In day-to-day life, a person needn’t be Shakespeare to get his (or her) point across in writing.
As a matter of fact, it’s probably easier if a person isn’t Shakespeare. But when writing for search engines, communication can be a little trickier, and so a session at SES San Jose highlighted some tips and strategies.
(Our on-scene murdok staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with murdok this week, for videos and reports.)
Heather Lloyd-Martin, the president and CEO of SuccessWorks, gave a presentation, and one of her main points was that unoriginal content is bad. Want proof? She pointed out an instance in which duplicate content got AmsterdamEscape.com banned from Google. Also, if your “[c]opy comes straight from the manufacturer (or the box, or the packaging…) . . . . [u]nless you are a big brand with lots o’ links, chances are that your copy will not position.”
So adjust product descriptions such that they focus on keyword phrases.
Aim for around 250 words per page, and be sure to have eye-catching, look-at-me titles.
Furthermore, as a “secret Google hint,” Lloyd-Martin recommends that you “[p]lace benefit statements near your main keyphrases. When Google takes a snippet for the SERP page, your description will boost your benefits.”
And perhaps most importantly, try to handle these matters in a way that won’t take tons of time and money.
In an example involving Mrs. Fields Cookies, Lloyd-Martin advised the company not to “pull down [its] site and rewrite every page and its Title for the search engines.”
The final point of the presentation: “Good writing can SAVE and MAKE you money.”
