Name: Brian Hawkins (BostonSEO.org Boston SEO Meetup)
Category: High Tech

Media Outlet: BostonSEO.org Boston SEO Meetup

Deadline: 07:00 PM EST – 15 July
Query:

We are looking for speakers & advice from accomplished online
publishers, affiliate marketers and SEO professionals. We have
over 850 members with 75 internet marketers that attend our
monthly Boston event to share SEO knowledge, network and
learn monetization options. We are interested to hear about
your tools and SEO techniques that you use, and anything you
would like to share with the group members as a Fall speaker or
email us your best original SEO tip for a round up guest post on
BostonSEO.org thanks www.Twitter.com/BrianHawkins

1. Google Places

My tip would be to not forget about optimizing for Google Places. These are the business listings that come up next to the map when one searches on things such as [boston lobster restaurant]. These listings require a local address, so they are not as overrun by lead aggregators as the traditional listings are. They also generally come up above the traditional listings, so they really draw the eye.

A couple of years ago, I had a client in the travel industry that saw a 20% drop in traffic Google, and a nearly 25% drop in sales from Google. Meanwhile, all their ranking tools were saying everything was fine. What we determined is that for most of their keywords, Google was now returning the map, and a third place listing was actually below the fold.

This was causing a significant drop in traffic. More worrisome was that it was causing an even greater drop in sales, so it was the best traffic that was going away.

There are similarities between optimizing for traditional SEO and for local SEO. With both, you are attempting to improve the prominence for certain keywords, but with local SEO, you are also working to increase the prominence of the listing’s location.

The potential traffic increase is large already, and Google’s continued focus on local suggests it will only grow. Any company that needs to bring in website traffic, phone calls, or physical visits from people in a particular location should certainly be considering local SEO.

Brian
–
Brian Combs, Founder and CEO
ionadas local LLC
Twitter: @BrianPCombs

2. Link Exchanges Still Provide Value

* A negative connotation exists around link exchanges since it was the first way to really abuse Google’s link based algorithm.
* There are misconceptions about link exchanges including that link exchanges provide little or no value due to Google deprecating the value of the links.
* Link exchanges are natural. If a site has no reciprocal links it actually appears to be _unnatural. _
* The relevancy of the link location is just as important, if not more important, than metrics usually associated with link strength such as page rank, the number of links on the page, etc
* Link exchanges with relevant link partners are a great way to drive traffic to a site because users are already searching for a particular category of products or related products.
* Link exchanges are a valid source of traffic and back links but must be used as _an element_ of an SEO strategy. People who make the mistake of only engaging in link exchanges are those who help fuel existing misconceptions.

Ryan Woolley, who is the vice president, group director of client services at the digital agency Response Mine Interactive

3. Benefits

Make sure to think about benefits first, features second.  Benefits answer the visitors top question, “Whats in it for me?”  Benefits convince the visitor he really needs this product or service in general.  Features answer the visitors question, “Why should I buy this from you?”  If the visitor isnt sold on the benefits, the features are largely irrelevant.
Practice recognizing the difference by listening to radio ads while driving and calling out loud what each sentence represents: benefit, feature, call to action.  My clients struggle with this element of great content more than any other, but the conversion rate impact when implemented is enormous.

Aaron Overton of Heatherstone.

4.  Client Testimonials
Client testimonials are always a great way to validate the declarations of excellence you reverberate throughout every communication channel you use. Although they can seem a little partial, testimonials can have influence over people on the fence about your product or service.
Testimonials can also provide potential customers and clients with more insight into your work and how you do it. If gathered correctly, your testimonials should be relevant, believable, trust-generating, and support your success statements. They should also push a few more hesitant searchers over to your side of the fence. Are your testimonials helping you convert more? Do you know how to get great client testimonials from your raving fans?
Every business with a website has a client that is a raving fan. Someone who reads every one of your blog posts, is always early for your meetings, and is genuinely excited about your business relationship.  A testimonial of glowing words is always nice, but quantitative results are more convincing. Use questions designed to get quantitative answers, but just a starting point. If an effective question comes to mind during the conversation, dont hesitate to ask. Here are two examples, one with and one without quantitative results:

