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.

Impatient searchers

Jakob Nielson’s seminal web usability study from 1997 showed that 79% of web users scan rather than read.

Think about how you use the web. You’re in search of information. And if you don’t find it on the page you’re visiting, you click away and look elsewhere.

The web is a “lean forward and participate” medium. Television, by contrast, is a “lean back and let it wash over me” medium.

What can you do to engage your readers so they lean into your content, stay on your pages and interact with your information?

Make it snappy

To write successfully for the web, you need to forget some of what you learned in English composition class.

Accept that people scan web pages rather than reading them in detail, and work with this reality rather than fighting it.

If you want to cover a complex topic, consider breaking it into a series of posts. It’s a great way to keep people coming back for more, and your reader will find it easier to digest your content if they get it in portion-controlled sizes.

Structure your paragraphs in the inverted pyramid style. This means stating your conclusion first, then supporting it with the sentences that follow. This helps scanners to move from point to point, and decide where they’d like to dive in deeper.

Once you’ve done that, use the following easy design techniques to make your content much more reader-friendly. It takes just a few minutes to turn a post from an overwhelming mass of gray text to something that engages the reader and pulls her in.

1. Embrace the line break

There are few easier ways to make your content more readable. Even complex content can be made much more reader-friendly with the simple introduction of lots of white space. Feature one idea per paragraph, and keep them short — three or four sentences at most.

And try writing some paragraphs with one sentence only.

2. Break up your content with compelling subheads

One technique taught here at Copyblogger is to write your headline and subheads first.

A strong headline (and therefore a strong premise) is vital to getting readers to come check you out in the first place. And solid subheads keep the reader engaged, acting as “mini headlines” to keep them moving through the rest of your content.

Make your subheads intriguing, but informative, too. Web readers have well-honed BS meters, so don’t exaggerate or you’ll lose credibility. “Compelling” is not the same as “hypey.”

Once you’ve written your subheads, review them to see what your reader/scanner will understand if he or she reads only that part of your article. Is there a compelling story? Will they get the gist of your information?

3. Use bulleted lists

• They create fascinations your readers can’t resist
• They’re an easily-scannable way to present multiple points
• They look different from the rest of your text, so they provide a visual break for your reader

4. Use deep captions.

Studies have shown that image captions are consistently some of the most-read copy on a page. Try pairing a strong image with a “deep caption.”

Deep captions are two to three sentences long. That’s long enough to intrigue your reader to dig in to your whole article.

5. Add highly relevant links

Internal links back to your own cornerstone content will keep people on your site and reading your best material.

External links demonstrate that you’ve researched the topic and want to highlight other experts.

Good content uses both to expand your reader’s understanding and add value.

Another advantage of internal links is they make it less frustrating when some dirtbag scrapes your content (cuts and pastes it to their own site without attribution).

6. Use strategic formatting

Add emphasis to your web copy by bolding important concepts. You reader will be able to scan through and pick out the most important information at a glance.

Don’t highlight everything (which would have the same effect as highlighting nothing). Instead, emphasize the key points so the scanner can quickly pick them out.

7. Harness the power of numbers

Think those numbered list posts are tired? Think again. Numbers are an incredibly effective way to both capture attention and to keep the reader oriented.

You can often make a post more compelling just by numbering your main points. Give it a try.

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.

He first defined what the search engines consider to be black hat tactics. Black hat SEO tactics include website cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text, link farms and stealing content from other websites. He cited examples of major corporations that have been impacted negatively in the search engines and how their rankings have especially struggled on Google. JCPenny, Forbes, Overstock and BMW were all sites that Google had devalued in the past year due to the use of paid links, a popular black hat tactic. Many of the sites that were effected by Google’s devaluation took 30-90 days to bounce back to their original keyword rankings! On the other hand, there are many ways a website’s SEO can participate in white hat SEO. Some great examples of white hat best practices are creating unique content for your website, implementing keyword targeted pages titles, meta descriptions and header tags as well as developing a well managed social media presence.

There are many white hat SEO techniques that can be implemented but these are some of the bigger ones that should be addressed. Ash cited Wikipedia as a site that is going about SEO the right way. He pointed out that they have incredible internal linking between articles and thousands of external back links that make them an authority for many Google search queries. In fact, Wikipedia’s approach has worked so well for them that they rank for 92% of 100 of the most searched terms on Google according to Matt Tuens, CEO at AcuVox.

Ethical SEO Takeaways

- Black hat SEO might work in the short term, but your site will definitely be burned in the long run.

