Friday, July 31st, 2009 The kind of grill you have says a lot about you. Do you do it up classic style and grill your meat over an outdoor wood stove? Do you simmer your meat over charcoal for that great smoky flavor? Or do you have one of those fancy drop in grills with a full on outdoor sink?
No matter how you cook outdoors, grilling is an American past time and it has some deep roots in American culture. It is only recently that is has become a full on bonanza of basically full on kitchens, fully equipped with everything, even outdoor kitchen cabinets.
The root of modern day American grilling comes from a place that used to only manufacture buoys. The Weber grill was the invention of a man that worked for a buoy manufacturer. Weber started the charcoal grill phenomenon that is still going strong today. The company even has a specialty restaurant where it makes everything from steak to desserts on the grills.
The gas grill came along later as a simpler option to the charcoal variety. They require less room because you don’t have to worry so much about things catching on fire. A charcoal grill needs more space. That is why gas grills are popular with people who live in apartments. A person who has an apartment with a small patio can safely grill using a gas grill out on their patio or deck.
If you have never tried grilling food over an open flame you should give it a whirl. It will make you feel like you are going camping. A camp fire is good for way more than just making Smores.
It really does not matter how you cook it, food just brings people together. And there is nothing like a grill and a game to make a weekend with friends and family.
Posted in Home & Garden, Outdoors | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 Recently the page checking code was breaking when used on a site. The XML returned from the supplier was being read using file_get_contents() and passed straight into simplexml_load_string() which was then kicking out a UTF-8 Encoding Error.
The way around this is to use utf8_encode() to ensure the string is encoded into UTF-8 before passing to simplexml_load_string(). In this instance my code goes like:
$FileContents = file_get_contents( $URL ) ;
if ( $FileContents !== false )
{
$xml = simplexml_load_string( utf8_encode( $FileContents ) ) ;
}
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Monday, July 20th, 2009 By Karon Thackston © 2009, All Rights Reserved
Following in the footsteps of Rand Fishkin and Guy Kawasaki, I decided to come up with my own list of don’ts.
There is no shortage of don’ts when it comes to SEO copywriting.
It seems this niche got off to a rough start many years ago when early comers somehow misconstrued the core principles of the trade. Allow me to elaborate on how not to write SEO copy.
- Don’t shove as many keyphrases into the copy as humanly possible. It’s not about the sheer volume of search terms you include. Yes, Google and other engines should be able to follow what the page is about. Yes, engines are looking to match a searcher’s query with search engine optimized content on your web pages, but which pages land at the top is decided through a series of calculations far more complex than any simple ratio.
When you overload copy with keyphrases you sacrifice quality and user experience. - Don’t lose site of balance. If SEO copywriting isn’t about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about? Balance. You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors. But surprisingly, the balance doesn’t come with serving both masters well. The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines. You see, your site visitors always come first. However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won’t see good rankings. If you put too much focus on the engines, you’ll start to lose your target audience. Balance… always balance.
- Don’t let someone else choose the keywords. If keyword research isn’t a service you offer, an SEO firm, keyword specialist or some other professional that your client hires will have to conduct the research. Don’t just accept keyphrases these folks toss your way. Ask to see the entire list with recommendations as to which terms would be best strategically.
Then you, as the professional writer, can decide which will also work best within the copy. - Don’t sacrifice flow for numbers. This is a follow-up to number three and is a major issue with bad SEO copywriting.
SEOs or clients sometimes insist on using hacked-up search phrases that simply don’t work in a normal sentence. An example?
“Candies samples free.” Many copywriters will just grin and bear it, sacrificing quality and flow for the sake of competitive values or other numbers. The result is often some obnoxious sentence like, “If you’re looking for candies samples free, you’ve come to the right place!” Forcing a phrase into the copy at all costs never turns out well. - Don’t use keyphrases that don’t apply to the page. If you operate a site about wedding receptions, don’t try to force a search term about wedding dresses into the copy just because it pulls a lot of traffic. (A) Unless you sell, alter or design wedding dresses, it won’t be applicable. (B) Even if you manage to get the page ranked well for the phrase [wedding dresses], once the visitor clicks to your site and realizes you have nothing to do with wedding dresses, they will leave. It’s a waste of time and effort and it creates a poor user experience.
- Don’t use misspellings and correct spellings on the same page. I fully understand that the misspellings of keyphrases can be valuable search terms. However, to mix correct spellings and misspellings within the same page of copy looks like you’ve got a bunch of typos in the content. It’s just not professional.
Some writers will go for the old, “We rent limousines (sometimes spelled limosenes) for the most affordable prices in town.” I don’t care for that approach. It’s just not natural.
Would you ever see brochure or newspaper copy that reads that way? I think not. - Don’t use keyphrases the exact same way every time. This is how we end up with horrible SEO copy that sounds like a 4th grader wrote it. (See #4.) There are lots of ways to use keywords in copy, not just one. In order to sound natural, you have to get creative with your keyphrase use. One way is to break up phrases using punctuation. Since search engines don’t pay attention to basic punctuation marks, you can easily write something using the search term [real estate Hawaii] that reads like this: “Currently there is an impressive selection of available real estate. Hawaii listings can be…” See? “Real estate” is at the end of the first sentence and “Hawaii” is at the beginning of the second sentence. The engines ignore the period so there’s no problem.
- Don’t use all types of search phrases for every situation.