Example #1 – Without Quantitative Results

Working with the Austin Law Cowboys has been really superb! They helped me get the money from my car wreck that I deserved. Now I dont have to worry about paying the bills and arguing with my wife.
Example #2: With Quantitative Results

Working with the Austin Law Cowboys has been really superb! They helped me get $45,000 from my car wreck and another $50,000 for medical bills two months before I was even out of the hospital! Now my wife and I are enjoying a much less stressful time during my recovery

Since most people dont typically use numbers when giving a testimonial it is important that you ask the right questions in order to get the quantifiable figures you are looking for. One way to do this is to get your clients to elaborate on the benefits they received that addressed their pains.
If you want to see which testimonials are working and which are not, run an A/B test for two landing pages. Set up one landing page with a testimonial and one without. Research shows that the testimonial will beat the competition by 158 percent. But don’t take my word for it, try an A/B test yourself.
SEO testimonials are valuable content and cause increased frequency of content creation and more traffic to your site. They will help convince some of your potential customers to try out your product and service, and back up all your claims of excellence that you reverberate throughout the Internet. If you are using gathering great testimonials, they should be doing work for you.

Ben Finklea is CEO of Volacci, a search-engine marketing firm, and an SEO expert.
Seasoned craftsmen worth a darn have a workshop of tools that help them excel at what they do best. Painters have brushes, carpenters have hammers, and mimes have invisible boxes. SEO practitioners are no difference.

5.  Cross Linking

One very easy way to perform SEO is by including keyword text links in your blog that points to your main website or a specific page of your main website. I have a blog with about 170 postings and within the signature line of each of my postings I include a text link with my main keyword phrase linking to my website home page. This has helped me get and retain top rankings on Google for my #1 search term for over 4 years.

Peter Geisheker, CEO

The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm

Twiiter: http://twitter.com/geisheker

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker

6. Program Your Title Tags

If you have basic SEO knowledge, chances are you know the importance of optimizing the title tags of your sites pages. However, if your website features its own database-driven search engine (e.g. for products you offer), you may not be optimizing the individual search result pages produced by the engine. Doing so is an opportunity to add potentially hundreds or thousands of pages and relevant keywords for search engines to index.

Come up with a formula for the title tag that pulls keywords from your database and that enables each search result page to have a unique title (e.g. Product Name | Company Name | Product ID #); doing so will help ensure that each page gets indexed. This should be an easy task for your web developer; a little PHP (or similar language) inserted in a single title will result in unique, keyword-rich title tags across your search pages.

Anna Pavlichenko

A internet marketing specialist at Marketade, a boutique Internet marketing and web design company that works with small businesses, mostly in the DC area.

Please comment below to share your best original SEO tip?

Best SEO tips straight from the SEO Pro’s. is a post from: Boston SEO

• Becoming an equity partner allows SEOs and business owners to work together, and take advantage of the ever-growing internet.
• Both can decide on how much equity the SEO gets in return for its marketing services.
• Traditional payments become a thing of the past, as small business owners figure out how to share their increased revenue while the SEO partners with the business.

Lazy Workers Beware
Equity partnerships are for the SEOs and business owners who are passionate about their work. The agreement inherently demands that the two synergize to help the business flourish. Making equity partners shows a devotion to the work both parties produce, so flat-rate consultants probably should stick to their few links a week. And business owners who don’t have any interest in expanding their company shouldn’t bother with equity partnerships.
Partnering is Investing
This model—where services are paid for in equity—is here to stay. It almost reads like a barter system, but equity partnership is more than that; it’s a commitment between two parties that produces a symbiotic relationship. By tackling an endeavor with an equity partner, you’re investing your time, energy and talent into a company. Though the SEOs may not have equal stake in the company, business owners can add incentives to keep the SEOs working hard. Though there’s already a built-in incentive for the SEO: equity. This partnership—when formed by two ambitious parties—is nothing but a win-win.