- Search engines provide SEO guidelines/expectations, and as Greg Shuey, VP of Client Services at SEO.com, tweeted:

- As SEO trends, keep your self educated in what will harm your client’s sites and what what will add SEO value. Be aware that what might have worked last year may not now.

You can find Ash Buckles’ full presentation in its entirety here: goo.gl/ShW44

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 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.

9. You Outsourced Your Work to a Near-Third-World-Country

Isn’t it just so tempting to hire a programmer or designer outside of the country? I once failed to listen to the advice of other professionals on a personal project of mine and paid dearly for it. If you think communication is important in business, be ready to try doing business with a major disadvantage if you choose to do a website this way. If you are lucky to find someone that does speak enough English so you can understand each other, be ready to make a lot of phone calls at midnight to carry on this communication. And finally, you’ll learn like I have and many of my colleagues that you’ll be promised professionalism and competency and receive neither. The many stories I have heard, mine included, these business arrangements typically end in legal threats and unsatisfactory or unfinished work.

8. You Purchased a Template and Did it Yourself.

By every right you are the leading expert of your business. You figure, “why spend money when I am the best qualified to present the business to my clients?” So you find a neat looking template and try to build the site yourself. In all honesty, there is truth behind the premise, but your execution was your failure. A good designer will know how to leverage you as the expert of your business in creating an effective design. Websites just seem so simple, but there are entire degrees in college, volumes of books and other reading materials, plus years of application that are needed to make something so simple to be so effective. Look at the ingenuity of Apple Computers, there is a reason why so few people have been able to match their prowess of simple design.

7. Your Website Looks Like it was Made in the 80′s or 90′s (or it was)

If you don’t take your business seriously, how can you expect your clients to do the same. Your visitors are looking for the latest and greatest products or services. In short, get with it, or fail.

6. You Created a Splash Page or Intro (“click to enter”)

There are many reasons why people choose to have a splash page and none have been effective thus far in doing so. Splash pages and intro animations end up just becoming an annoyance to your visitors, especially if they come to your website more than once.

5. You Only Have One Page.

Usually in this case you have a website because you were told you needed a website. Not only is this tactic looked down upon by your users, but search engines as well. Create something of value for your visitors, design a strategy to get them to build your revenue. A one page site says, “I only did this because I had to.” If you only have one page, your site is a failure.

4. Your Site Catches No Interest

If your site can’t create interest in your product or services, your website will lose to the competition. Focus your attention on benefits, not features. Create page titles that make your audience want to learn more. Show how the application of your product or service will change your audiences’ lives in some positive way. Design some sort of mystery that needs investigating on your site. Build your customers interest or fail.

3. You Only Hired a Web Designer/Developer.

Whats the problem with this picture: You build a state of the art sports arena, its beautiful, has many sought out commodities and was built in Antarctica. You may ask, “What’s the point of a sports arena if you aren’t going to have anyone use it?” A silly scenario, but a common pitfall for many websites out on the Internet, because they are or have a professionally made website with no budget for marketing. When budgeting out your website, make sure to appropriate sufficient funds to attract an audience to it. Use the following flexible rule of thumb for a website budget: a quarter of your budget for design and branding, a quarter for development, a quarter for public relations and SEO, and a quarter for advertising.

2. Your Website is Too Generic

A good looking website and a well branded website are two very different things. A good looking website might impress your audience but a well branded website will influence your audience to a profitable action. If you’re running a business, the latter is the smarter choice. Every aspect of your website should be communicating the same message, from your design, to your logo, to font, text and style. Keeping these aspects of your website consistent will create a stronger and more influential brand.

1. You Didn’t Monetize Your Site

Sometimes people get so caught up in making a website that they forget the whole reason why they made it in the first place. If you didn’t make your website obvious and easy for your visitors to make profitable actions, you’ve made it that much harder for your website to succeed. Before any design and development, you must first make a plan of how and what your website needs so your website is productive and successful. When your visitors come to your site, it should be designed in such a way that promotes your visitors to specific and measurable action. Every aspect of your site should be helping to accomplish your predetermined objectives, because without keeping this end goal in mind your visitors won’t fulfill those desired objectives.

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.

