There has been countless posts on writing for the web, but it generally seems that copywriters (and designers, for that matter) know very little about SEO.

We’ve seen it many times: a company writes their own content or hires a copywriter. They might also hire a designer for a new site. Both the copywriter and the designer completely ignore SEO (or aren’t aware of it to begin with), and the client ends up with an incomplete product that will need to be optimised later.

At Morning Copy we offer SEO services for clients in all industries. However: onsite SEO is included in every design and copywriting project we complete – because there really is no point doing something twice!

We’ll revisit designing for SEO in the future, so here are some thoughts on SEO and copywriting.

1. Use headers just like these

Anyone that knows about writing for web knows to break up pages using subheadings but very often the writer will simply make the font bold and larger. Why not use a header tag? Your page title should be a h1 and the page should follow a tree format as below:

h1 Page Header
h2 Sub Head 1
h3 Point 1
h3 Point 2
h2 Sub Head 2

And so on. Basically, search engines place extra emphasis on header tags, bold and italic markup. Don’t go over the top, but certainly use each of these elements on your keywords.

2. Interlink

Keep them clicking! Interlinking your own content and providing external resources is essential on the web but it’s important to optimise each link. If we were going to promote our article on styling Google Forms, we’d link using the anchor text Google Forms, not like this: read the article here. I mean, who wants to rank for “here“?

This is a very common mistake and one of the things we often fix first when optimising onsite.

3. Use images correctly

Images are great, but get the most out of them! Firstly, host the image on your own site, if you can. That means the Google image bot can crawl your images.

Name the images with your keyword. DSC0097.jpg is useless. Morning-Copy.jpg is much better.

Then use the alt tag to describe the image again:

img src="Morning-Copy.jpg" alt="Morning Copy"

If every alt tag is unique you’ll get a double thumbs up from Google!

Email marketing analysis gives a business direct access to their consumers’ buying habits and can potentially grow a business through strengthening customer rapport. It is important to treat your hard-earned database with respect as this will lead to more repeat business in the future. This equals higher profits! Newsletters can help your business to generate more revenue as it gives you the opportunity to find out what your readers really want from you.

It is vital to conduct a performance analysis for online marketing campaigns to gauge its success. If readers are unsubscribing from your mailing list or not taking up your advertised offer, then your business is losing money and wasting time selling either the wrong product or to the wrong market.

When analyzing the success of your campaign it is important to look for 5 things. These are the number of:

Successfully delivered emails

Opened emails

Actual unique clicks

New unsubscribes

Forwarded email opens

Successful Deliveries
This figure tells you how many of your readers actually received your email to their inbox. A delivery rate of approximately 90% is optimal. The remaining 10% will be bounces: either ‘hard bounces’ (incorrect email addresses) or ‘soft bounces’ (full inboxes or busy servers).

When creating email campaigns it is imperative to remember that you are producing content for your readers and also for the hundreds of spam filters which will be scanning your campaign for junk mailing. This can be a fine balancing act as newsletter content should be short, limited copy supplemented with ‘light’, eye-grabbing images. Ideally, you want your marketing to reflect the medium of the Internet: concise, immediate, easily accessible and quick. Unfortunately, these are the same qualities for which spam filters specifically bounce junk mail.

Morning Copy has a proven success rate developing online creative solutions with a pass rate in the top 10 percentile of the industry. See our solutions for how to wake up a sleepy database and increase your email delivery rate.

Opened Emails
Your bulk mail service will provide you with the statistics of ‘Number of recipients who opened‘, ‘Total number of opens’ and ‘Average number of opens’, of which only the first figure is of use. For reporting purposes you want to know how many recipients from your total database opened the newsletter each, not the total amount of times the mailer was opened overall.

Actual Unique Clicks
‘Unique Clicks’ information is presented in the same fashion as the ‘Opened Emails’ category. Again, the unique record is the most informative, telling you which links within your campaign were the most popular and how many recipients clicked. This is the most important detail as it tells you exactly what your readers want! Capitalizing on this information will increase your sales as you sell your readers offers/goods they will actually buy.

