The Ocean Agency

The series continues with what SEO companies can learn from the man I consider the cornerstone of almost all great writing (since his time): Mr. Samuel Clemens, better known to the literary world as Mark Twain.

Known by Faulkner as the “father of American literature,” Twain offers some great advice on writing (or, more specifically, not writing adjectives), the creative process and editing.

Search engine optimization is extremely important for your business as 95% of all site traffic from search engines comes from page one results (icrossing).

While the importance of being on page one for your business has not changed, social media has shaken up how you get there. As social networking has increased, search engines are forced to pay attention to tweets, (public) facebook updates, forum discussions, Youtube videos etc. The list goes on.

Via

In Today’s web, Social media matters to the search engines,  which makes optimizing your businesses’ social media presence a top priority. Recently, Brian Solis wrote a fascinating article about optimizing your social media presence in order to improve your search engine positioning.

25% of search results, for the world’s top 20 brands link to user generated content (Socialnomics July, 2009).  This number is bound to get higher as social network interaction increases.

Facebook has just surpassed Google as the number one traffic driver on the web.

From these statistics it would be easy to paint a portrait of a world where Facebook could eat the entire web, and SERP is completely determined by social content. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves — Posting items about your business to Facebook and Twitter everyday is not enough to rank well on search engines, or communicate your message to your target audience.

Good content that encourages interaction and sharing is now more important that ever to your search engine ranking position.  Spending time crafting resourceful content that is engaging and shareable, combined with patience, hard work, and clean coding will get you to the top of the search engines.

Curating content, both your own, and content that offers value to your target audience syndicated expertly on social media channels is a necessary addition to any SEO campaign.

How is your business or SEO company integrating social media  to improve your search enginge rankings?

As I wrote in Part I of this series, SEO companies can learn a lot from Ernest Hemingway. But they can also learn a lot from a more unlikely source, one of my other favorite authors and the one who inspired me to pursue writing for a living: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr..

The iconic writer, known for a unique and humorous style that is near impossible to duplicate, was a dark optimist who had a clear love for writing. And while his tips on writing are important, his insights on readers are more important. And, though a lot of this is attributed to fiction, the lessons transcend type and make for great arguments in search engine optimization.

We “computer people,” as Vonnegut would call us, have been handed the most impressive and awe-inspiring medium since the printing press. It is important to remember that when writing content of any sort. As Vonnegut says, “what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around.”

We are obligated, as writers, to both know and care that we are “dancing animals,” especially when choosing topics to write about. As a copywriter, it can be easy to lose focus on the audience of a piece–easy to forget we are writing for other people. Topics should cover things that are important, interesting and, ultimately, usable.

Users are looking on the Web for usable information. Remember, for an Internet reader, content is usually a means, not an end.

Vonngeut offers two great bits of advice on how to know you are targeting usable content and how to write it.

His seven steps for creative writing couldn’t apply more to SEO companies if he had written it to do so:

1. Find a subject you care about.
2. Do not ramble, though.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Have the guts to cut.
5. Sound like yourself.
6. Say what you mean to say.
7. Pity the readers.

To put it more simply, in terms that would be used today, don’t fake it. Readers are just like writers. If you don’t care about a subject, why on earth would your reader? If you don’t keep the reader in mind or keep a piece short and readable, what motivation would anyone have to read it? In Part I, I mentioned that the purpose of writing is to communicate. But it is important to remember the basic rule of communication is empathy. If a reader doesn’t care about what you’ve written, why have you written it?

But even when following these seven rules, there is still one thing to remember: nothing is certain. Writing is like picking ponies at the horse track: You can never be sure who will win or what will work. If you’re smart, you can win consistently, but, to win big, you have to take a chance.

As Vonnegut puts it:

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

The author series takes the wise words of the best writers of the past century and looks at them through the eyes of an SEO copywriter. If we are to learn, it should be from the best. And thus we shall.

interactive marketing companies are notorious for buzz words.

With the emergence and mass-adoption of social media, marketing buzz words are now on steroids. So, here at the Ocean Agency, we thought we would help out business owners by translating marketing buzz words and break down how they can improve your business, minus the marketing speak.

1) Augmented Reality

Definition: Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.” (Wikipedia)

Our Definition: Mixing technology into physical real-world experiences

Example:

Does augmented reality make sense for you business? Possibly.

Here is one example:

If you’re a restaurant, you could have the food items on the menu reveal themselves in all 3-D glory.

Obviously, augmented reality is expensive to produce, but the future lies in digital experiences mixed in with consumers physical spaces that tell a compelling story, or, more importantly, offer some kind of value.

Biggest take away for your businesses: Incorporate technologies that improve the experience of your customers.

2) Geo-Location

Definition:” Geo-location is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an Internet-connected computer, mobile device, website visitor or other.” (Wikipedia)

Our Definition: Identifying and targeting  customers based on their location.

Examples: Foursquare location targeted specials and advertisements:

Does geo-location make sense for your business? Probably.

This one is definitely living up to the hype thus far. With the expansion of social networking on mobile devices, people are sharing their location data at an increasing rate. Businesses can create relevant ads on these platforms that aren’t intrusive.

With this data businesses can help consumers make decisions, save money, and build brand loyalty. A win-win for both brands and consumers.

Something to keep in mind:

Recently, Foursquare has partnered with a variety of major media outlets like BravoTV and the New York Times. The only incentive for users from these partnerships?

A Bravo TV or New York Times Olympic Badge.

These are great incentives for Foursquare addicted PR, communication and markerting types, but in order to encourage mainstream adoption the incentives will have to increase.