Here are a few examples of ways that landing pages are used with various traffic sources:

• Traffic is sent from a pay per click (PPC) search marketing campaign (such as Google AdWords) to multiple landing pages optimized to correspond with the keywords the searcher used.
• Traffic is sent from a banner ad or sponsorship graphic to a landing page specifically designed to address that target audience.
• Traffic is sent from a link in an email to a landing page designed to prompt a purchase.
• Traffic is sent from a blog post or sidebar link to a landing page that pre-sells affiliate products or encourages an opt-in to a sub-list.
• The page you’re currently reading is a content landing page designed to organize many related pages around an overall theme.

Landing Pages Turn Traffic Into Money

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.

We tell my clients:

• People scan.
• They don’t read.
• News cycles are short.
• Tweets teach us to say what we mean in 140 characters.
• You may not even be reading this as you scan this page for something you’re really interested in.

You get the idea. Writing for the web takes some strategy about how words become visual cues.

Our advice?

• Read the article.
• Acquire a new style of writing.

Outcome?

You will be more successful at communicating with People Who Scan (which is most of us these days on the web).

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. That may sound a little crazy since it is impossible to know everything that goes on with one persons life let alone all your target audience, the majority of whom you don’t even know personally. Well it is if you look at it that way but if you only look at it in terms of the general events that you know will be impacting or are currently affecting them then it makes more sense.

A perfect example would be a future post on SEO and savings (watch out for my next post ^_^). With all the troubled economy nowadays you can be pretty sure that lots of people are trying to find ways to cut on spending. It shouldn’t be a surprise to find more people now searching more for “cheap SEO”, “budget SEO”, “affordable quality SEO”, etc. Take advantage of this fact and offer solutions (promos for SEOs and informative posts for SEO blogs).

Another simple example would be industry events. Of course people within your industry will already know about upcoming events but it is still a good idea to mention big events, even if just in passing. It will not only show that you are aware of what’s going on but visitors who might have overlooked it or forgot about it will be happy to be informed. Doing a blow-by-blow of the event is also recommended but only if you really attended it and there’s new and interesting information to convey. Otherwise stick to summarising stuff and don’t forget to link to your sources.

Remember it is very important to stay relevant. Your page may rank really well for your targeted keywords but if people have started searching for other keywords then you’ll still end up with no one visiting your site.

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?

Obviously, the second option does not make sense. The fact that 404 pages are listed under crawl ERRORs signifies that things must be set to right. However, redirecting all the URLs that return 404 pages is also not the way to go, especially if you have thousands of URLs with such a problem. Instead what you should do is determine which of the URLs needs redirecting, and which you can just ignore.

Before going into detail as to which pages you definitely should redirect, I just want to make it clear that URLs that keep returning the 404 error when crawled by Googlebot will eventually be considered dead by Google and so not be crawled anymore. So while you’ll still see the URLs you don’t really care about still appearing on the “Crawl errors” page, you can just disregard them until they are no longer crawled by Googlebot.

As for the other URLS, the ones that you should pay attention to and redirect, how do you figure out what those URLs are?

I have already written about 404 Pages around two years ago, and my advice still remains the same. 404 Pages only when you get substantial traffic from that page, that page get inbound links from important sources, or is a typo of an important URL. As Google says, “If your 404 page is indexing or getting links from other sites, redirect it,” and if not, just let it 404.

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.

So how do you adapt in this changing SEO climate?

Well it seems that the biggest areas that many SEOs should work on is the social media aspect. We know how big social media has become, but it’s nowhere near reached the threshold. In fact, its effects on the online community will only increase, including its effects on search. It is plain to see that search is becoming more social, and not only because search engines like Google are pushing for it. Contrary to that, it is actually Google that’s having to adapt to make the most of people’s increasing preference and dependence on the online social circles.

Lately, I have written more about social media and the different ways you can incorporate them to your overall SEO strategies. I suggest that start reading more about the topic, that is if you want to be one of those that want to survive the changing SEO landscape. Forget the line between SEO and social media marketing, and make sure you learn how to integrate the two approaches for a more effective SEO campaign.

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?

Ideally, a page should have different content elements that would address each of the three user intent. However, it is important that the page also focuses on primarily addressing one of the user intents. For example, an online store obviously caters primarily to users with the action intent of purchasing a product in mind. This means that while having a good site structure that will make it easy for users to go to another page when needed, thus answering the needs of users that land there whose real intent is to navigate and browse through the different pages of the site, the page should primarily be designed to encourage user to buy the product. The content that should stand out then, aside from information about the product,  are elements like the checkout button, menus for easy colour and size selection, and links to related or similar products that the shopper might be interested in buying.

