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SEO Technique: Optimizing through copy blocks

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 11, 2007 in Search Engine Optimization

I don’t often share specific SEO tips and techniques because their usefulness doesn’t last very long, they may not work for everyone, and people sometimes take my ideas and turn them into spam techniques. While I cannot stop anyone from scripting specific ideas, the search engines do look for emerging patterns in Web page optimization. The people who need to take that warning most to heart are the people who do it by hand.

On-page optimization can be done largely by feel or “by the numbers”. People who do it by the numbers tend to produce formulaic, clunky copy. I write plenty of formulaic, clunky copy myself but I don’t particularly like it. You can shoot the goose that lays the golden eggs simply by writing copy that is so uncompelling that no one who lands on a page answers your call to action.

Point 1: Design Copy In Blocks

This is the hardest concept for people to grasp, although it seems as plain as day to me. Every Web page can be divided into blocks or sections. Some people call them “zones” (and I used to) but advertising networks now use their own zone layouts and I’m not referring to those fabricated zone maps.

A copy block is any section of a Web page where the copy makes one point and only one point. If you write well then you break up your copy so that each paragraph makes only one point, each caption makes only one point, etc. The length of text is irrelevant. The meaning of the text is everything. If you have a lengthy section of text that makes multiple points, you need to break up your text (at least until you are ready to put the page back together).

Copy blocks appear in mastheads, navigational tables, margin columns, main body columns, and in footers. There is no right or wrong place for copy blocks. You should be able to list all the copy blocks in your basic Web template.

Point 2: Assign keywords by copy blocks

There is an old SEO myth that suggests you should optimize a Web page for no more than 3-5 phrases, and the fewer the better. That is just absolute nonsense. You want to optimize your Web page for as many expressions as you possibly can without destroying the page’s aesthetic and functionality.

Pages are relevant to every word that occurs on them (some exceptions occur but for this article we’ll assume there are none). Pages are also relevant to every possible combination of words they contain. Proximity, placement, rareness, emphasis, and repetition all help make pages more relevant to specific expressions.

Proximity refers to how close the words in an expression happen to be to each other. It also implies that order is important. A page that contains “these words as quoted” is more relevant to that quoted expression than a page that contains “quoted as words these”, but both pages are relevant to either expression.

Placement refers to your use of words in specific page elements: titles, URLs, Hx tags, ALT= attributes, outbound link anchor text, etc. Think of placement as a different way to emphasize a word’s value to a document.

Rareness refers to how rare a word is deemed to be with respect to the universal lexicon, the Web as a whole. If you use “canine” as often as “dog”, your page will be more relevant to “canine” because “dog” occurs in more Web documents. For example, in Google’s hidden Supplemental Index, some very common words apparently are not being index, whereas most rare words do seem to be.

Rareness also determines how large the base document set really is. A word found only in 1,000 documents is more likely to help your page be scored highly relevant for a query than a word found in 1,000,000 documents. Some people use repetition to compensate for light rareness.

Emphasis is exactly what it sounds like. However you make a word stand out on the page (by bolding, italicizing, “quoting”, or otherwise giving the word special emphasis), the more prominently featured a word is compared to other words on the page, the more relevant that page is likely to be for that word.

Repetition is the spammer’s tool but it is also the Best Practice that is most often used in natural large copy pages (like blog posts with comments and forum posts). A page that is highly relevant to a common word may have that word repeated many times. I have counted legitimate repetitions of words in the hundreds of occurrences on one page.

Just because a word is used on a page 100 times does not mean it is spam. If you write a blog post and 100 people post lengthy comments, using your name at the top of each comment, your name will occur on the page at least 100 times. That’s natural. It can also be faked, so don’t assume that you have a template for spam in my example.

Point 3: Scoring for relevance

Each search engine decides for itself which of the above factors it will score for relevance. Each search engine decides for itself how each factor will be scored. You cannot affect that relevance scoring algorithm. That is sadly one of the most difficult lessons people to learn in this business.

You cannot second-guess a search engine but you can devise your own scoring system. You can use that scoring system to teach yourself to write pretty good copy that is highly optimized for many expressions.

Most people assume their relevance scores are driven by three primary factors: page titles, page URLs, and inbound link anchor text. Of those three factors, you can only rely on inbound link anchor text for heavy repetition. However, if you focus on the other on-page factors, you will find that repetition dove-tails nicely with copy blocks.

You should score each of your copy blocks for relevance to each block’s targeted expression. Each block can only target one expression optimally. It doesn’t matter how your score your copy block optimization as long as you are consistent. This scoring is for your own use. It’s not a predictor of how a search engine will evaluate the copy.

By looking at the mechanics of calculating relevance scores you’ll see how to write optimal copy for each block. You can, if you wish, dedicate more than one block of text to a specific expression, but you can also target many different expressions.

Point 4: Evaluating page relevance

Most queries are resolved on the basis of relevance scores. Although the search engines can and do weight results by “importance”, it has been shown time and time again that so-called “highly important” pages can be outranked in search results by less important pages.

Your objective in using your own page relevance scoring algorithm is to help you improve your writing skill. It’s like training with a wooden sword before you switch to a metal swod. The more you practice writing highly relevant copy, the more you create highly relevant copy. As you become comfortable with writing highly relevant copy, you can focus on other aspects of your writing, such as embedding appropriate calls to action, voice, tone, etc.

This methodology is not a standaloine technique that helps you achieve a high ranking quickly. This is a training method to help you improve your copy writing skill. You want to intuitively write highly relevant copy that generates many conversions (regardless of how you measure conversions).

I can say more about copy blocks but I think I’ll leave the rest for a later post.