SEO Expert, Evangelist and SEO Consulting Services - Tony Adam

SEO has lately been a plethora of information about Linkbait, tricking engines, social marketing and such and I wanted to post something in my mind that really takes me back to what got me into SEO, using my creative side and copywriting for the search engines.  After all, I still believe content truly is king.

These may or may not impact your overall SEO performance intentionally, but it will increase conversion and possibly indirectly affect your rankings in the SERP’s.  Here are a few factors that I have found to be HIGHLY important when writing good content or copy:

1.  Talking to your customer:  This really has the least desired significance from an SEO perspective, but is still highly critical.  Your copy should really put your customer or reader in a situation where they feel like you are talking directly to them in a “1 on 1″ style conversation.

2.  Be Consistent:  Maintaining a level of consistency with your page copy is going to lead you in the right direction.  Maintain a consistent theme, ensure your crucial keywords and key phrases are being called out and stand out.  You can throw a bold/italics/underline tag in there to make it stand out to the user and even the search engines.

3. Markup, Markup, Markup: As mentioned above, throw some tags in there to mix it up and have content that sticks out.  Use custom CSS to create sexy header text and give the search engine’s more visibility into key phrases.  Be creative in the way that you do things, but, DO NOT SPAM!  If you spam, you won’t gain conversion, which goes back to being consistent and talking to your customer.

4. I said I wasn’t going to talk about links, I can’t help it!:  Another way that you can be creative with your markup is not just by marking up your phrases, but also, linking to internal pages within your site.  This will really give you an opportunity to really get some attention with SE’s.

5.  Having a Call to Action & Being Persuasive:  So, you’ve talked to your customer, you’ve maintained consistency, you’ve got the SEO stuff out of the way, now how do I sell?!  Well, maintaining all of the above will get you part way there, but having a really persuasive call to action will really help you convert customers and readers.  Overall, that is your main goal, conversion, so ensure that you are really taking control here and throwing all your creative juices in this basket.

Some of this must be quite obvious to the seasoned folks, and even to myself, but it is very nice sometimes to remind yourself and bring yourself back to the basics.  Especially since in my mind, when it comes to good marketing at all, Content is always king.

An article from SearchEngineLand.com by Danny Sullivan was released today in response to Jason Calacanis’ statements in regards to SEO’s.  Personally, I was infuriated when I read this because it is a generalized statement that was made with no factual content.  Today, again Jason made another ill-advised cheap shot and it got major heat.  In reality, I could go on a really lengthy tangent of why an entire industry is mad and why he is only hurting himself, but Danny wrote a great article and it deserves to be read. 

Here is the link from Search Engine Land:

Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason…

So, by far the greatest marraige proposal I have seen to-date and the great reaction I have seen to date so I had to blog about it…here is the link to the video proposal by SEOMoz’s own Rand Fishkin and the link to the reaction is below! 

The Proposal: http://www.ifilm.com/video/2820143

The Response:  http://www.ifilm.com/video/2820607 

Interesting notice about the Apple iPod having some issues with Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system.  Apple has announced that the iPod could possibly get corrupted by using Vista with the current iTunes platform.

Apparently the iTunes service would not download a listing of songs that you have purchased, but that problem has recently been taken care of.  More disconcerng though is the fact that if you choose to eject your iPod through the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon, there have been users reportedly experiencing some corruption to the iPod.

Microsoft has recently released patches to fix the above mentioned item pertaining to the iTunes service not functioning properly.  At this point though, Apple is asking users not to upgrade to Windows Vista until a newer version of iTunes is released in a couple weeks.  Microsoft is taking the approach that the iPod should be fine.  The end all, be all question is, will this hurt Microsoft sales in the interim and long run?  Will Microsoft Windows Vista lose sales and will the iPod users hold back and cause a major drop in Vista sales?  Or, are users going to continue to upgrade and install Windows Vista either way?