This data is crucial in measuring the effectiveness of your website metadata as well as keyphrase performance according to landing page.

As you can see from the above screen grab, Google reports on the position of keyphrases in SERPS. The reported position fluctuates from 3 – 10, which highlights the reality of personalised search where rankings will vary by individual.

The second columns refers to number of impressions over the reported time period. The third column highlights the click through rate (CTR) for that keyphrase – in this case 11%.

The published fluctuations in rank gives us a useful insight into the effects of personalised search. But even more crucially, the reported click through rate allows us to measure our SERPS effectiveness and adjust our metadata as part of our SEO copywriting campaigns.

Whilst the Webmaster Tools data may not exactly match our web analytics data, it gives us enough insight to make iterative improvements to our SERPS content.

As of June 2010, News International will be charging £1 to access The Times and Sunday Times Online for a day’s subscription; or £2 for a week’s subscription.

News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, also hinted that its other titles, the Sun and the News of the World, would follow with a paywall model.

This is a landmark moment as both The Times and The Sunday Times are set to become the first UK national newspapers to charge for access to all of their online content. The Financial Times is currently charging for a large bulk of its online content.

As ad revenues fall, this is seen by many as a necessary business move, but of course it is commonly regarded as a high risk strategy as many competitor online newspapers will not be following suit.

Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, said:

“We expect to attract a growing base of loyal customers that are committed and engaged with our titles.  We are building on the excellence of our newspapers and offering digital access to our journalism at a price that everyone can afford.”

The Time Online currently attains 1.22 million readers per day. If we were to assume that only 5% of these readers convert to the paywall model, it would yield £1.83m if they each buy a £1 daily subscription. At a 10% conversion rate, it would net £3.66m per month for both papers. Whereas if the weekly subscription was selected,  revenues would be reduced.

Who should be involved from the start when building or refreshing a website? A web designer? A programmer? An information architect? All of these professionals have significant impact on your site’s look, functionality and infrastructure. But the person you also need to talk to from the beginning is an SEO web content writer.
Such trained writers understand what matters most to your customers once they get to your site: content. You may have the best-looking, easiest-to-navigate site on the web – but without the right words to make your offer stand out, your customers will simply go elsewhere.

Content is king
Mobile telecoms operators recognised years ago (to their profit) that content is king. And at its most basic, content for the web is words. How you use these in your site can make the difference between someone staying and buying from you, or going and buying from someone else.

This is why you need an SEO web content writer. Hiring a web design agency filled with talented web designers and bright technologists who know every acronym from AJAX to XML is great. But they won’t look at every single word on every single page of your site. A web content writer trained in SEO techniques will.

One writer, one voice
You wouldn’t let every departmental head in your business define your corporate brand. So why let them co-write your corporate site? That way lies inconsistency of tone and presentation. A web content writer knows this – and knows how to ensure your business speaks with a clear and consistent ‘voice’. He or she will turn all your essential information into a site that gets noticed. And not just by Google.

As easy as ABC
So how is it done? What are the first steps? A good content writer should approach every project knowing their A, B and C: Architecture, Background and Content.

A is for Architecture
Architecture isn’t just about the site’s technological structure. It’s about words on pages. Before you do anything, you need to know how big your site has to be. You should talk to your writer about everything you feel needs including. From this, he or she will be able to help in drawing up the all-important sitemap of every proposed page on your site. Then you can decide if it needs trimming down or beefing up.

B is for Background
Background is the hardest part – it means work for you and those in your business. You’ve identified what pages are needed, now you need to identify which people in your organisation have the understanding and background detail to help the writer do their job.

Don’t make the mistake of sending your writer away with a pile of corporate brochures and the words, “Just cobble something together from the existing site”. That won’t be enough to ensure well-written, SEO-compliant pages – even the best web content writers in the business aren’t mind readers.

C is for Content
Content is the words your customers will read. This is when your hard work behind the scenes gets turned into pages that highlight your strengths, showcase your expertise and sell your goods and services. Or at least, that’s what should happen if you’ve developed a close collaborative partnership with your web content writer.

Never send your writer away to write in isolation. Encourage questions, have regular round-table progress discussions, ask to see how the writing is coming along – and contribute honest, constructive feedback. You’ll be surprised how much quicker (and more economical) the process becomes when approached like this.

And D is for…?
There is a D in this process: Design. Not just of the visual elements of your site, but also the technologies (if you need something bespoke) to make it work seamlessly. But it all starts with A. And that means getting an SEO web content writer on board from the beginning.

We all like to think we know how to write. But doing so for the web is a specialist skill. You wouldn’t try to program your site yourself – so why try to write it?

This article was written by Mark Owen from i do words.

See further information on Emarketeer’s web writing courses.

When teaching seo copywriting, I make the clear distinction between demand analysis and performance analysis.

Demand analysis
Demand analysis is the use of online tools to discover the most popular search terms carried out by searchers by time and geo-location.

