, preferably towards the beginning of the title. For human readers, a title tag should clearly and straightforwardly describe the nature of the page. In addition, the tag can also carry a branding message.

Here is an example of a strong meta tag, taken from the services page of a client of mine:

Enterprise-Level Credit Card Processing, Merchant Accounts | BluePay

At 68 characters, we’ve gone slightly over our recommended maximum. But having branding keywords (i.e. BluePay) at the end is OK: Google may truncate the last few characters, but visitors will see the branding message in their browser tab, especially if they bookmark the page. The title tag will further extend brand awareness if the visitor tweets the page or likes it on Facebook:

Title tags appear in Facebook link posts.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions appear in search engine results under the page’s title.

A meta description can set your page apart from others on a SERP. Here are seven tips for crafting a good one.

1. Don’t overuse keywords. This will make your description look spammy. For example, “We have promotional coffee mugs, custom mugs, custom coffee mugs, and custom mugs for coffee.�
2. Don’t use multiple exclamation points!!!! Excessive punctuation can be interpreted as aggression. It pushes people away.
3. Avoid extravagant claims. They undermine your credibility.
4. Include an incentive to click through to your page:
   • “Order one, get one free.â€�
   • “10% off your first order.â€�
   • “Learn how our service can reduce operating costs up to 15%.â€�
5. Focus on the user benefits of your product or service.
   • Bad example: “High R-factor insulation.â€�
   • Better example: “Insulation to keep your home warm and toasty.â€�
6. Mention your location if you are a local business. This helps searchers instantly connect your business to their need.
7. Establish your credibility:
   • “In business since 1965.â€�
   • “BBB accredited.â€�
   • “Over 5000 satisfied customers.â€�

(Whereas title tags are always displayed, description tags are not. Today, Google doesn’t always pull meta descriptions into its SERPs; instead, it might excerpt on-page content related to the user’s search terms.)

Quick Tips for Meta Magnificence

• If an SEO is working on your project, have them generate title tags based on their keyword research, and then tweak as needed.
• If you do not have an SEO, back up a step and reflect on why you are building the website. I believe that an unoptimized website is not worth building.
• Title tags should be consistent in style and form to enhance the user experience. Meta descriptions need not be consistent at all.
• Because of character limitations and the need for concision, writing these tags can be time-consuming. Remember, though: you don’t have to achieve perfection for launch. Tags can be changed at any time, and analytics experts often suggest that they should be.

Error #4: Saying Too Much

Brevity is the soul of conversion. Find out why.

Error #5: Weak Or No Calls To Action

Strong calls to action from our company’s website.

Assuming that you’ve written a brilliantly persuasive page, it’s still next to worthless without a strong call to action (CTA). It’s flat out wrong to assume that visitors will be so inspired by your brilliant copy that they will pick up the phone and call, or fill out an online form and beg you to contact them.

In the real world of Web marketing, visitors want to be led. If they have to stop and think about how to take the next step, you’ve already lost them.

CTAs generally fall into one of four types, listed here in descending order of commitment:

• Place an order;
• Enroll, subscribe, enter;
• Get a quote;
• Learn more.

Recognizing the need for a call to action on every page is step one. Matching the right CTA to the page is step two. High-level product category pages normally call for a “soft� CTA, such as “Request more information� or “Schedule a consultation.� In contrast, detailed product-level pages require a “hard� CTA, such as “Order now.�

A call to action must be clear and compelling:

• “Order now to save 15%,â€�
• “Get your artist’s rendering within 24 hours,â€�
• “Learn the 5 secrets to permanent weight loss.â€�

Calls to action are strengthened by:

• Testimonials: It’s worked;
• Credibility statements: It’s reliable;
• Warranty or guarantee: It’s risk-free;
• High value: It’s worth having;
• Urgency: It’s now or never.

Unfortunately, the calls to action on business websites often seem like afterthoughts: vague, lame and boring. Remember: customers want to be led. Effective leadership requires more than “Call for more information.�

One last vital point about CTAs: having a primary and secondary CTA on each page is often a good idea. A prospect may not be ready to order, but they may be willing to download a white paper that they would read and remember. Today’s white paper could be tomorrow’s conversion.

Five Case Studies that Illustrate the Power of Strong Calls to Action

• Hyundai increased conversions by 62% by adding SEO text, bigger pictures… and a CTA.
• RIPT Apparel added “Limited 24-hour availabilityâ€� to its CTA and increased sales by 6.3%.
• Notify, by the Weather Channel, redesigned its landing page to focus on the CTA. Conversion rates increased by 225%.
• Express Gold Cash changed its CTA from “Submitâ€� to “Request a packâ€� and improved its conversion rate by 47.7%.
• Natural Air increased conversions by 590.6%(!) by adding a CTA with pricing.

Two Tips for Strong Calls to Action

• The main reason why firms don’t include strong CTAs on their website is that they don’t have them. Before getting too far into website development, conduct a brainstorming session to begin the process of identifying action steps that website visitors would be eager to take.
• For CTAs to be effective, design and content must be joined at the hip. The position of an arrow, the font and color of a button can make or break a call to action. Don’t segregate your writers and designers. We’ve found that a team approach to Web projects fosters continual interaction between all contributors and results in a far better product all around.

Keep Your Eye On The Conversion Ball

In case you haven’t noticed, or you skimmed to the end, as Web readers often do, the errors and fixes discussed above revolve around one thing: conversion. One of my favorite quotes comes from advertising icon David Ogilvy. He said, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.� Ogilvy, arguably the greatest copywriter who ever lived, understood the primacy of persuasion. You may prefer a soft sell or a hard sell, but if your Web page isn’t selling, why is it there?

Resources And Tools

• My favorite character counter, handy for composing title tags and meta descriptions.
• Test readability with this awesome online testing tool.
• Detailed information on content-related SEO topics.
• Twelve pithy journalism-inspired writing tips for the Web.
• Modern words of wisdom: for spot-on copywriting technique, read Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
• Classic words of wisdom: perhaps the greatest “how toâ€� copywriting book of all time, Tested Sentences That Sell by Elmer Wheeler is available online.

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© Brad Shorr for Smashing Magazine, 2011.