This is a guest post by Kevin Kaiser of Startup Biz Blog. Kevin has been working with new startups and small businesses helping achieve their maximum potential. If you enjoyed this article, you might consider subscribing to his blog.

Use a Partner to Grow Your Business, Not Consultant is a post from: Boston SEO

A website can be used to relay communication, but since the internet is instant access, your online efforts are a great way to show your business and you are genuine and transparent. Perhaps the most important thing you can do for your site is to set up a blog. Blogging is extremely popular as of late, and just mentioning the word can sometimes be enough to cause someone to take notice. Blogs are useful because they are easy to update on a regular basis with pertinent information. The media likes blog-based communication because it is often a no-hassle way to learn about your company’s latest endeavors. Blogging also allows you to inject a human voice into the site, which pulls quite a bit of weight with some people. After all, clients usually prefer to know that the company they’re working with is professional but also personable. A well-written blog can help to get this across.

On top of having a successful blog, every website should have a press release and news section. This is where you will want to post all of your latest happenings, awards and news. While the blog is used similarly, the difference is with the tone of the writing. Your press release/news section should be written with formal professionalism, while your blog should be written conversationally, a more approachable voice, even including comments and conversation. One thing to take note, however, is a lack of attention to a conversational type of post can turn a great thing into negative affects on your company’s reputation.

It also can’t hurt to jump on the social media bandwagon, which is what most business are doing. No matter what genre your business fits into, it is always beneficial to be apart of the social media conversation. For some businesses, it is the only way to increase transparent conversations with clients and the targeted audience. By making use of sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you can elicit and become informed of “the buzz” that might otherwise be hard to come by, especially with the hard-to-reach audience, the online audience.

The final way to increase communication from your company to the public online is to creatively develop interaction on your website. Whether it be through your blog comments, give-a-ways, developing a youtube channel or joining an online chat room on your website, the more the interaction you have on your website, the better feedback you’ll get and the more you’ll be able to reach the sea of potential online shareholders.

About the Author

Written by Victoria Knight, finance writer and money market rates reporter for Ratlines.com.

Integrated Marketing to an Online Audience is a post from: Boston SEO

Internet is a very cost effective medium for not only new businesses but also existing ones. It offers excellent convenience to the prospective customer. An added advantage of having a website is that a company can rope in customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It has a broad reach to its consumers. The Web is not just nationwide – it’s worldwide. This means that your product or service can be viewed by people just about anywhere in the world. Compared to other forms of advertising, Internet marketing can reach a far larger number of people. Television and radio ads just can’t compare to a pop-up or banner ad online. Mailings get thrown away and aren’t cost effective. Billboards only reach those who happen to be paying attention at just the right time. Consumers will hang up on or put off talking to a telemarketer. In the time it takes to make one phone call, you can send thousands of emails. Overall, it just makes more sense to put your money into online promotions. Although the product or service that you have designed can be marketed on any commercial website, it would be better if you create your own website that is designed specifically for marketing and selling purposes. The website needs to be designed in such a way that it helps in converting casual visits into sales. To get the attention of online visitors, you need to include the right content on your website as the right words will covert casual visitors into customers, whereas wrong words will cause them to click away and never return. Content is something that determines what a customer thinks about a newly launched product or service, making it even more necessary to have the right content. Fancy graphics may get the initial attention of visitors but ultimately it is the content that prompts visitors to click on the “order now” button.

Internet marketing or online marketing is one of the most recent and speedy marketing and advertising methods in today’s competitive business world. It uses the Internet as a medium to advertise and sell products and services. A form of electronic commerce, online marketing is used by most of the business organizations to expand and promote their marketing worldwide. This business strategy has two modes of operation – business-to-customer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B). Both have had tremendous impact on industries such as flea markets, banking, and music. Today, Internet marketing has become a fashionable marketing plan as Internet usage has increased tremendously among the public.