There are many ways in which this “don’t” applies. One quick example is that of an ecommerce site. It wouldn’t be advisable to use specific, long-tail keyphrases on the home page of your site. They are much too specific in most cases and are better suited for individual product pages. Broader terms are typically best for an ecommerce home page. If you don’t understand the best applications for the various types of keywords, you’re likely to have lackluster results. - Don’t neglect ALT tags/image attributes. These tags are the ones associated with images on your pages and they carry a good deal of weight especially if the image is used as a link. The ALT text counts the same as anchor text in a text-based link.
Depending on a few different factors, ALT text may be a good place for those misspellings mentioned in #6. - Don’t forget the chain of protocol. There’s a method to the SEO copywriting madness. The idea is not to get as many different keyphrases onto a page as possible. Just the opposite, in fact. Rather than having 12 different search terms used only one time each, you need to use two to four keyphrases (depending on the length of your copy) per page. The title, META tags, ALT tags, other coding elements and on-page copy need to support each other as far as keyphrase use goes. Your goal is to let the engines know that you have original, relevant content about a narrow topic.
Unless you have an exceptional number of back links built up, just mentioning [dark chocolate], [chocolate strawberries], [chocolate chip cookies], [chocolate cake], [chocolate desserts], [organic chocolate] and [chocolate cheesecake] once each on a web page isn’t likely to do a lot of good. Instead, pick two or three terms which are closely related and use them several times each along with mentioning them in your tags.
When you avoid making common mistakes, you’ll find your SEO copywriting flows much better, is more natural-sounding and ranks higher, too.
Need help with SEO copywriting? Karon has written 3 excellent books to help you learn keyword optimization techniques. Visit http://www.CopywritingCourse.com today and click to the Order page for details.
Posted in Copywriting | 3 Comments »
Friday, July 10th, 2009 By Karon Thackston © 2009, All Rights Reserved
It’s a common complaint. Ecommerce site owners will contact me for help because their product pages don’t get ranked. Among one of my standard checks is their product copy. Very often, what I find is copy that was provided by the product manufacturers. Or, worse yet, copy that is the exact same for a variety of products with the exception of a few words. Both can cost you in the rankings.
Don’t Use Canned Copy
Using copy provided by product manufacturers may seem like the best way to go. After all, you get professionally written copy for free. However, there are two major drawbacks associated with this approach.
First, you lose most of your ability to differentiate yourself from every other website that sells the same products. If a person does a search, for example, on a particular model of Oster blender, he’ll likely find most websites have the same copy that was provided by Oster.
Since the product is the same and the copy is the same that leaves only a few options for proving to visitors why they should buy from you as opposed to any of the thousands of other sites that carry this blender.
When you use custom-created copy, you have the opportunity to entice them and show them why your store is the best choice.
On the SEO side, this is a classic case of duplicate content across multiple domains. What is commonplace these days is for one site that uses the canned copy to rank well while others are filtered farther down in the rankings. The top slots end up filled with review websites, blogs or other ecommerce sites that use original copy.
Don’t Use Copy That’s the Same but Different
Jewelry stores. Foreign language sites. Office furniture stores. There are countless types of sites that will often use the same product copy, but substitute a word or two. For instance, jewelry stores may have a particular ring setting that is available with rubies, diamonds or emeralds. They’ll use the same copy for all three rings, with the exception of the stone.
Like this:
This elegant cocktail ring isn’t just for special occasions. The stunning 14 karat gold band is topped with a classic six-prong setting that cradles a top-quality diamond. This allows the diamond to reflect more light for a brilliant shimmer.
Then, for a ruby ring, the copy would read:
This elegant cocktail ring isn’t just for special occasions. The stunning 14 karat gold band is topped with a classic six-prong setting that cradles a top-quality ruby. This allows the ruby to reflect more light for a brilliant shimmer.
Personal experience has shown that these types of product descriptions may or may not get ranked well. This is not duplicate content across multiple domains; however, it still stands a chance of suffering the wrath of Google.
To get a clearer picture about this situation, I emailed Google know-it-all Matt Cutts and asked the question, “Is Google sophisticated enough to be able to tell when an ecommerce site has a need to use duplicate content for products that are the same but different? It seems as though you can from what I’ve noticed in the SERPs.”
Matt’s reply was a great big “maybe.”
“Typically on-site text doesn’t result in a penalty, just in the other copies of a page being filtered out. Only changing a single word (‘English’ to ‘Italian’) might not be enough though.
If someone has different products, usually it’s a good idea to make sure that the descriptions are at least somewhat different.”
Translation? Typically, if it’s duplicate content on different pages of your own site, and not across multiple domains, one of the product descriptions will rank well, and the rest will be filtered out of the search engine results pages (SERPs). I’ve seen this happen a good bit for exact duplicate content when every word is precisely the same.
Changing one word means the content isn’t an exact duplicate anymore. However, Matt cautions that just altering a single word (diamond to ruby, etc.) may not be enough of a difference to save your products from being filtered. I’ve seen product pages that have only changed one or two words get filtered about 50% of the time.
Safest bet? Do what Matt recommends and use product copy that is significantly different for each item. Original copy gives you the freedom to entice your site visitors, differentiate yourself from the competition and rank high in the search engines.
Karon Thackston is an SEO copywriter specializing in ecommerce websites. Need help boosting conversions and rankings? Visit http://www.marketingwords.com today.
Posted in Copywriting | No Comments »