On the other hand, if you have a blog, then your primary focus is to answer the needs of users who fall under the information intent category. Again, it is better if you also have actionable elements like the subscription/RSS feed button, social sharing buttons, downloadable content, polls, and such to make the blog multi-dimensional. However, you have to ensure in this case that you always have informative content that caters to your audience’s specific needs. I find it a good idea in the case of informative sites, such as blogs, to refer to About.com’s study on the mindsets of search, since the three mindsets (i.e. Answer Me, Educate Me, Inspire Me) discussed will guide you into deciding how to present information so as to make it more authoritative, relevant, and interesting to users with different mindsets. Should you provide short informative snippets on general topics or should you provide in-depth articles on the same topic and have an expert/professional on the field write it? Knowing the mindset of your target audience will help you figure these things out so that you can come up with a better concept for a new website, or overhaul an existing site if need be.

Last but not least, you should realise that ALL users want to have an easy time navigating a website. That means that a good site architecture and alternative ways for site navigation are imperative. However, there are users that have navigation as their primary intent upon landing on a page. Examples of these users are those that look for the homepage of a website (i.e. company site such as Apple.com) with the intention of looking for a more specific page on that site (i.e. iOS 5 page). While you might wonder why they simply didn’t enter the search term “iOS 5” instead of “Apple”, you should realise that people go about search in different ways, and there are people who just prefer to do it this way. Sometimes users also do not know the exact search term but have an idea of where to look for information about it. In this case they might not know the term iOS5, but only know that they want to upgrade their iPhone to the new OS they’ve heard mentioned by a friend. Because of such users, you need to make sure that your homepage does indeed have a very clear and easy way for users who land there to go from page to page. At the least, if they lose their way once they get to subpages, it should be easy for them to go back to the homepage and start searching once again. If you don’t have a clear navigation structure, you can bet that your bounce rates will be high despite good content.

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?

Of course not! Common sense tells us that the guidelines that map the road for manual raters in determining a quality site indicate the same principles that guide Google’s search developers as they continually make changes in the search algorithm in an effort to provide better search results. Ideally what Google wants to happen is for their algorithm to be good enough so that all of the results returned for each search query will be the most relevant ones, without having to depend on manual reviews to ensure that would be the case. In the meantime though, since the algorithm has not yet perfected (nor will it likely ever be able to do so) the “art” of determining relevancy, Google has to depend on manual reviewers to ensure that at least the top results returned will indeed be what the users are looking for.

So, just what is it that we can learn from the raters’ guidelines that we can directly apply to our own SEO efforts today?

The most important lessons we can take away from the document is summed up in the purpose of statement, “Good search engines give results that are HELPFUL FOR USERS in their specific LANGUAGE and LOCATION.” {Emphasis are mine.}

The helpfulness of the search results to the users refers to its relevance. However, in order to determine the relevance or helpfulness of a page’s content , it is important for the raters (and before them the algorithm) to be able to determine the intent behind the query. This includes asking what it is exactly the user is asking for, a question that is especially hard to answer when search terms have multiple meanings. As webmasters, the take away from this is simple, we need to give search engines as much contextual information as we can to help them figure out the specific meaning of the content. This means using keywords and phrases in its various forms and being as specific as possible, not only in your phraseology but also in the use of images. I’ll delve on this topic more in succeeding posts.

Intent also refers to what the user aims to do once they land on a page. As webmasters, you should also know what YOU want your users to do once they get on the page. Is the page primarily a way to get information out to your users, or is the aim to make a sale? Structuring each page so that it is clear to both search engines and users what they can get out of that page will help search engines funnel queries so that users that do land on your will be the kind of users that you are indeed targeting.

Language and location are also key in determining the intent of a query. This makes sense because the meaning of words can vary greatly depending on both factors. An example given in the guidelines is the search term “football”, which would refer to American football the United States, but would refer to soccer in most other places in the world. Simply knowing the nuances of the language of your target users for your sites will automatically help you in knowing ensuring the content indeed contains the “right” keywords.

In short, search is all about USER INTENT. You can’t make user happy if you don’t know what it is they want exactly. So the main take away is to determine what it is your target users want, put in content that would make them happy, structure your site to make sure Google can decipher that it contains the specific information your users are looking for, and only then should you focus on the other SEO strategies. Without this foundation, your site is no better than most sites, which means it’s unlikely you’ll ever make it to the Internet A-list. And even if you do make to the top of SERPs, it’s only a matter of time before manual raters “decide” to demote your page for non-relevance. Get your foundation right if you want to not just get to the top, but also stay there.