Web Content | SEO Writing

Are You Paying Enough Attention To Your Meta Descriptions?

How well are your meta descriptions doing in terms of helping you attract organic clicks? The meta description is a key element of successful web based copywriting and online article writing. Writing the meta description is something many people fail at with their web copy and their articles.The meta description can make or break you on the search engine results page. You want Google to love it and you want it to be irresistible to your human target audience as well. Over the years there has been much debate about how relevant to SEO your meta description is but one thing hasn’t changed… this is your opportunity to grab someone’s attention and make them want to click.

What is the meta description?

The meta description or summary is the two sentences that show up in the search engine when your page gets indexed. This is what people see in Google, Yahoo or MSN that they scroll through. When they Google something, unless they click “I’m feeling lucky”, they’re presented with ten results. Those first ten to twenty results are where you want to be listed.

If you manage to get there, what you now want is a killer meta description that will coax the searchers to your website. If your description or summary doesn’t tell them that you have the information that they want, you might as well be on page ten. If you hit result #3 and your meta is more compelling than the listings at the first and second spot, guess which link is going to get clicked… yours!

What makes a great meta tag?

A great meta tag tells people in twenty or so words why they should click on your link. It should tell them what they will find. If that tag or description convinces them that they will find the information they want by clicking your link, they will click it.

When I write meta descriptions, I write as many keywords in as possible and I make sure it makes sense and makes people want to click. When I have a client striving for top spot on Google, I often search their keywords and look at their competition on page one. I look at what might have helped them get to page one with primary keywords and Long Tail keywords and I also look for human readability so that people and search engines will like them. My quest is to write a better description than the top ten results! That way, even if my client makes it to spot #10, they have a good chance of being clicked on.

One of my SEO article writing secrets:

When I write for clients that don’t ask me to write meta descriptions for them and even otherwise, I try to treat my first two sentences of each article as the meta description! That way, if their publishing platform doesn’t have them craft a manual meta, chances are that they’ll get a rich snippet from the first content paragraph.

Need help with your SEO content? Contact me! danaprincewriting at gmail dot com.

Should You Invest In PLR Articles?

Many people getting into e-commerce and Internet marketing are looking for content for their websites, articles for bum marketing and looking for ways to increase their visibility on the web. Articles can do a lot for your business and your website rankings but content is still king so you need to be very cautious about what you do with those articles.

Should you purchase cheap or inexpensive private label rights articles to get your business going? Many people consider this a low cost opportunity to get some content for their website or put articles out there into directories with their name on them. The articles are made available for a low price with the understanding that you will tweak and customize the articles and post them with your name on them. Various sources for PLR have different terms and conditions and it’s important that you read the fine print.

Find out the PLR article terms and conditions before buying

A batch of articles might be sold fifty or more times or might be sold fewer times than that depending on the package and the source. If all your competitors buy the same packages and you all do very little to tailor those articles to your business, the result will be that the articles are not very effective for you.

Not only does Google have a duplicate content filter but customers and potential customers will quickly recognise that the content on your website or pointing to your website is regurgitated. This can harm your reputation and cause people to click onto other places to see/subscribe/buy/learn, etcetera.

The plan and intent for these types of articles is for you to tweak these but many people who buy PLR articles are not professional writers and don’t know how to do this effectively. In this case, what should you do? You can either make a best effort at it yourself and use tools such as copyscape or dupecop to ensure your content is original or you can hire someone to rewrite the articles for you. When you hire someone else to help, it’s costing you more money than anticipated and some will say that you might be better off hiring a writer from the start to write original, unique articles specifically for your company. This is subjective of course and you will find many people with differing opinions.

What do I think about PLR articles?

As a writer, I’ve done my share of rewriting on private label rights articles and I can tell you that when I do that, the rewritten articles are virtually unique and practically unrecognizable compared to the original but not all writers can do this. Some writers will take main ideas from these articles and expand on them. Other writers will take the article and rewrite it with different words that mean the very same thing. Which is better for you? It all depends on your needs.

In my somewhat expert opinion (whatever the worth of it) if you are going to buy PLR articles, be sure that you have them changed so that they barely resemble the originals. If you aren’t sure if you even want PLR articles, you might elect to hire a writer to write unique articles for you. If you have found a great source for PLR, chances are that the writer who wrote them is willing to write unique articles for you as well. If not, feel free to contact me for a writing work quote.

