Let’s take a look at four examples of copy blocks.
PageRank flow
PageRank flow You determine PageRank flow through your internal links. Think of your Web site as a complex set of boxes with holes them. The boxes are all attached to each other in an Escher-like combination. Your PageRank is water and you pour the water into the top box. You should be able to see the PageRank flow from box to box. If you dissassemble the collection of boxes, any dry boxes you find are isolated or orphaned, or they just don’t have enough connecting holes pointing to them.
Find Supplemental Pages
Find Supplemental Pages You need to find supplemental pages on your Web site because Google won’t allow them to rank well for relevant queries. Although a number of methods to “find supplemental pages” have been proposed by people around the Web, Google has not sanctioned them and judging by Google’s past behavior it seems unwise to me for people to share ideas about how to find supplemental pages. Google turns to figure out ways to turn off the unsupported query formats or otherwise make them unusable.
SEO theory that links to posts inside your blog are more important than links to your home page
SEO theory that links to posts inside your blog are more important than links to your home page There are a lot of blog spam posts that include the expression “SEO theory that links to posts inside your blog are more important than links to your home page”. These spam posts are part of a so-called “SEO meme” where bloggers deep-link to other bloggers’ posts. Whomever came up with the SEO theory that links to posts inside your blog are more important than links to your home page doesn’t understand how search engines look at blogs and doesn’t understand how freshness is being evaluated. Any link is a good link as long as it is sincerely given.
Best internal link structure
Best internal link structure The best internal link structure for your Web site is completely natural and doesn’t seek to influence search engine evaluatons beyond telling the search engines which pages are the most important pages on your site. If you are looking for the “best internal link structure” to use on a Web site, you want to stop and put yourself into the shoes of the search engine programmer who has to parse your link code, you want to stop and put yourself into the shoes of the lost surfer who wants to find specific information, and you want to stop and put yourself in front of a mirror and see how you look.
Copy block SEO analysis
These example copy blocks are fairly uniform in length, but they don’t have to be. You can create one huge long block of text for a copy block. Or your copy block can be one sentence long. You can create a copy block that looks like a floater in a magazine article:
That floater is an advertisement, plain and simple. It also happens to be an endorsement. It also happens to be a block of copy that makes an implied point (several, actually). It’s an illustration. It’s a blatant, self-promotional plug. It’s a link that may or may not pass anchor text. It’s a text segment that makes this particular blog post relevant to 1st Query and “SEO services” (and “SEO services” is a highly competitive query so the chances of this blog post ranking well for SEO services are not very good, even if I repeatedly say SEO services, “SEO services”, and SEO services).
The number of copy blocks you include on a Web page doesn’t matter. You can use 100 blocks or you can use 1 block. There is no right number nor even a best number of copy blocks. The number of copy blocks may vary over time.
We can tie our four copy blocks together (in a logical way) by adding another copy block that recaps their points. So we can say that the best internal link structure for a Web site is not concerned with PageRank flow because when you find supplemental pages on your Web site you can simply add more links to those pages from other pages on your site to help pull those pages into Google’s Main Web index. You don’t help one page by choking off another page. You don’t fix internal link structure by breaking internal link structure. Nor can you compensate for weak internal structure by subscribing to the SEO theory that links to posts inside your blog are more important than links to your home page.
Copy block optimization teaches you to discipline and pace yourself so that you construct page copy effectively. It doesn’t provide any magic SEO formula success. Successful page optimization comes from making your point clearly, cleanly, and no more often or emphatically than you need to in order to show people what you want to say. Copy block optimizaton helps you organize your content and your thoughts. It gives you the ability to work independently of HTML code and template restrictions.
Copy block optimization focuses on what the block of text actually says and how it makes its point. Copy block optimizaton is not concerned with keyword density or even keyword frequency. You can optimize a page for as many as 100 keywords. There is no reason not to because a page is relevant to every word and every possible expression it contains.
Then again, if you’re having trouble optimizing for one term you may feel you have no hope of optimizing for 10. But quite often it’s easier to optimize for 10 expressions hardly anyone searches for instead of 1 expression that everyone searches for. If you get nearly as much traffic from the long tail of search as you would like to get from the head, being lost in the clutter for popular keyword expressions is not nearly as painful as when you get no traffic at all. Copy block optimization liberates you from the slavery of 1-keyword metrics.
By looking at a page in its component parts, you have more freedom to be inventive and creative than if you just plod through the drudgery of creating a page that is relevant to one expression. In reality it is impossible to optimize a page for just one expression. You may only consciously be optimizing your pages for a small number of expressions but the more indexable text you add to those pages the more expressions each page becomes relevant for.
