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Have you ever tried to read your local newspaper online? How about the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal? It just isn’t the same. Do you know why? Because articles meant for print don’t translate well to the web, and the rules that apply to writing content for the internet are different than those for print. What constitutes quality content offline does not necessarily constitute quality content online.

How the web is different

Text is hard to read

Typical computer monitors have a resolution of 96 dpi (dots per inch). Compare that with a printout from a laser printer that has a resolution of 600 dpi, or a magazine page that can be upwards of 2400 dpi, and it’s not hard to figure out why the text on a computer places a strain on the eyes. According to the book Hot Text – Web Writing That Works, by Jonathan and Lisa Price, “because text is more difficult to read on-screen, people often read slower, comprehend less, recall less, and do less in response.”

Words can be linked to other pages and sources

The closest thing you’re going to get to a link in a newspaper is when a story is split into two sections and you’re told the story is continued on page 9. But when it comes to the web, words and images can be linked to other web pages, photos, videos, sounds, and a myriad of other things. Being able to link is the primary tool that web writers can take advantage of that print writers don’t have at their disposal.

How you should write

Write less

Because of the strain placed on readers when reading on a computer screen, you can’t expect them to read a 5,000 word article. Research has shown that most readers tend to scan an article before reading. Articles longer than 1,000 words will likely turn off your audience and result in few people reading your article (and therefore fewer visitors coming back to your site in the future). You should condense your writing to include only the most crucial points and eliminate everything else. Writing successfully for the web forces you to present only the necessary content and leave the rest out.

Utilize headings and lists

Since people tend to scan web articles as opposed to reading them from the first word to the final word, you should make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for by using headings, bold type, and lists. A great way to turn a print article into a readable web article is to transform it into a top 10 list. Lists make it easy for readers to scan and read only what they are interested in.

Use plenty of links and make them obvious

Since linking is the primary advantage of a web writer, it should be used early and often. Linking allows you to provide the reader with a roadmap of information. With your article as a starting point, your reader should be able to find more information about any and all topics discussed in the article. Common things to link to include reference pages, news sources, audio and video, forums, and applications that will enhance the reading experience. The best thing about links is that the user can choose which ones to follow and which ones to ignore. That allows you to reference something without citing the entire thing as you would have to in a print article.

One of the most important things to remember when linking is to make it visually obvious that a section of text is a link. Five years ago it was common place to use the standard blue underlined text for linking, but as the web has evolved, most designers have abandoned that style for better looking links. Site designers can still make links obvious by consistently using a different color than standard text and by providing a hover effect, such as underlining the link and changing it’s color, when users place their cursor over the link. This subconsciously tells them that the text is a link.

Write with the search engines in mind

Since much of the content on the web is found via search, it makes sense to write with the search engines in mind. No, this doesn’t mean that you should stuff your articles with keywords to the point where they are barely readable. But it does mean that you should write titles and headings that actually convey what your article discusses. For example, this article could be called “Content Evolution” or “Digital Distribution.” If it were a magazine article, those titles or other titles might have been more appealing, but they don’t capture the essence of the article, which is “How to Write for the Web.” If someone were to search for an article on writing online, they’d likely use a phrase like “how to write for the web” or “writing practices for the web” which would turn up this article, but probably wouldn’t turn up an article with one of those other titles.

Resource: Price, Jonathan, and Lisa Price. Hot Text - Web Writing That Works. Indiana: New Riders, 2002.

Adapted from the Faceup Web Marketing eBook
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About a week ago I got a phone call from a college buddy of mine named Paul who runs a soon-to-launch online business. Here’s how the conversation went:

Paul: “We want to hire your company to do the SEO for us. Whatever the price is, we can afford it.”

Me: “Tell me a little more about your company and exactly what you expect to achieve from search.”

Paul: “We want to rank #1 in Google for EVERYTHING in our industry, and I know you can do it for us.”

Me: “I’d be happy to consult with your team to make sure you understand the principles of SEO and get off on the right foot, but I think you’re better off doing the work yourself.”

