Changes in Attitude

The search engines change. All the time. Rank for something today, and 3 months from now, you might be nowhere to be seen.

So as a freelance SEO copywriter, what does this mean to you?

Change. Because you must to survive.

How To Change
If you know you must change to keep up, the question then becomes how to do it.

There's not really a good, clean-cut "it always works like this" answer for you here. Some changes (like the always increasing value in links, or specific links from specific sources) are relatively easy to see, and easy to accommodate. But most often, changes in the search engines are really pretty subtle, so if you are not watching them all the time, you may miss out.

Crank Out The Pages
A freelance SEO copywriter needs to know what works (as far as textually) better than other options when writing a webpage. So it is imperative to have lots of active sites going at all times, in various niches, so you can tweak them and play around and see what happens.

Blogs are good ways to test change, because they tend to get lots of traffic, you can crank out different types of text to see what sticks and why. You can host them a number of different ways too, which can tell you a lot. And perhaps best of all, they can be free...so you can launch a bunch of them (all with different objectives) and feel free test your theories.

If you don't have theories to test, you may be in the wrong profession.

What It Is
Most often, I am simply given a list of keywords to develop. It's my job to create something from nothing, and I rarely get much direction from most clients...they don't know how to express what they want other than they know they want new pages.

In the past, it was all about page/word count. For instance, right up until early last year, a client might have given me a list of 500 keywords, and want a page of 250 words devoted to each with specific keywords in them...it was a lot of bread-n-butter gigs to say the least. And I stayed really busy doing it, too -- I made a great income by simply being literate, so my wooden pages were grammatically correct and not nauseating.

Many times I knew little about what I was writing about and had no time to research, but the clients didn't care as long as there were keywords in the pages, I matched their company tone, I was on top of the sentence structures and all the keywords from the list were handled. Good for them, better for me - I switched on auto-pilot and spit out thousands of pages.

Fast forward to now, and that strategy doesn't work.

Now, I still get a list of keywords but the clients tend to want more solid materials, because lowest common denominator stuff stays below the fold. So if this was the only thing I knew how to do (filling up hollow pages with hollow text), I would be really screwed right now. But I am not at all screwed, because I know what is happening in the engines, and am pleased to say, it is much better to write solid, meaningful work and build links to it than to simply pile keywords into bland filler. I appreciate the shift anyway...for even though many experts always said this was true about solid SEO techniques, it was far too easy to manipulate the engines with repetition for most people to care about the actual VALUE. Those people are likely watching their cherished rankings fall now, because there is no structure under their efforts, no meat to go with the potatoes.

I don't see the search engines moving backwards. Instead I see them continually trying to refine the ways to determine a page of content is worthwhile...using links and other references is not new, but it is a much stronger part of the algorithms than it used to be.

What It All Means
What this all means to you, dear SEO copywriter in the wings, is that you need not concern yourself as much with what the search engines want, and just need to be a good writer. The money train for pap and fluff has stopped, and it won't be starting back up.

Are keywords still important? Hell yes. But relevancy, and craft, and solid writing are FINALLY much more apparent to the engines than it was in the past. This is a golden opportunity for a good writer, because you can focus much more on your craft, and leave the tweaky manipulative things to someone else. It wasn't always this way...I was there a couple years back when it was all about keywords, and knowing how many to hit and how hard to hit them. I was part of the mess that is now on the Internet - sorry, there were mouths to feed.

But sometimes, a little change is the best possible thing you can hope for.

So get lots of sites going...don't belabor them, just create platforms on which you can write. And write, and write and write. See what is working, and what doesn't. See what creates an audience, engages readers, and encourages traffic to build. Study traditional copywriting, and learn those lessons well.

But just keep writing -- it is, after all, what an SEO writer does for a living.

Avoiding SEO Traps, Part 2 of 2

Link Farms, or Getting Something for Nothing
One of the most common ways that I see some questionable SEO firms operate, is to cash-in on a farm of sites. In an email, they will offer something like "We have hundreds of sites, and we will focus and harness them to improve your website's rankings..." In a nutshell, they are offering you a paid link back to your site from their own farm of established websites.

I am relatively sure this works right now because there is such an emphasis on backlinks, but feel this is a tactic that will have a very short shelf life. It is too easy, and it will not last forever.

How and Why it Happens
Things like open source code, Wordpress, Blogger and social media have made it much easier and quicker to get a bunch of web properties out there.

So people launch site after site, looking for the ideas that stick. They may cycle through hundreds to arrive at ten that get some decent traffic. So they jettison all but those that work, and then start over and do it again and again. In time, they build a farm of a few hundred or even a few thousand sites. This is all about the numbers, so the sites all look pretty much the same, and they'll usually function pretty much the same.

Scraping content is simple, so someone can get lots of these sites going and not really have to do much as far as ongoing development. There are scripts that populate sites so no human ever gets involved in what the site says. So you can create it with a script, populate it with a script, and use another script to change the content dynamically. It's hands-free developing--which is why it is so popular.

Then, once a few sites are established, the owners sell space on these sites where they create links to other sites. Sometimes, depending on the skill and knowledge level of the SEO offering these links, they are niche-targeted. That's a best case scenario--like a farm of financial-related sites leading back to your financial website.

But more often, the SEO provider isn't as concerned with the link quality as the link quantity...which is actually something that could hurt your efforts as much as help them. This strategy may show some immediate and impressive short-term gains, but the engines aren't stupid. They will look at who, and what is linking to your site, and why. And if everything is not kosher, they remove the link juice. Worse still, they may penalize a site for using these so called "Untrustworthy" links.

Even though this flooding of content through "cookie cutter" sites is a strategy that is working right now, I don't see this surviving for very long. It is too easy to game the system using these link farms, and it has never really been the intention of a search engine to reward this kind of thing. My prediction, based only on what has worked in the engines (and why) for the last 6 years, is that these simple-to-game farming strategies will soon lose all power.

Links are meant to offer strong juice to content. So create more viable content, and as the value of link juice diminishes, the content will resurface as the pinnacle of truth. Amen!

Content Is, and Remains King
The search engine algorithms are at their core, all about content...and the best content will not lose long to the sites that are better at manipulating links. Links are much much easier to fake than good content...so mark my words, in time, the value of backlinks will diminish or at least refine itself to a point where these strategies have much less value, if any at all. Creating a million websites and passing out the links is free and easy--so a better content filtering system will need to be employed to separate the men from the boys, as it were.

If you are investing in SEO, invest in content. SEO is a little about manipulation. But it is more about understanding, and creating good, solid reasons for continued website interaction. In a word, SEO is about content. If someone promises anything more than this, expect to pay a lot. And good luck to you...you'll likely need it.