Author BIO: Adam writes articles for Internet marketing Company and for more articles and internet marketing tips he suggest you to visit: www.onlinemarketingseo.com

The Hidden Treasure in Internet Marketing is a post from: Boston SEO

Are you spending all of your time, money and efforts going after all the wrong people? Do your marketing results totally miss reaching and attracting your ideal customer?

If you are nodding your head in agreement, then most likely you can identify with my frustration. “Join the club”, I say, because we are not alone! It wasn’t until recently, after an enlightening conversation with my good friend Charly Caldwell and the creator of this great blog, that I realized I was spending most of my time going after the wrong customer. In my case I was going after anyone who had windows in their home. Bad idea taking into consideration the fact that everyone has windows, but unfortunately, not everyone has the money to get their windows cleaned.

That’s when I decided to go after the audience I wanted, my ideal customer. In my case, they can be described as owners of up-scale homes in Fort Myers and Naples Florida. These clients not only have the funds to get their windows cleaned but they also have the funds to get the windows cleaned on a regular basis. Changing my marketing target focus resulted in not only more business but also more residual income from each individual new account.

Here are a few marketing tips to use when targeting your ideal customers:

• Narrow it down! Don’t send out one mailer to a whole zip code. Instead use that money to send a campaign mailer over a few months to a certain target neighborhood. People are more likely to call after they have seen your ad more than once. Remember – Repetition Reaps Results!

• Do your research! Write down a list of qualities that make up your perfect customer and plan out a way to reach them in a more efficiently, effective and consistent basis.

• Think big! In my particular case, I target property managers. It’s a little tougher to get your foot in the door, but once you do, they have the ability to team you up with many home or business owners. Fish with a net instead of a fishing pole!

• Be creative! Think outside the box! I have a friend that actually sends property managers a diaper in the mail with a card that reads “We know our competition is full of it!” This is the kind of marketing strategy that get’s people talking. I’m sure that diaper made its way around the office a few times. What can you do to make your marketing ad the talk of the town?

Good luck with your search for the ideal customer. Please let me know if this blog post helped you.

About the Author:
Hi, I’m Jason Evers, if you’re looking for an online resource, full of good, tried and true tips, techniques and tricks for creating results for your small business, then you have to check out my blog. It’s my goal to share with you all of the small business success tips & techniques I’ve learned, and others have shared, to create small business success!

Please visit me at http://www.createsmallbusinesssuccess.com I look forward to your comments.

Finding Your Ideal Customer is a post from: Boston SEO

Once we’ve created our own website we’re pretty excited.  We want other to see it, for the word to be spread about it and for others to visit so either our business can benefit or so we can start making some money.  What’s hard is getting the word spread.  Websites take time to gain age and become popular, but there are a few things you can do in the mean time to get some visitors.  For a few ways to promote your website online, continue reading below.

Spread the word: First of all, tell all your family members and your friends.  Then they can spread the word and before you know it, your website will be found by several people.  A great way to do this is through e-mail with a link from your website attached.

Blog: Create a blog for your website.  Update with posts daily and always come up with something new to write about.  This will draw in daily readers and give so many more opportunities for people to find out about your site.

Social bookmarking: Once you’ve created new content on your website or blog you can submit each post to a social bookmarking website.  These are great because they refresh instantly and you can also get a few people to check out your site right away.

Blog comments: Commenting on other people’s blogs or sites is another great way to throw your link out there and to explain your site.  Go to Google blog search and narrow down your results so that you find exactly what you’re looking for and the people you’re trying to target.

Message boards: A lot of people use message boards.  Whether they are asking for advice, need a question answered or they’re looking to find a certain type of website, people use them daily.  Visit these message boards and spread the word of your new website.