He was perplexed. Why wouldn’t we want to take on his SEO work? It has nothing to do with him or his company. It has everything to do with the misunderstood nature of what it takes to consistently rank high in natural search. The absolute best companies I’ve worked with make every decision with SEO in mind. Everyone in their organization – from management to programmers to marketing – is thinking about the search impact of their decisions. For that reason it makes sense to hire a consultant or to learn it yourself, but not to hire an outside firm to outsource your entire SEO campaign to.

Most of the time when companies outsource SEO they do it with the mentality of “here you go, you handle it, we expect results.” They view it as an entirely separate entity and not as a core value that needs to be instilled in their organization to be successful. That’s why outsourced SEO just doesn’t work: your organization still makes decisions the old way.

How will this programming change impact our search results? Can we build link-building into our marketing campaign? What adjustments can we make so that both are working in harmony to achieve our objectives as a company and rank as high as we can? There is no incentive to learn about search if someone else is handling it for you, and consequently you probably won’t be asking these important questions when making a critical business decision.

Paul was still a bit confused with that answer. So let’s take a closer look at some of the key components necessary for SEO success and what needs to take place for them to be accomplished:

Keyword Research – this entails researching how frequently phrases relevant to your site are searched. I like to use the SEO-Book tool or the free version of Wordtracker. Keyword research is important because it will impact your site structure, title tags (widely regarded as the most influential factor in how high you rank), and will help identify opportunities in your industry (if a term is searched a lot but there aren’t a lot of good results, you may have just identified a great expansion opportunity for your company). This is best done by either a consultant or the internal head of your SEO campaign, which should be someone in upper-management.

On-Site Optimization and Site Structure – this is what most people think of when they think of SEO. What changes should be made to your site so that search engine spiders have the best chance of crawling it, understanding the content, and ranking you accordingly. Most often, this involves changes to Title/META tags, cleaning up source code so that it’s proper HTML, moving CSS and Javascript to external files, adding sitemaps, modifying internal linking structure and anchor text, and several other standard changes that eliminate all potential crawling and indexing issues. This is best done by your programmer(s) so that they understand the importance of the changes and make them part of their routine in the future. These changes can be suggested by a consultant, but will only really be successful if programmers are on board.

Link building – this is probably the second most common task associated with SEO. By now you already know that you need one-way incoming links from relevant sites with applicable anchor text to rank high. Many outsourced SEO firms will either engage in elaborate link exchanges or purchase paid links for you: both of which are obsolete in terms of having any positive impact in your rankings, and now can potentially penalize you. The best one-way link building techniques – press releases, content syndication, blogging, product syndication, viral videos, etc – all require a LOT of input from you to be successful. Most of the time they should be integrated into your existing marketing plan to have the highest chance to thrive. For example, most companies already issue press releases when they have newsworthy announcements so it’s a natural extension to email the release to online news sites and blogs, and to use an online distribution service. I think successful link building is best done by your marketing department as part of your overall marketing strategy. It’s fine to have a consultant help put the plan together, but the actual implementation of the plan should be done by you.

Analytics – this involves the measurement and tracking of your sites’ SEO and marketing campaign. Previously, this could be tedious for small sites and I might have recommended outsourcing. But with the new version of Google Analytics, a properly configured account will tell you everything you need to know about where every single sale on your site came from. Your programmer or consultant should be able to set it up for you and configure the reports to track only the most important metrics for your organization. I also like to track incoming links and search engine rankings for a site (two things that Analytics does not track), but those can easily be tracked with the Marketleap Link Checker and Digital Point Keyword Tracker.

In the end, whether you decide to hire a consultant or tackle SEO internally with the vast information available online, you still need to make SEO part of your organizations objectives for it to be a success: something that outsourcing usually doesn’t do. At Faceup-Sites, we offer our popular Faceup Web Marketing Book so you can learn and implement SEO on your own.

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In the past few years WordPress has become the standard blog publishing platform because of its ease of use, rich feature set, available plugins, and standards compliance. Of course, the fact that it’s free and open source hasn’t hurt either.

