Keyword research and selection is an important part of SEO copywriting. While keywords/phrases shouldn’t be so important that you miss out on writing copy that interests and engages your readers, optimizing your copy using thorough keyword research does have its benefits.

1) Find a keyword selection tool

A keyword selection tool will help you find the best keyword selections for a specific word or phrase. Enter a word or phrase in the search engine and it will bring up several of the most popular keyword/phrase results to choose from. Overture, Word Tracker and Keyword Discovery are popular keyword tracking tools.

2) Go for low competition in your keyword research

When you are launching a website you are in competition with thousands of other websites that are already established. Keyword research can help. When using a search engine tool, choose appropriate keywords with the lowest competition level. These keywords/phrases will help you get higher search engine rankings faster.

3) Narrowing down your keyword choices

After researching keywords, you might end up with hundreds of possibilities. You’ll need to narrow down your choices to the ones that can provide the fastest search engine results and return on investment. Again, these will be the keywords with the lowest competition levels with the highest searched phrases.

Technorati Tags: SEO, seo copywriting, writing for the web, Allison Nazarian, web copy, search engine marketing, keyword research

I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with Yvonne Perry of Writers in the Sky Creative Writing Services and wanted to share some of what we discussed.

What inspired or motivated you to write this new eBook to help authors with online book promotion?

I’m always looking for ways to re-purpose my writing and time spent in marketing research. If I write a media release, it will probably be refashioned into an article or whittled down into a blog post. Book Marketing in the Digital Age Online Promotion Made Easy is a compilation of the material I crammed into an hour-long lecture I gave at Nashville Writers Meetup Group when I presented to the group earlier this year, plus everything I presented in a three-hour intensive workshop at the Tennessee Writers Alliance 3rd Annual Conference; and it includes the most recent research I’ve done on SEO and social marketing.

What is the most effective book marketing tool on the Internet?

Had you asked me that one year ago, I would have said blogging, and while that is still somewhat true, I have to admit that social networking is the best tool for helping authors promote their books online.

Social networking includes interacting or socializing with a number of people in a public chat-like setting except there is no live chat room. It retains the flavor of an email going back and forth the dialog ending at any time but a message being delivered. I’m referring to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Ning, Yahoo groups, and such online places where people share friendship and information. Twitter only allows 140 characters per post, so writers have to learn to be concise. That’s a good exercise to practice when one needs to tighten their writing.

Yvonne launched an e-book that targets getting visitors to your site and other great tools to accelerate on-line book promotions. I have found it to be an invaluable tool and believe you will as well. You can purchase the e-book here. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: promoting an e-book, seo, seo copywriting, search engine marketing, e-book marketing, Yvonne Perry, Allison Nazarian, social network, social media

Mistake # 1: No-no Navigation

Navigation, in fact, must be so easy that visitors to your site shouldn’t even have to think about it. Your website navigation should immediately let someone know:

• Where they are,
• Where they’ve been,
• Where they can go next,
• How to get in touch with you, and
• Where the home page is.

Mistake # 2: Putting existing print on your website.

No, no, no. Do not take your brochure, product catalog, employee manual, whatever and simply put it on-line. Printed materials don’t work on-line; they’re two totally different species. Wouldn’t you be annoyed if you read a brochure, had your interest piqued, logged on to the site and found the exact same copy there? I would…and am quite often!

Mistake # 3: Believing people care about you personally and your website.

In the final analysis, nobody truly cares about your site. That sounds horrible, but it’s true. What people want is a solution. They want their problems solved and they want to figure out in as few seconds as possible whether you’re the one to do it for them.

In the last post, we talked about how a successful marketing strategy is centered on content. Determining exactly what content to focus on is 100% dependent upon your target audience.

A few questions to ask yourself before mobilizing your next marketing plan,

1. Who is my target audience and ideal client?
2. What motivates this ideal client?
3. What problems do they have?
4. How can I solve their problems?
5. What content will be most compelling to them?