How To Get Your Blogs and Articles Noticed

So, you’ve written an awesome blog entry or article. Now you want it to be read. You can’t wait for the comments to pour in telling you how brilliant you are as a writer and as an intellectual. You are anxious to find the links to your website from the article or blog. When you hit the submit button you feel like you are about to hit the jackpot. You envision affiliate marketing money or Google Adsense clicks or $$ pouring in to your online shopping cart.

A day or two later you look at the entry  to see how many have read it. No one has.
No one? You check your website stats to see how many new visitors have arrived by way of that entry. Nobody?

Are you doing something wrong?

You read it again and still believe firmly that every word gelled, meshed, gave you goose bumps and you know in your very core that this is a brilliant piece of writing that begs to be read. You know you’ve written awesome copy that should be bringing in readers and potential clients in droves. How will you get your brilliant words noticed? How can you get people to read them?

Self Promotion of Blogs and Articles

Here are a few tips to get that brilliantly written blog or article read without your having to resort to Spamming. There are so many blogs out there and so many article directories that brilliantly written pieces  can be lost in the masses if they aren’t marketed. Marketing and advertising your blog and articles  is the best way to get noticed.

You can launch that sucker out into cyberspace with flashing lights and confetti raining down on it so that people can’t help but notice it.

How?

First of all, is the title catchy?
A catchy title can reel them in. You don’t want to mislead people but you want to catch their attention so that they can’t resist clicking that link when they see it wherever it turns up. Don’t mislead them either. I once really wanted an e-mail read by my colleagues so I entitled it, “Liquor and Free Stuff.” It got read but I got scolded for resorting to such dirty pool tactics. Reel them in but don’t tick them off.

Use conversational tones and write interesting pieces otherwise people won’t read the whole thing and won’t bother clicking your link to see what else you have to say. Consider putting the most interesting aspects of the gist of the article or blog near the beginning so that you can hook your reader.

Is your blog or article categorized well?  Do you have the right categories in place as for filing it? Be sure that you do so it’ll get read. A good way to further categorize your blog is to tag it. The tagging of blogs creates a directory of sorts so that people can find your blog easier. The more it gets read, the closer to the top of the tag cloud it gets. Technorati.com is a great tagging place that offers lots of resources.

Ping Your blog. There are services that send notifications out to the blogosphere that helps people interested in your subject know that you’ve updated your blog. This can help you get more readers. Pingomatic is a great pinging service.

Add RSS services so that people who like your blog can subscribe to it. If you’ve got a niche topic such as decorating, parenting, freelance writing, etc. you can get yourself a fan base of people who will come back and read more. This is like an elevated status of bookmarking. Instead of your readers having to manually check your blog, the RSS feature notifies them when you’ve written a new entry. RSS also feeds your blog to many news feeds all over.

Social book marking. Social book marking lets people on that social book marking site/community know when you’ve updated your blog or see something that you think others might find interesting. Book marking your blog is like giving it a positive review and telling people on social networking sites to have a read. It can be very beneficial especially if you use a social book marking aggregator to help you. An aggregator submits to multiple book marking services at once. I like Onlywire.com. It submits to over a dozen and plugs into my Firefox browser. Onlywire and StumbleUpon are where I see the most success.

Read your blog. Yes, re-reading it can be like recirculation for it. Put it back into the blogosphere by editing a small chunk or reading it which will put it out there into services that show most recently read entries.

Comment on other people’s blogs of similar subjects and put a link for your blog or article  into the reply. Learning some basic html can help you do this. Be sure to save it for when it counts otherwise it’s considered Spamming. If you have five different blog subjects you want to get out there, look at the tags on Technorati and comment on those blogs with something like, “I enjoyed your blog about scrap booking and wrote an interesting scrap booking post on my blog recently too, if you’d like to take a look”. Post the link in your reply. You could have the blogger stop by and read your blog as well as other readers of their blog.

Put your links to blogs and articles into your signature for community forums and post in relevant forums. If you’ve written an article about making money online, put a link to your article in your signature and post it in a money making forum. Be sure that you participate in the community otherwise it’s considered spamming.

Before you know it you’ll get noticed, obtain traffic and you will be much more likely to get results!