Yahoo Answers: Yahoo answers is one of the best ways to get people to come to your website.  It is very common for people to ask a question on there and to ask for websites that have to do with what they’re asking about.  For example, if someone has a question about finding a certain lawn mower, and you have a lawn mower website, you can direct them to your site.

There are several ways to promote your website online.  Using these few ideas can help you get more people to your website instantly and hopefully increase the returning visitors you get!

About The Author:

This is a guest post written by Tom Tessin.  Tom runs FindMySurveys, a paid surveys directory helping those online find legitimate ways to make a little money on the side.

6 Ways to Promote Your Website Online is a post from: Boston SEO

The issue I have with this, as an affiliate marketer, is that you are trying to hard to get affiliate marketing to do multiple things. An affiliate program should be about generating sales of your product or service or attracting leads. In return you reward the affiliate with cash! It is that simple.

Having an affiliate program just as a way of adding links to your website is not really a good idea.
Affiliates who sign up to your program will feel hard done by.

Why?

Well basically they are promoting you and your business across the web and you are only paying them for the business they generate, they are getting nothing for the links or advertising they are doing for you.

It can end up being more damaging to your business.

So my advice would be to stick to the more tried and tested ways of adding links and only add an affiliate program to your business with the sole purpose of generating sales – not links.

Or use affiliate marketing to earn income and then reinvest that back into SEO!

Bio

Jason Hulott is a 14 year veteran of affiliate marketing and internet marketing. He now co-runs a Web marketing consultancy business in the UK servicing the Finance and Insurance markets. SpeedieAffiliates is a recent addition to their product offerings which can help affiliate marketers and affiliate managers with a range of affiliate marketing services.

P.S. Boston SEO Meetup co-organizer @BrianHawkins has launched a new Boston affiliate marketing Meetup202 networking event.

Affiliate Marketing and SEO is a post from: Boston SEO

Wikipedia defines hyperlocal as:
“Firstly, it refers to entities and events that are located within a well defined, community scale area. Secondly, it is intended primarily for consumption by residents of that area. Thirdly, it is created by a resident of the location (but this last point is discussed because for example a photo can be hyperlocal but not locally produced).”

In the SEO world, it’s mainly characterized by locally-based blogs that cover happenings, restaurants, and anything else in a small geographic location.

Why is Hyperlocal SEO a Big Deal?

As SEO has become more pervasive over the years, ranking on a national keyword is pretty difficult. There are some shortcuts, but in the long run, national keywords tend to be ultra competitive and ROI has slowed noticeably. Since then, many have moved locally. Even though the term ‘SEO’ would be extremely difficult to rank for, stick a geo qualifier like your city on there, and suddenly it looks possible to show on the first page.

Local vs. Hyperlocal

So ‘Denver SEO’ would be a local keyword used in local SEO, but what would make it hyperlocal? Nothing. The term by all definitions is already hyperlocal. What makes it hyper is the positioning and intent of the website or blog. Hyperlocal Denver SEO would seem to connote a Denver SEO firm that services only Denver businesses.

Hyperlocal Builds Trust

It is so easy for someone to throw up a website targeting the term ‘Scranton PA attorney’, but it is quite another thing to be an attorney in Scranton and have a name, address, and contact phone. Your potential customers can sense when things are grass rooted, and when it’s astroturfed. With Google making hundreds of adjustments to its algorithm per year to counter spam, you can count on counterfeits always being unearthed eventually.

Hyperlocal is Nothing New in SEO

So as the title of the article suggests, I hope to decide if the term hyperlocal is a new craze, or if it’s a buzzword used by execs who don’t actually know the definition. As it happens, hyperlocal seems to be a new name with the same old concept of local SEO. That seems to rest on buzzword status. No one says you can’t make money by throwing around buzzwords, but I would like to see less new terminology, but more innovation with our current tech.