Once you have answered these questions and determined exactly what content to focus on, you then want to deliver a call to action for your ideal client. Explicitly call them to action so that they are not left wondering what they should do next. Keep their attention focused on you and how to proceed, so that they don’t feel they need to look any further in the direction of your competition.

Just a few years ago, SEO copywriting wasn’t something anyone even knew they were looking for. As far as Get It In Writing, this certainly wasn’t something we even knew we could (or should) offer.

But all that has changed. Now, I would say that 1 or 2 out of every 3 inquiries we get is SEO-related, from web copywriting to blog ghostwriting to SEO articles to optimized press releases. And understandably – I mean, who isn’t trying to crack the Google code and catapult themselves and their business to the top of the search engine pages??

The desire is where the similarities end, though. Everyone wants great rankings, but most still don’t understand how you get there. There are many different components and moving parts to the picture. As far as the SEO copywriting portion, which is my company’s expertise, I believe it is less mystery and more technique and realism.

Most people do not (please don’t be offended) know how to write good, effective SEO copy – they just don’t. Those who do know that they need to cater to two audiences – their target customers AND the search engines – within the same copy and do it so well that both groups think it’s directed right at them.

There’s so much more to SEO copywriting than these few explanatory sentences. (By the way check out this blog entry on an amazing SEO success we recently had with a L.A.-based attorney client.) But here’s what you need to know about SEO copywriting: it’s very powerful when done right, most people are not experts at it and, when someone tells you they can deliver an SEO article or web page for a few dollars, chances are you will get what you paid for (not much).

Chances are if you are reading this you have heard of SEO. You may even know that the letters SEO stand for Search Engine Optimization. More likely than not, however, you aren’t 100 percent sure what exactly SEO is.

SEO is a means, actually an expertise and an entire industry based around, getting high rankings in search engines such as Google and Yahoo! so that potential customers searching for your products or services are more likely to find you, visit your website and, it follows, purchase what you are selling.

Here’s an example I am intimately familiar with: You go to Google and enter “SEO copywriting” as your search terms into the box at the top of the search engine page. The companies listed on that first page of Google are those you are most likely to visit if SEO copywriting is indeed a service you seek.

In theory, the better optimized your site, the higher it will appear in the search engine results for relevant terms and phrases. Now I say “in theory” because in many, many businesses there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands and maybe even millions of other businesses vying for those coveted positions as well.

It’s a tough thing, because only one company is at the top of Google for any given term, and only about 10 are on Page 1. That’s it. So how can a company guarantee first page placement? I have no idea. I tell clients (and potential clients) that any SEO company that is guaranteeing them anything is just not being realistic.

So now you know, in a nutshell or a nutshell, what SEO is…right?

I am floored by an amazing success my client, Larry Zerner, a Los Angeles Entertainment Attorney, experienced this week. Along with Teri Tucker, a great web designer from T&I Grafix , we created a new site at http://www.zernerlaw.com/

Larry’s goal, like so many others out there, was to raise his search engine rankings, Google in particular. [This is what is referred to as "organic" or "natural" search engine rankings, as opposed to "paid inclusion" which includes Pay Per Click (PPC).] As a solo practitioner, Larry wanted to maximize his web presence (who among us doesn’t?). What we want and what we may get aren’t always the same, right?

Now this is no exaggeration, nor is it a promise of what could happen to you and it is certainly not a guarantee, but here is what happened:

Within 24 – 48 hours of the new ZernerLaw site going live, Larry’s firm, which previously had had little to no search engine presence whatsoever, was on the first page of Google, and in some cases in one of the three top positions, for a slew of terms he had wanted to rank for for years, including but not limited to: Los Angeles Copyright Attorney, Los Angeles Entertainment Attorney, Los Angeles Copyright Infringement Attorney, Hollywood Entertainment Attorney and Copyright Infringement Lawyer Los Angeles.

Again, all results differ based on a million different factors BUT this is a HUGE testament to the fact that GOOD SEO COPYWRITING WORKS. (And notice I didn’t say “SEO Copywriting” – I said “GOOD SEO COPYWRITING.”).

There is a big difference.