Biggest take-away for your business: Make your place of businesses a true destination. People share their location to gain incentives and because it says something about them. Ask yourself this question: Would people want to tell the world that they are at your place of business? Why? Why not?

3) Brand Utility:

Definition: “The brand utility method is concerned less with feature sets and more with functionality. How can your products make the lives of consumers better? That is the question that a brand utility advertising campaign seeks to answer.”  (Printing and Advertising)

Our Definition: Improving the lives of your customers to inspire loyalty in your customer base.

Example:

ING Direct.

If ING Direct is a bank, why does it have cafes in major cities in the US?

Brand Utility.

The ING Direct cafe offers free wifi, $1 coffee/tea and $1 pastries, in addition to employees who know all about ING Direct products.

They improve the lives of their customers by offering discounted coffee and food and even give those with an ING direct account free coffe or tea on Fridays. The ING direct cafe concept is a perfect example of brand utility, and it makes incentives offered by other banks look lame/miniscule in comparison.

Biggest take away for your business: If you improve the lives of your customers, they will thank you publicly and keep coming back.

What can you do to improve the lives of your customers in a way that fits with your overall brand message?

Alright, now it’s your turn. Business owners:

Would you use these tools in your marketing plan? Why or why not?

So this week, our Chicago SEO company made a big change. Really, it’s not that big, but it has made a big difference in how we think about writing for SEO and for communities.

Until this week, our department had been using Yahoo! Messenger, which incorporates a lot of features that we didn’t really need (stock ticker, news, Y! Voice) and was invasive to our PCs and workflow.  Our manager Timothy suggested the switch to Yammer, which our department promptly adopted. And… pardon the creative spelling here… we loooooooove it.

For those unfamiliar with Yammer, it functions similarly to Twitter: you update your own status, and it is shared in a feed. But you must have a company email address to join, and only people from your company are included in your network and can see your updates. Your company’s feed is private. Yammer also has a desktop application, so you can keep it open in a window and view your coworkers’ updates. For us as a company, this is incredibly useful for two major reasons:

Of interest to interactive marketing agencies everywhere, a report was released yesterday which found that only 8% of online teens use Twitter:

What makes this even more interesting is that 93% of teens are online:

These figures illustrate something really important about teenagers: They care about their friends and their actual physical network. Moreover, psychology has taught us that many teenagers) are terrible at planning ahead and thinking about the future. They live in the moment and with the consequences. The prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that is most involved in future planning and decision making, does not fully develop until your early 20s.

What does this have to do with “public” information sharing, like Twitter or blogging?

1) In order to blog or tweet, you inherently have to believe that you have something remotely valuable to say. This requires both a sense of personal identity and self-esteem, both of which are developing during the teen years.

2) Tweeting and blogging are linked to “personal branding” more than anything else. Personal branding requires foresight, introspection and networking with people who aren’t your “real” friends. If teens are deeply focused on physical friendship and developing a personal identity, the link between Twitter, blogs and personal branding might be seen as “lame” or inauthentic.

If teens don’t tweet or blog, how do you target teens with an interactive marketing campaign?

At our Chicago SEO company, we content developers spend hours struggling over the perfect words for the homepage of websites we create. Organization and layout are crucial, and we consider every possible connotation of each selected word. To put an exclamation point or not can be a serious point (pun intended) of contention! And all this careful attention pays off– we nail down the message in just a few sentences right there on the first page that the average visitor sees.

But what about the inside pages? As a content developer or business owner working on a site, do you still consider every word carefully? Do you monitor the consistency of tone and message closely? As views of a page decrease, does your attention to its content, too? It shouldn’t.

A complete website will have finely-tuned content on every page. Here’s why: SEO companies know that usable, optimized content drives an SEO campaign and that users, like Google, recognize quality content.

SEO companies can learn a lot from Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway, in one of his frequent moments of brilliance, once said “There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

But, he was mistaken. There is one rule on writing, and he actually is responsible for stating it in the most Hemingway-esque way possible (short, concise and communicative): “The first draft of anything is shit.”

Both are true and relate directly to search engine optimization writing. As Timothy wrote, it is important to write solid, readable content more than posting frequently. But while you may have great information, how do you make it readable?

When writing a blog post, it is important to remember the basics of writing itself, then worry about writing for the Web. And these Hemingway quotes are extremely pertinent to online writing.

“The First Draft of Anything is [... err... trash]“
I know from experience that writers, stereotypically, don’t like to believe this. I know I don’t. But it’s true. It’s always good to write something and, if time allots, take a day or two before rereading it. This is the best way to edit. For example, if you have 10 blog posts to do in a week, spend a day or two on research, spend a day or two knocking out the articles, then read them in the order you wrote them. This way, the one you wrote longest ago will be your first edit, and you can see the mistakes and wordiness and superfluous flair that seemed like a great idea at the time.

Writing is like having one drink too many: What seems like a great idea in the excitement of the moment will probably seem very different after a little time of reflection.

“Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
Another great Hemingway quote that perfectly describes the art and business of writing. Sometimes a blank screen or sheet of paper can look a little like a cliff face when you don’t have carabiners or crampons. If a particular subject has you stumped, come back to it later. This is the importance of spacing out all your topics and/or clients. Don’t focus on one before moving to another. Do a bit here and a bit there to keep yourself fresh, spry and producing the best writing possible.

And remember, good writing is simplistic. To quote Mr. Hemingway yet again, ““Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

The purpose of writing is to communicate. So do this in the most simplistic way possible. This isn’t 18th-century Russia: the days of long, winding passages of words stacked like broken steps are over. Here’s an example: