David Rosam

If you’re interested in making your website successful, you’ve got to write great content in the right way.

I’ve been writing SEO copy for the past decade and now’s the time to share what I’ve learned. It’s at Writing For SEO.

There’s also a Twitter account to follow – @writingforseo

And a Facebook page.

I hope you find the information useful.

…to you and yours from me and mine.

Have a great one!

I love this.

Truly revolutionary thinking with positive implications way beyond our first thoughts.

If you read the comments around the Net about Drobos, you may well conclude that they are unreliable and buggy.

For some time, my Drobo (the four-bay Series 2 with USB and Firewire) had been rebooting itself, shutting down and spending days rebuilding itself. I thought I’d have to pension it off and buy something else – not another Drobo.

Before I binned it, I tried what it said on the Drobo site, silly though it sounded.

I replaced the Firewire cable for a nice Neet  one from Amazon – I really rate their cables and have them all over the flat. The Drobo rebuilt in record time, and hasn’t missed a beat since – that’s several months. The drive has also started going to sleep and waking up as it should.

The moral of the story? If you have a misbehaving Drobo, replace Drobo’s own rubbish one with something decent.

All of Buckminster Fuller’s videos edited into one. Pull up a comfy chair, won’t you?

Very funny. Me as Hitler? It’s good to know how other people see you

Hmm…

As an optimist with a pile of rubbish to throw away, do I see the dustbin as being half-full or half-empty?

Just a thought

About a year ago there was a new phenomenon at Rosam Towers. My dearest wife, Sam morphed into iSam, through the simple addition of an iPad. You never saw one without the other

Having resisted the charms of a tablet for years, I bought a Google Nexus 7 while on holiday… You’re ahead of me aren’t you?

I’m a Davus.

Update: I’m now an iDave. I ordered an iPad mini on Day One.

The guys at Don’t Get Screwed Over hit the nail on the head.

We’ve all been there.

And here are some Tips so you don’t get screwed over, and some information about Open Source legal documents. I think the documents are designed for the US legal system. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Have you read Writing For SEO’s Top Posts?

• Exact Match Domains. The current state of play
• Header tags and how you use them in SEO Copy
• Never. Ever. Forget your call to action
• Writing consistently. Do you have a style manual?
• Writing Tools Part 5: Online Writing Tools

They’re the most popular posts amongst Writing For SEO’s readers. You shouldn’t miss them.

Thanks to DaveBleasdale for allowing me to use his image.

I’ve been asked to expand on an earlier post – Never. Ever. Forget your call to action.

While most agreed with me, some wanted to know more about how to write a call to action. So here goes…

Here’s how to write a call to action

Don’t start rattling out a call to action without some prior thought. It may be the smallest part of your post or page, but it’s up there with the headline and subheads for importance.

The key thing is to stop being shy. There should be no beating around the bush. Unless you’re plain rude, your readers or customers will love you for it.

Why? Because a good call to action makes life easy.

Think about this. You’re in a shop with an armful of stuff you want to buy, but you can’t see where the checkout is. Then compare it to being on a web page, not knowing how to make a purchase or sign up to a newsletter, or find out more information.

The result is frustration. Your job is to alleviate that frustration, or even better, stop it happening at all.

Putting your call to action in writing

Here are some simple ways to write a call to action:

• Don’t just say ‘Buy [name of your product]‘. Add ‘Here’ or ‘Click here’ – think about being in the shop, trying to find the checkout
• Be clear about the benefit of clicking – say ‘Click here for free next day delivery’
• Create urgency – with a cut-off date for an offer, say
• Include some stats – Join 10,000 subscribers to Writing For SEO Update

Don’t use these call to action words

Be straightforward, but not rude. Work for yourself by helping your readers. Don’t say:

• ‘Buy now’ – see how that’s different from above? It’s pushy, for a start
• ‘Submit’ – what the heck is that supposed to mean? What kind of site are you running?

Use design elements

Make your words even more effective by using:

• Different fonts, sizes or weights
• Buttons
• Coloured backgrounds to make your call to action stand out
• Pop-ups

Have you experimented with calls to action? What works for you?

Thank you to Henry Zbyszynski for allowing me to use his image.

OK. So I made a howling omission. I didn’t write about online writing tools.

As more than one person has pointed this out to me, and the series as a whole has been so popular, I thought I’d better plug the gap.

Where do you find writers’ tools online?

There are a lot out there, and for the purposes of this post, I’m just going to stick to those that enable you to write – online Word Processors of one sort or another – rather than polish or enhance your writing – grammar checkers and so on.