You cannot cage the hounds of relevance but you can unleash them and let them roam freely through the forest of query expressions. If you choose your hunting grounds carefully your hounds will track down the visitors you want. Setting the metaphor aside, we can say that if you strive to optimize at the copy block level but also make your pages coherent and fairly uniform with respect to a given concept, you’ll find you build improved relevance into your copy without having to rely on SEO formulas.
Formulaic SEO locks you into the past. Writing copy should be very fluid and natural. You should not constrain yourself with the expectation that your copy conform to some specific style or format.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
tinkerbellchime 10.11.07 at 11:33 pm
I appreciate this SEO series on writing for blogs and websites. Breaking up a web page into blocks makes sense in newsletters and online magazines, too. I’m finding that although I have very little text on my pages (due to audience) I can still get visits because most of the queries are three to four words long. Unfortunately, I think that with less text per page, I’m going to always be forced to create more pages to make up for less visits per page due to the sparse amount of text. Unlike most SEO strategies, this isn’t because of ads, which I have none, but just the nature and objective of the site. More photos, but less text. Believe me, I wish it were the other way around.
You have long posts, which makes sense for a blog about search engine theories, but are you getting a lot of visitors that were directed (misdirected?) to your site for random words and subjects that don’t make sense given the subject of your blog posts? What I mean is that with more words there are more word combos. And if there are more possible word combos per page than wouldn’t it be more difficult for Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines to correctly target the query to a relevant page or site? On the other hand, maybe it’s the opposite and the more “on topic” text you have the easier it is for the search engines to figure out what the page is about. I’m going to guess that you generally think that in most situations more text, that is more copy, helps companies rank higher in the SERPS.
Michael Martinez 10.12.07 at 8:20 am
tinkerbellchime: “Unfortunately, I think that with less text per page, I’m going to always be forced to create more pages to make up for less visits per page due to the sparse amount of text.”
Michael: It’s not clear to me if you’re referring to blog posts specifically or something else. Blog posts and news articles tend to “age” in the search indexes differently from static Web pages (I think forum posts do, too). Google, in particular, has done a lot of research about determining “freshness” and evaluating age.
In general, my feeling is that a blog or news site needs to be fairly productive in order to maintain search visibility, whereas a static content site doesn’t necessarily have to — except in that you obtain more visibility with more content.
tinkerbellchime: “You have long posts, which makes sense for a blog about search engine theories, but are you getting a lot of visitors that were directed (misdirected?) to your site for random words and subjects that don’t make sense given the subject of your blog posts?”
Michael: According to Google Analytics, nearly 900 query expressions brought traffic to this blog in September 2007. Just eyeballing the referral report, it appears to me that better than 90% of those visits were driven by queries directly related and relevant to the content on this blog.
The largest closely related set of queries seem to relate to links, nofollow, and PageRank. There are many very specific “SEO” queries that just cover the map as well.
tinkerbellchime: “And if there are more possible word combos per page than wouldn’t it be more difficult for Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines to correctly target the query to a relevant page or site?”
Michael: I may criticize and abuse all of the search engines frequently for not being perfect, but they do a pretty amazing job of matching up queries to content. Fewer than 1% of the queries that drive traffic to SEO-Theory have any link anchor text (internal or external) associated with the content on this blog.
THAT is what the power of content can do in the hands of an experienced SEO who does not limp along on link anchor text-based strategies. There is a relatively short segment in the long tail of search where a lot of very similar queries fall together, and for which almost no one optimizes.
tinkerbellchime 10.13.07 at 8:00 am
Thanks for your reply to my comments: To clarify things as regards your first reply, I was talking about my actual static website pages, not my blog. My blog is on my website, which I feel is an advantage that indirectly helps the site, but in my case the blog is not the main attraction–the website is.
What I should have explained in my post is that unlike my blog, my website has a sparse amount of text due to the objective of the site–to teach English to beginning learners with pictures. Since my visitors don’t speak much English, I can’t put too much text on the static website pages. Many of my website pages only have about 9 short sentences on them. And yes, they are in copy blocks. I also use a lot of bullet points and white space within each block of text.
So, the problem is that with little text per page, I’m unable to get the ‘traction’ that I would otherwise be able to get. Finally, here’s my question: In the case of a website like mine–one that legitimately requires lots of photos with little text and almost no variations on the few words that it does use–will I need to focus on getting links to compensate for this situation?
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