Performance analysis
Performance analysis refers to the conversion efficiency of specific keyphrases on our website. In other words, have certain keyphrases engaged visitors and been persuasive enough to convert these visitors into leads, sales or sign-ups etc.

If the words on our website attract users but have a poor conversion effciency, one has to consider modifying them in order to work more efficiently as emotional triggers but without affecting the website’s search rank.

Search words versus “care words”
Performance related words are termed “care words” by Gerry McGovern, CEO of Customer Carewords who says:

“The words we use when we search are not always the words we like to read when we arrive at a website…and give strong clues as to what we want, but only clues.”

So, our every day “language of intent” can differ when searching where we tend to use more mechanical and punctuated terminology.

For example, one might be looking for a last minute holiday to Venice but the search term used might be “flight deals to Venice”.

However upon arriving at a website, is the searcher more likely to purchase the holiday if it was termed “holiday offers to Venice” rather than “flight deals to Venice”?

So, clearly understanding how people search and subsequently convert is extremely significant if we are serious about writing search optimised and persuasive copy for the web.

Measuring keyword performance
My advice is to follow your web analytics reports closely. Assess your keyword performance by bounce rate, average time spent on site, average pages per visit and of course the all important conversion rate.

These metrics will give you a good indication as to whether you have sufficiently engaged your visitors in order to persuade them to convert. Remember, getting the searcher to your website is only half the story!

Whenever I run a writing for the web training course, I am often asked about how misspellings fit into SEO copywriting strategy. Given that misspelled words are so ubiquitous among all of us, should they be considered when writing for the web?

How often do we misspell search terms?
To illustrate how often misspellings occur within search engines, take a look at a Google’s report on search activity for the term “Britney Spears”.

Google reported that over 20% of the search queries were spelt incorrectly; the two most common misspellings – Brittany and Brittney – comprised around 16% of searches.

Similarly, the term “car insurance” is spelt “car insurence” approx 8,100 times on average per month in the UK as is illustrated below.

How do search engines handle misspellings?
You will be pleased to know that Google, Yahoo! and MSN all handle misspellings well by offering alternative suggestions.

Most of us will recognise Google’s “Did you mean…?” functionality whenever we mistype a search term.
MSN operates slightly differently:

…as does Yahoo!:

So given that search engines are supposedly correcting the errors of our ways, do we need to factor in misspellings into our website content? Well let’s take a deeper look at some results in SERPs.

Interpreting search engine results
We did a search for “car insurance” and “car insurence” in Google.co.uk in order to compare results in SERPs (search engine results pages).

A search for “car insurance” yielded the following:

Whereas a search for “car insurence” yielded these results in SERPs:

The top two results for “car insurance” are moneysupermarket.com and confused.com.

Whereas the top three results for “car insurence” were: beatthatquote.com, churchill.com and ukcarinsurancedirectory.co.uk.

The next obvious test was to see if the misspelling actually appeared in the above three sites. This could be ascertained using the following commands:
insurence site:www.beatthatquote.com
insurence site:www.churchill.com
insurence site:www.ukcarinsurancedirectory.co.uk
By looking at the results, it is immediately clear that the word “insurence” doesn’t actually appear on beatthatquote.com or churchill.com whereas it is contained within ukcarinsurancedirectory.co.uk as links.

However, the reason that these sites rank well for the misspelled search term could be due to many reasons such as historical use of the search term or even as a result of backlinks to these sites using that search term in the anchor text.

This can be seen using the command allinanchor:insurence.

Factoring in spelling mistakes
So does this mean that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with tactical deployment of misspelled words on our websites? The short answer is yes.

Let’s not forget user experience. A website with personalized content tailor-made to that individual’s needs, will result in higher conversion rates. Whereas a website too focused on keyword stuffing without factoring in user experience, might well generate greater footfall, but will be less likely to meet the needs of its visitors.

Inserting misspelled words is clearly not a viable strategy for any serious business. Whilst businesses still insert misspelled words into its meta keywords, the chances of those ranking high in Google are basically zero.
There are still many companies that buy misspellings of domain names in order to forward traffic to the correctly spelt version of the domain name.

Google uses this strategy e.g. click on www.gooogle.com or www.gogle.com or www.googel.com as examples.
Whilst this is considered acceptable in my opinion, I wouldn’t start cybersquatting on many hundreds of domains as it could be considered unethical if those domain names could be legitimately purchased by others; equally it might not be cost effective for the amount the potential traffic it could drive.

As an aside, if you want to play around with a fun tool that generates misspellings, have a go on this misspelling tool.

What about UK/US variations in spelling?
The differences between US and UK spellings is an issue that cannot be sidelined. But this requires an entirely new blog article, so watch this space….

Literally minutes ago I typed “iPhone 3G crack” into Google as I was searching for results regarding iPhone software hacks – purely for experimental reasons I hasten to add!!

