The Confident Copywriter

Posts Tagged ‘keywords’

On Thursday, we introduced the concept of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), technology poised to change the way we use keywords to optimize copy.

One way you can get moving is by starting a blog. You’ve heard this advice many times, but the truth is that the humble blog is becoming more important, not less. That should be a relief to some who have questioned whether social media is making blogging obsolete.

If you want to rank well in organic search, your site must reward the search engines with lots of valuable content. There is no faster or easier way to achieve this goal than with a blog. It’s one of the smartest ways to build content.

Once your blog is ready to go, be sure to publish at least three posts each week. Why is this important? Because each post is counted as a new page. More posts equals deeper content, and a higher page rank.

LSI is not meant to replace the all-important keyword, but to enhance it. Be sure to optimize your blog posts with keywords, as well as tagging and categorizing the post.

And never, ever forget the importance of relevant information!

Keyword-Optimized Images

Adding keyword-optimized images is another important strategy. Google does include images when indexing your website, so make sure you’ve got some keyword-optimized images. Before you do this, be sure the images you choose add relevancy to your content. A blog post about SEO accompanied by a picture of an ice cream cone probably isn’t going to be as optimized as it could be. The point of a picture is to add weight to the message.

To keyword-optimize the image, simply include one of your top keywords in your HTML code where the image is linked to the page. (In the image “alt” text. Wordpress users, use the “Title” field.)

The Ever-Popular Video

Videos are enjoying immense popularity. Unfortunately, search engine spiders are deaf. Therefore, build individual videos around one important keyword, and be sure to use that keyword in the video title. And don’t forget the importance of a transcript, the actual words used in your video. This helps the search engines recognize the keyword you’ve so carefully used. For example, when uploading a video to YouTube, choose “closed captioning” to also upload the transcript.

Nike Got It Right

Search is going through an unprecedented transition. As social media networks continue to infiltrate our lives, people rely less and less on the search engines and more and more on the opinions of ‘friends’ to make trustworthy recommendations. If you’re not on board with social media yet, time is running out. (That’s not a sneaky plea to win business. It’s the truth.)

As a child, when my Mom would nag me on some point I had heard umpteen times, I would complain, “Ma! You already told me 100 times!” To which my very wise mother would reply, “If you would just do it, I wouldn’t have to keep talking about it!”

If you’ve been marketing online, even for a short time, you understand the importance of keywords. Keywords direct web visitors to the products and services they want…if you’ve optimized your site properly, those visitors end up on your website.

News Flash: Traditional keyword usage is changing.

This is important news for copywriters, because we must understand how to optimize client copy to achieve the best results. Even if you are a business owner writing your own copy, it’s important.

This is important news for anyone who sells a product or service on the web too.

Here’s what’s new:

Keywords will not always be the most important part of an SEO strategy. Why? Because search engines are becoming more sophisticated, increasingly focusing, not just on the keywords themselves, but on the content surrounding the keywords.
Enter Latent Semantic Indexing, a mathematics-based indexing and retrieval method currently being tested. If you’re scratching your head on this one, you’re not alone.

KnowledgeSearch.org explains, “Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.”

OK…in layman’s terms…if you are selling a vegetarian lifestyle guide, your top keyword might be “vegetarian lifestyle”. So you will use the regular methods to optimize your copy for this phrase. However, LSI dictates you must optimize your content for related words and phrases, such as:

• vegetarian
• no-meat diet
• eating healthy
• nutritional requirements
• benefits of eating legumes
… and so forth.

Some of these terms, such as “eating healthy” and “nutritional requirements,” are generic; not specific to “vegetarian lifestyle guide”. However, the search engines expect to find these types of terms in conjunction with a website optimized for your main keyword. These ‘outside’ keywords signal the search engines: “Relevant content found here.”

After all, this is the whole purpose of the search engine: to match the visitor’s query with the right information.

Thankfully, true latent semantic indexing is not yet being used by the search engines, so you have time to get on board. But you can bet computer wizards are working towards this goal. You might as well get ready now.

What are your thoughts on this?