1. Google Docs - now part of Google Drive, and the big daddy of online tools for writers

2. Microsoft Office Web Apps – stripped-down versions of the MS Office apps you know and love

3. Zoho – a comprehensive suite of web apps

4. ThinkFree Office – I’ve not tried this one, but I found it while researching this piece

5. Adobe Buzzword – prettier than many, but in the past I never got on with Buzzword. Maybe things have changed now

The strengths

The strengths are impressive, maybe even persuasive:

• Free (or free option)
• Work in your browser alongside most of your research material
• Can be great for collaboration – with the file in the cloud, more than one person can work on it. And there’s only one copy of the file, not a multitude of variations multiplied through e-mail

The weaknesses

Actually, there was a reason why I didn’t write about online writing tools in the original series. I only use Google Docs, and then very seldom. Only when I want to collaborate.

When put alongside the best native apps on my Mac, I find online writing apps clumsy and/or under featured. They’re not as pleasurable to use. That’s important to me; it may not be important to you.

The biggest weakness, the killer as far as I’m concerned, is being dependent to some degree on an Internet connection to get my work done – if there’s no wi-fi or 3G when I’m out and about, or if my broadband goes down, I have a problem. If I use apps on my Mac, then there isn’t that to worry about.

And, almost as bad, I don’t want my primary data storage to be up there in the Cloud. I’m happy to back up there (not only there, you’ll understand), but I want physical control of my data.

My recommendations

Simple. If you’re serious about your writing, but don’t have the money to buy a native app, then you should look at Open Office or Libre Office, which also won’t cost you a penny. Or for blogging, Evernote.

What are your thoughts? Are you happy to trust your work to the cloud?

Thanks to Akuppa John Wigham  for making his image available.

This week’s Top Posts list is headed by the evergreen Exact Match Domains post. If you’ve already read it, don’t miss the easy way to do key phrase research.

• Exact Match Domains. The current state of play
• Try this easy way to find key phrases in minutes
• How to produce SEO Copy in eight easy stages
• Header tags and how you use them in SEO Copy
• Writing Tools Part 2: Text Editors

With eight easy stages to write SEO copy and how to write header tags, you have a great start in SEO copywriting.

Thanks to DaveBleasdale for allowing me to use his image.

Is that a surprise from a professional producer of content? It shouldn’t be, if you’ve read many of the posts here on Writing For SEO – particularly if you’ve had a look through my slides for World Domination By Blog.

This post is also inspired by a post on Geoff Livingston’s Blog, which is based on some of the same thoughts.

Are you enjoying the flood of Content Marketing?

Google’s changes over the past year or 18 months have attempted to put a stop to some of the more questionable tactics by SEOs and webmasters. So we all responded Content is King! And Content Marketing swung dramatically into focus here in 2013.

Words, infographics, presentations, podcasts, videos and eBooks spew forth from marketers throughout the web. And, like 99% of most things, it’s rubbish, produced by the yard, piled up so mine’s higher than yours.

To get higher up Google than yours.

How to lose readers

How many blogs do you read regularly that throw multiple posts out every day? Or, put it another way, is any of this mountain of stuff worth spending your valuable attention-deficited time on?

I’m sure lots of you are like me and give up on blogs and RSS feeds that fail to deliver on quality. And, in my book, a flood of low-quality content is far, far worse than a trickle of low quality content.

Why do I say that Content is an Indulgence?

I believe that most Content being produced today is an indulgence for site owners and marketers. They’re producing stuff because they believe Stuff is King. It’s being produced for their benefit, not their community’s.

If they stopped to think about it for just a while, they’d realise that they need a strategy before the stuff. That strategy needs to take into account the needs of readers, customers and prospective customers.

And I’m back to the point that quantity isn’t what most of us need.

Are you competing with the best quality content?

Being unread, unengaged-with and ultimately unprofitable will undoubtedly be your fate if you fail to compete with the best of the content in your niche.

Your readers will naturally gravitate to reading the content sources that give them back something in exchange for their time.

So get the best online strategists and content originators on your side. Produce the best you can, and aim to be the very best you can in your niche.

Are you producing quantity rather than quality? Is your community turning away from you in the face of your flood of low quality stuff? Have you lost your way?

Thanks to Nick Whitworth for allowing me to use his picture of a very indulgent cake.

Here’s an easy way to increase the traffic to your site and find some more topics to write about. It should be part of your Agile SEO armoury.

Key phrase research in minutes

You’ll need to have Google Analytics installed, also with Google Webmaster Tools installed and linked to Google Analytics. You won’t get the data you need without linking the two services.

This approach will also work best if your site isn’t brand new – generally, the more Organic traffic you’re getting, the better this will work.

Find out how you’re ranking

Log on to Google Analytics.

Choose Traffic Sources on the left hand menu, then Search Engine Optimisation, then Queries.

This will show you the top search queries for your site – although, be aware that many of them will not be driving traffic to your site.