About The Author:

A.J. Wilcox has been studying and practicing SEO for 2 1/2 years, and is the
local/national team leader over at OrangeSoda’s SEO department.

Hyperlocal SEO – The Latest Craze or Buzzword? is a post from: Boston SEO

While standard functionality allows for website analysis and link partner discovery, the enterprise features truly make the software bundle stand out. Enhanced features include a domain quality and webpage analyzer, site crawler, Google maps importer, project manager, trigger setting and project proxy setup. The professional version offers all this but is much more report-heavy.

Hardware and Software Requirements

Windows users need to have at least one free GB of hard drive space, run a class four Pentium processor, have 512 MB of RAM and run Windows 2000, Windows 7, XP or Vista. The Java runtime environment should be 1.5 or later. Mac users need to run at least a G4 with 512 MB of RAM and one GB of hard drive space. Software specifies Mac OS X 10.4 or later versions; Java runtime is 1.5 or later. Linux users have similar hardware requirements to Windows users, but the software specifications denote Linux with GNOME or KDE.

Advanced Link Manager/Advanced Web Ranking for Business Use

Click-through customers are the lifeblood of a virtual business presence and the Advanced Link Manager enables the entrepreneur to engage in a link popularity campaign that relies on real data rather than best guesses. At the heart of this information is an accurate account of sites that link to the business and the keywords used to do so. It is here that the Advanced Web Ranking component shines.

This of course opens the door to search engine optimization. Better yet, it also provides a bit of a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the competition’s linking strategy and may very well give the shrewd business owner a way to outmaneuver the closest competitors in the arena of link popularity and keyword density.

Another aspect that makes this bundle quite attractive is the amount of time it cuts away from the business administration aspect of an online presence. This holds true especially in the realm of reciprocal link checking. In fact, testimonials from other users show that some operations managers actually tailor their business administration activities to the options offered by the software.

Software Target Audience

The Advanced Link Manager/Advanced Web Ranking bundle is attractive to the global corporation with multiple domains and also the small entrepreneur who is just starting out. The latter has the advantage of making good use of the data for building a business from the ground up and incorporating working link strategies into the business plan.

As an aside, Advanced Link Manager/Advanced Web Ranking software might present a business opportunity in itself; the savvy web entrepreneur may go into business offering SEO services to clients merely by analyzing their websites with the software. Add to this the software’s search engine submitter that targets more than 400 large, small and niche-specific search engines, and the business opportunity is pretty obvious. The ease of operation – as underscored by a pretty straightforward user’s guide – ensures a brief but steep learning curve for the user.

It is interesting to note that another segment of the target audience is the entrepreneur who thus far only used one function of the bundle. For example, it is useful to have a web ranking software package but it stops short of actually allowing the entrepreneur to take the information to the next level; this is where the link manager comes in. Those who in the past have decided to download a bit of freeware in the hopes of getting similar performance will soon find out that — in this case — the consumer truly does receive what s/he pays for.

Advanced Link Manager/Advanced Web Ranking: Too Much of a Good Thing?

There is little doubt that the Advanced Link Manager/Advanced Web Ranking website ranking software bundle provides an excellent amount of data that eases the administration of an online business. A potential downside is the sheer volume of information and data; if it is possible to have too much of a good thing, the extensive graph options may soon become overwhelming. Of course, the seasoned entrepreneur — with a clear understanding of what s/he needs and what is distracting – has the option of disregarding some of the data in order to focus on the nuggets that are of interest to the business.

How to Get the Most Out of the Bundle

After playing around a bit with the sheer volume of Internet power and information, there are some very simple methods to consider that make the use of the Advanced Link Manager and Advanced Web Ranking software easy.
• Check a site’s search engine ranking.
• Compare the site’s performance to that of the closest competitor.
• Discover the keywords used by competitors that rank higher. This now presents an interesting dilemma: should the entrepreneur stick with the keywords chosen or adapt to use similar or dissimilar keywords than higher ranking businesses?
• Employ the keyword research tool to make an educated decision rather than a hopeful guess. From there, rely on the keyword builder to craft phrases around the preferred words.

