Your precious words. You know they’ve got to be right to attract the audience you want.You’ve slaved over them, carefully crafting each phrase. You finally hit “publish,” and what happens?

Nobody reads them. No comments, no tweets, no sharing on Facebook.

It’s enough to send a writer into deep depression, and wipe out motivation to keep producing great content. Think you need to spend another 10,000 hours perfecting your writing skills? Probably not.

Actually, the solution may be a lot easier than you expect. Writing less and styling your text so it’s easy to read could be all you need to do to attract and hold attention.

Today Archetype attended a conference about SEO ethics at Utah Valley University. Ash Buckles, President of SEO.com, spoke on black hat vs. white hat SEO and the respective techniques to avoid and participate in.

10. You Hired Your Nephew

Your nephew is a electronic wiz. He plays video games, accumulates 2,000 texts on his phone a month, knows how to use the remote for your entertainment system plus took a website class in high school. You’ve heard that he has created a website for SEO Utah or two and see an opportunity to save a few bucks. Sure, you can hire him for dirt cheap, but that’s about what you’ll end up with for your website. A few hundred dollars later, you find that the website he created has done more damage than good. You find yourself taking your URL off your business cards, stationary and email signatures. Worst of all you’re missing out on potential customers and profits.

A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a golf course… a landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to.

Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action.

Several times a week, we talk to clients about how to prepare and think about written content on the web. As web content writers, we have created pieces for a variety of situations from personal bios to company “About Us” pages. We’ve discovered that writing for the web is its own animal.

On this post, though I will still be discussing relevance you won’t get any more tips on how to increase your page relevance. Instead, I will be delving on another aspect of relevance, which is the that of your site’s content to the lives of your visitors.

Although SEO is primarily done to help boost rankings in SERPs and we can practice it by merely trying to (intelligently?) guess the search engines algorithms, this shortsighted approach to SEO is one of the reasons why many do not see that much effect with their SEO campaign. It is ALWAYS important to factor in every possible aspect that you practically can when it comes to your SEO strategy, and that includes the daily happenings in search engine users’ lives.

URLs that return 404 pages have always been a source of headache for webmasters. This is especially true for websites that have tons of pages, since the chances of getting 404 errors increase this way.

The good thing though is that tools like the “Crawl errors” page on Google Webmasters Tools exist to make it easier to track such pages. All you need to do to find all the URLs that return a 404 error when crawled by Googlebot is to click on the “Not Found” tab of the “Crawl errors” page.

The question now is what to do with these pages? Should you 301 redirect them all or should you just let them be?

Google’s bias for their own services has many people rethinking their SEO strategies. It even begs the question of whether SEO is still worth the effort.

Despite the seemingly disheartening future of SEO, I share the opinion of many who believe that SEO’s demise is nowhere near the future. What is happening is that we are seeing SEO as it evolves right before our eyes. Indeed, some so-called SEOs will probably flounder and fail, but it is only because they cannot adapt.

Google calls it user intent. About.com calls it “mindsets of search”. Whatever label you may put on it, the point is that search is all about the user.

I have already written a post about user intent and how it is the foundation of search. I did not, however, breakdown the different kinds of user intent, which the Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines (2011) spelled out for us.

Google classifies user intent into three categories:action intent (DO), information intent (KNOW), and navigation intent (GO). While the way Google determines user intent when they enter a search term is not really that important to us, we should still be paying attention to what WE intend to provide our users once they get to our websites. What kinds of users can we cater to? Which of their needs can we, or do we want to answer?

Google’s Quality Rating Program Guidelines makes it clear to us how Google’s raters view pages as they conduct manual reviews. The truth of the matter though, is that perhaps 99% of the pages that are indexed by Google would never even be the subject of manual reviews. The reason for this is that only the pages that make it to the top of Google’s SERPs, or those that are reported for non-adherence to Google’s guidelines (i.e. spam sites), get to be manually reviewed by raters. Does this mean though that you shouldn’t bother with the document’s content as an “in-between” site?