While developers have flocked to using WordPress as their blogging platform of choice, it’s often overlooked as a content management platform for non-blog sites. WordPress allows you to create pages that automatically are added to the sites’ navigation bar and can be customized by a PHP programmer to handle just about any task you’d want to accomplish with a site. Free themes and plugins can help reduce programming and design costs immensely, and with a little work WordPress can be customized to automate many of the most arduous SEO tasks. The result is a powerful and easy to use search engine friendly publishing platform that eliminates the majority of both upfront and ongoing SEO work.

Since WordPress is already very standards compliant, you and your programmer don’t need to worry about proper HTML formatting – that’s all taken care of for you. There are, however, a few simple steps that should be taken to turn your WordPress site into the ultimate search-optimized site:

Create Unique Title Tags
Search Engine Optimization firm SEOmoz recently polled 37 of the best SEO’s about what factors influence Google’s algorithm. The NUMBER ONE factor influencing a high ranking was “Keyword Use in Title Tag”. For that reason alone you want your Title Tag to include the most relevant keywords related to your post. Unfortunately WordPress defaults to having your site title as the first thing in your Title Tag. Ideally you’d have a customizable page title show up first.

For example, if your company named Cool Designs is located in New York and has a Web Design page, the Title Tag “New York City Web Design – Cool Designs” is more likely to rank high for NYC-related web design queries than a page that has “Cool Designs – Web Design” as the Title Tag. Fortunately WordPress has a SEO Title Tag plugin that allows you to customize each Title Tag.

Turn on Permalinks
The default WordPress post or page has a permanent link that looks like http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123. This is what’s called a dynamic URL - a URL that uses variables in the URL to determine the page content. In this case the “p” variable determines what is shown when the page is loaded. And while dynamic URLs are efficient for programming, they aren’t exactly search engine or user friendly.

Years ago search engines had trouble indexing dynamic URLs. That’s not necessarily the case anymore (although you might as well remove all doubt), but static URLs like http://www.yoursite.com/keyword-filled-post-title/ still offer several advantages. The primary advantage is the cleanliness of the URL, which really has nothing at all to do with search rankings. A URL with real words in it (as opposed to numbers and question marks) is much more enticing for people to click on when search results are returned, and consequently is much easier for them to remember when re-visiting your site. Having relevant keywords from your post in your URL can also have a slight impact in boosting your rankings for those key words.

This change can be done with URL rewriting. Normally doing this requires quite a bit of programming effort. Not with WordPress. Just go to Options  Permalinks and change your default structure to the date and name based structure.

Create Sitemaps
Both HTML sitemaps (a page that lists links to every other page on your site) and XML sitemaps (a file that lists all of the pages on your site for search engine spiders) can aid immensely in getting every page on your site indexed by all of the search engines. Automating each type of sitemap usually requires a few hours of programming for most sites. Of course, WordPress has a HTML sitemap plugin and a XML sitemap plugin that does all of the work for you. After creating the XML sitemap, be sure to submit it to Google and Yahoo to access extensive crawling information about your site.

Install Analytics
All of the traffic in the world isn’t worth very much if you aren’t converting any of it to sales, leads, newsletter signups, or whatever the goal of your site may be. Google Analytics has become the premiere analytics software because of its simple and customizable interface, breadth of features, and price (free). In addition to the normal important analytics metrics – visitors, unique visitors, page views, new/returning visitors, traffic sources, most viewed content, etc – Google Analytics has goal tracking and e-commerce revenue tracking so you can see exactly where each conversion is coming from. After signing up for an account, the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress will have you up and running in minutes.

If you also use WordPress for its blogging capabilities, you’ll want to install the Sociable plugin and sign up for a Feedburner account to make sure you get the most out of your blog. Sociable allows people to submit your posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Technorati, reddit, and StumbleUpon, which can be VERY effective for promoting extremely viral sites and articles. Feedburner offers a plethora of advancements to your RSS feed for your posts, but from a SEO standpoint the most important thing is to configure it to automatically ping search engines and blog directories. This ensures that your posts always get indexed, and usually gets them indexed fast.

There you have it – a perfectly optimized site using WordPress and other free tools in about a hundredth of the time it would take you if you built it from scratch. At Faceup we offer WordPress sites starting at $249!