Download links:

http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com/download.html
http://www.advancedwebranking.com/download.html

Advanced Link Manager and Advanced Web Ranking Software Reviewed is a post from: Boston SEO

We all know the importance of SEO and the significant role that content plays in the campaigns. But do we concentrate so much on the SEO value of our content that it often comes at the detriment of its real value to our core users – the humans? In a good SEO campaign, the answer to that is no. Good quality content that’s SEO friendly and appeals to your human readers is a fundamental part of a well carried out SEO campaign. But there is no shortage of examples online of bad SEO campaigns on websites containing paragraphs and paragraphs of text that is keyword stuffed to the extent that it makes little if any sense. So how can you go about writing SEO friendly content that is human friendly too?

Clear Article Titles

Let’s take this article, for example. I want to target the search term, ‘SEO friendly content,’ and have included it in the title. Page titles and H1 tags carry a lot of weight in SEO terms. Therefore it makes sense to include the keyword or search term in your page title and/or H1 tag. This has SEO benefit but is also human friendly too. It gives your human readers a clear indication of what the article is about therefore telling them instantly whether it is something of interest to them.

Keyword Rich, Not Keyword Stuffed!

A lot of people find it difficult to fit their target keywords into their content and still make it sound natural. This isn’t always an easy thing to do but it really is absolutely essential if people will return to your website a second time! The Google algorithm is pretty advanced now and spots spam. Hence simple lists of keywords or hidden repetitions of the same keyword over and over no longer working to positively increase rankings. Essentially, the crawlers want to know what your page is about. A few mentions of the keyword will give the crawlers the idea. Going overboard to a point at which it sounds unnatural will get you a nice spam penalty. Read what you have written aloud to yourself. Does it sound natural? If not, don’t post it to your site. It’s often easier to find more naturally fitting places for your keywords at the beginning of paragraphs, particularly where they keywords contain a noun.

Use Unique Content

While it’s tempting to use an article (with permission) from another source, this isn’t always the best SEO practice. Unique content really is King (sorry about the cliché). From an SEO perspective, unique content gets you Google brownie points. Repetitions of the same content over and over mean that many of the sites featuring said content find themselves hidden behind that link on Google that tells the user that ‘similar results’ have been ‘omitted’ and that they can click to show them. But by that point, most users have already gone on and read that article on another site. Offering consistently unique content gives your users a reason to come back and read your material again as well. If you always post unique content, your readers know that the only place they can go for that article (at least as soon as it’s posted) is to your site.

Write Like a Reader and Think Like a Searcher

What I mean by this, essentially, is that SEO friendly content is content geared to be found easily. Human friendly content is content that human readers both benefit from and can read easily. If someone is looking for ‘budget recipes’ they are more likely to search for ‘budget recipes’ than for ‘financially resourceful food formulae’. Keep your language simple. Search engine users tend to search in easy to understand terms and your content should be written with this in mind. Add to that the fact that nobody really enjoys reading an article when every other word is six syllables long and they need a dictionary just to get past the opening line and keeping it simple really is the winning formula for SEO friendly content.

Put the Keyword in your URL

If you are posting your content to a blog or website, adjust your url /permalink to incorporate the keyword you are going for where possible. Not only does this enable search engine crawlers to more easily decipher the topic of your content, but it also offers the readers you give the URL to some idea about the subject matter beforehand.

These are just five ways that you can create SEO friendly content that pleases your readers as well. It’s great to have an optimised site that people can find, but unless your content is good and appeals to people, your conversions and/or return rates will be very low.

This was a guest post written by Josue Habana, an online marketing specialist and virtual worlds enthusiast. Josue has a Second Life Music and arts blog and a satirical Second Life blog.

Writing SEO Friendly Content That’s Human Friendly Too! is a post from: Boston SEO