And to my surprise the first two results in the Google SERPs were from blog articles discussing the fact that cracks had appeared on owners’ iPhones. This did in fact make me chuckle as I certainly wasn’t expecting that; rather I was expecting to be bombarded with information on how to crack iPhones!

Now, Google’s keyword tool estimates there are approx 6,660 searches for “iPhone 3G crack” per month which is fair amount of demand. And I would suspect that a large proportion of those searches are not people searching for information on whether their iPhone casing has cracked, but more likely software to crack an iPhone 3G.

This is a classic example of the SEO homonym effect where searches for one meaning of word yield results for the alternative meaning.

So, whilst synonyms are a commonly discussed (and fundamental) on-page optimisation SEO factor, homonyms are less commonly discussed but potentially as influential on traffic volume (although not necessary conversions).

The simplest way to detect the homonym effect is to look for spikes in traffic volume in your web analytics and to analyse your keyword referrers by date. You may well spot a keyword lurking around that has more than one meaning and is therefore attracting an unexpectedly large amount of traffic.

For a load more explanations, use Google’s define: search command.

When carrying out our writing for the web training course, one of the most prevailing ranking factors discussed is the use and application of synonyms.

What is a synonym?

Synonyms are words or terms with similar or identical meanings. So, for example, synonyms of our “SEO copywriting” course could be “writing for the web”, “online copywriting”, “web copywriting” and so on.

Given the fact the searchers are likely to type any of the above keyphrases into Google when searching for a web copywriting course, it is blindingly obvious that the use of synonyms within our on-page copy, our website metadata and internal and external links will improve our potential for higher rankings on a broader array of search terms.

Put another way, synonyms will widen our marketing funnel and attract not only a greater number of searches, but they will hopefully increase the contextual strength of that particular web page thereby increasing its search rank or authority.

Synonyms are not only useful for keyword based search engines, but will become increasingly more important when search engines fully embrace latent semantic indexing (LSI) where the concept of theme will dominate keyword algorithms.

Within an LSI search algorithm, mixing synonyms with similarly themed long tail keyphrases, singular and plural terms and even different tenses, will strengthen our theme and therefore increase the chances of a higher search engine ranking.

When running a search engine optimisation campaign, one the most important steps an SEO professional will recommend is to carry out keyphrase analysis in order to identify strategic and targeted keyphrases that will attract visitors to your product, service or brand.

Part of this step is to identify the target audience, i.e. the type of person likely to search for the keyphrases you have identified during planning.

In Steve Krug’s fantastic book, Don’t Make Me Think (which refers to usability rather than search engine optimisation), he claims that there is no stereotypical web user. And, he is right.

However, what we can do is to identify users in the research / buying / searching process as there are normally clear trends and user types that one can identify.

Dave Chaffey’s book Emarketing Excellence, demonstrates that searchers tend to fall into three categories – “explorers”, “hunters” and “trackers” – when searching. Let’s explore these further.

I’ll use a real life example here – me! I recently had a new kitchen installed and purchased all of my appliances online. Whilst searching for my new oven, I realised that I was exhibiting the explorer/hunter/tracker search behaviour precisely as Dave Chaffey had explained it.

Explorer
My initial research for an oven led me to carry out searches such as “built-in oven” or “integrated electric ovens”. At this stage I was researching and needed to establish the range of items for sale based on using relatively short tail keyphrases.

Websites with pages optimised for explorers will hone in on these kind of short tail keyphrases. Typical content could be buyer’s guides or blogs. Furthermore if the website content has clarity and good usability, these will perform best for explorers who tend to be impatient and click-happy.

Hunter
By the time I had figured out what kind of oven I wanted, I went on to carry out longer tail keyphrases such as “Bosch built-in electric oven ” adding qualifier keyphrases such as “stainless steel” to the mix. At this point I was a hunter as I knew the brand, type and colour of oven I wanted.

Websites optimised for slightly longer tail keyphrases, possibly within their product range or service overview pages, will tend to rank and hence perform best. Be sure to include all keyphrases variants and synonyms (carried out using demand analysis techniques at the keyphrase planning stage).

From a design perspective, websites with the strongest or most persuasive brands as well as the most engaging content will tend to capture hunters and convert them to trackers.

Tracker
After exploring and hunting for my oven, I was at the point when I knew exactly what model oven I wanted and simply needed to find the most trustworthy website or company offering my oven at the right price. At this stage I had become a tracker.

To attract trackers, websites need to focus on longer tail keyphrases such as product types or models; these keyphrases tend to be found in most abundance on product or service detail pages.

From a website design perspective, success with trackers comes down to prominent calls-to-action and persuasive design with good attention to detail on points-of-resolution during the checkout process.

I finally purchased my oven from a reputable etailer and so far haven’t had any problems!

See our related courses: Writing for the web and SEO training.