Capture the key phrases

You need to get the data into a spreadsheet for the next stage. Make sure you have the right number of rows displayed using the pull-down menu in the bottom right, so you get all the data you need.

Now choose Excel.xlsx (or whatever suits your spreadsheet) and download the file.

Find key phrases to target

Sort the data by the Average Position column, from Smallest to Largest.

You’re not interested in the key phrases that rank in Positions 1 to 5. They’re very much where you want them to be.

The ones you’re most interested in are those that are in the lower half of the first page and on the second page. They’re the ones that, with a bit of effort, you should be able to rank higher.

So try filtering on Average Positions between 5 and 20. Here’s just a section of the spreadsheet, with the average positions on the right.

Have a look through the key phrases, deleting the ones that aren’t relevant to your site, or you’re otherwise not interested in. As you can see, there is a significant percentage of key phrases that Writing For SEO is ranking for that are little use to me.

See what you’re left with. This month, those positions give me more than enough possibilities – above is just a small part of the filtered spreadsheet, of course.

But if, after going through the results, you find very few relevant key phrases, you can increase the scope of key phrases – try filtering between 5 and 30 and review the results. It will

Now write some content

Armed with the list of key phrases that are just bubbling under, I can write some content to support these key phrases.

While I haven’t addressed the issues of competition for these key phrases nor off-site SEO, if you follow these steps you should be able to drive many of the list towards the top of Google over time.

How do you find key phrases to target?

At the start of May 2013, my post about Exact Match Domains remains the favourite amongst Writing for SEO‘s readers. Don’t miss the slides from my recent talk, either.

• Exact Match Domains. The current state of play
• How are you doing? Google Analytics for Beginners – 1
• World Domination By Blog – My Slides
• Writing Tools Part 2: Text Editors
• How to produce SEO copy in eight easy stages

At about this stage each week, I urge you to read all of these posts. Guess what? I’m doing exactly the same this week. Go to it!

Thanks to DaveBleasdale for allowing me to use his image.

I keep noting down some useful thoughts, but they never expand enough to become a whole post. Every so often, I’ll be posting a small collection of the best of them.

A time-saving tip for your WordPress posts

As a Writing For SEO reader I hope you make sure you put h2 tags around your subheads.

When do you add them, though? If you wait until the text is in WordPress, it can be a bit fiddly trying to find the subheads to put in the tags. So here’s how I do it.

If you use a text editor or Evernote to write your blog entries, try putting the tags around your subheads as you write your entries. When you’re happy with your writing, highlight all your copy and copy it.

Then go into WordPress and then choose Add new post. Your main writing/editing window has two tabs at the right hand end – Visual and Text. Select Text.

Click in the window and paste your text there. Now click on the Visual tab and you’ll see your subheads in style and, if you use two Returns at the end of each paragraph in your text (or Evernote) file, WordPress will even sort out the linespacing for you.

Now, all you need to do is to put your headline into the Title window, and most of your formatting is sorted.

This may well work with other blogging platforms, but I’ve not tried any since I started writing my posts in Evernote and realised I could publish this way. Perhaps you could try it with your blog or CMS and help us all out by publishing the results here in the comments.

Get more value from your old posts

This one came up in the Q&A Session after my talk last week. I was asked how much time I spend Tweeting my content. The answer, thankfully, is very little!

One of the challenges with Twitter is that anything you post is transient. Consequently, few of your followers will see what you’re Tweeting about, and may well miss valuable content on your blog.

That’s of little use to you, as a blogger, or them, as people who could use your stuff.

I’d seen some bloggers recommend constantly Retweeting, but that would consume vast amounts of time, and contrary to what some people think, I don’t spend all day on social media.

Looking at some people’s posts, I noticed some Tweets were being made with something called WP Old Posts, which I confirmed as a WordPress plug-in. What it does is to pick out an older post at random every set number of hours, and Tweet it for you.

Now, this is a real win if you’re posting largely timeless content – you are aren’t you? And, incidentally, if you have some posts that for some reason won’t stand the test of time, you can exclude them from being Retweeted.

Now, all I post is when I have a new post on Writing For SEO, and spend my social media time engaging with my followers.

How do you get maximum value out of your blog posts?

Thanks to Anne Hornyak for letting me use her image.

Here are my slides from my presentation at last week’s Worthing Digital.

Find out how to make your blog perform well or use a blog to make a website more successful.

These are a great set of top posts. The ever-popular post on EMDs, plus three how-tos and last week’s Top Posts.

• Exact Match Domains. The current state of play
• How to produce SEO Copy in eight easy stages
• Top posts on Wednesday 17 April 2013
• Write a sales page in ten easy steps
• How to choose keywords that people really search on

As I do every week, I urge you to read them. They’re what your fellow Writing For SEO readers are finding most worthy of their time today.