The clicks statistics is also great for understanding your readers’ habits. Where are the majority of the clicks generated from? Does the top of the page have the most clicks? Are images or text links more attractive to your database? Which offers are the most popular? Are recipients reading to the end of the mailer? Optimize your sales potential by building subsequent mailers on this information.

New Unsubscribes
Sadly, some readers will actually want to leave your database. Unsubscribes are inevitable however, and must be removed from the database immediately. Morning Copy experiences a very marginal unsubscribe rate from its created campaigns, which is less than half a percent on average, the desired industry standard.

Forwarded Email Opens
Imbedding an option for recipients to forward your campaign to their friends is the perfect way to increase your database immediately. It has guaranteed delivery rates and favoured open and click rates, plus it’s free! Personal recommendations from friends are invaluable to any business, so this feature can be incentivized to encourage more good ‘leads’.

Morning Copy is experienced in post-production analysis. Find out how we can create unique marketing solutions by judging your performance statistics within the market.

As we’ve seen with numerous clients, a site can still suffer in the search engines if it’s not well optimised; despite having a large number of backlinks. Typically, they’ve spent all their time building links and forgotten the basics!

Below is a quick check list of how you can optimise your site for search engines. This is just a starting point – there are far more things to consider. Once your site is optimised as below, start link building!

1. Keywords

This is the most obvious element of on-site optimisation, but often overlooked. The keyword you are targeting should account for about 5-7% of the total copy. While many webmasters include keywords in the copy, they often forget to include them in the URL, in the page title and in the alt and title tags of images.

Remember: it isn’t 1995 – don’t hide keywords behind images, in the same colour as your background, or by using display: none in your CSS!

2. Markup

Use header tags in a clear tree format – beginning with h1 at the top of your page, then following with h2 tags for subheaders, then h3 and so on. Search engines place more emphasis on header tags, as well as bold, italic and underlined text. It is also gives your pages a high level of readability.

3. Avoid duplicate content

While it’s obvious that you can’t use the same content on more than one page (or at least it should be!), duplicate content issues don’t end there. You may be displaying duplicate content if you can access your website, without the URL redirecting, at any of the following:

• http://www.mysite.com
• http://mysite.com
• http://www.mysite.com/index.php
• http://mysite.com/index.php

The same applies for sites in html. Basically, the search engine bots access your site at the above locations and deem them all to be unique sites. To work around this you need to install some rewrite rules using .htaccess. This can be tricky, and you can potentially pull down your whole site if you make a mistake.

Don’t know what a .htaccess file is or how to make one? The below probably isn’t for you! Check back for a dedicated .htaccess tutorial shortly!

Here are the two common .htaccess rewrites you require:

Redirect http:// to http://www.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect /index.html or /index.php to http://www.mysite.com

Don’t use both, only that which applies to your site (html or php!).

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

4. Interlink your content

Interlinking your site makes it easily accessible; meaning the search engines find and index more of your content and they do so more often. Link relevant articles or pages to others using the anchor text that you want to rank for. You can also make links bold to give them more relevance!

5. Funnel Page Rank

If you imagine page rank as water in the bucket that is your site, each link is a hole in that bucket! That means, you’re losing (or sharing) water – page rank! If you are linking to a site or resource that you do not want to share your page rank with, simply make the link NoFollow. Just as it sounds, it means that the search engine bots will not follow your link, and so will not pass on any page rank.

You can apply the same to your internal links also; a practice known as funneling page rank. Select the least important pages on your menu and make the links NoFollow by adding rel=”nofollow” in the link code. See below for an example -

a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mysite.com/unimportant-page/">
Unimportant Page

You should still have some links to these pages without a NoFollow attribute, but employing this on your main navigation can greatly improve the page rank on pages that you do deem important. Basically, if the unimportant holes in your bucket are plugged, more page rank flows to your other pages. Great!

Go forth, optimise!

Remember, this is just the beginning – the absolute basics of your site’s on-site optimisation, though still crucial to your campaign.

If you’ve noticed your rankings improving but you require more, call the pros! The Morning Copy team has years of experience working with sites in some of the most difficult niches online and consistently gain top results.