Blog Writing

Blog writing is a regular activity for many businesses but it’s no good writing the one off blog and hoping it will win you lots of attention. To be successful, you need to be consistent, and have motivation. Good blog writing is uncomplicated and reader friendly. Aim for a regular flow of blog material with fresh content that engages in a conversational way. Your blog must be informative and offer something new or interesting. Offer advice or tips, your opinion as an expert and be prepared to share your knowledge…winning confidence and trust.  Whilst SEO writing is important, it’s about writing for people not just search engines. A blog is not a magazine article and needs some human emotion. Whatever you do, avoid anything dull or boring.

SEO copywriting

SEO writing isn’t as complicated as it sounds but it takes some knowledge and a degree of skill to get right. Optimise your blogs and web copy with keyword insertion. Research your keywords carefully and insert in the correct ratio to please the search engines. Include some keyword phrases as well as just words such as ‘writing content for websites sw London’. This is because many searchers will type in a complete phrase. Don’t forget to optimise your headings but don’t force this and sacrifice ‘readability’. If it doesn’t sound right, your readers will turn away. Include more keywords in the early paragraphs. This will help satisfy the search engines and help readers to identify with your subject; they will feel quickly reassured that they have landed on the correct site and their problem can be solved or a need satisfied.

Social media

The idea behind blogging is to create reader involvement and interaction with you and that’s where social media is intertwined with blogs; it’s also why SEO copywriting is another important element. The three elements, social media, SEO copywriting and blog writing are inextricably linked. As copywriters in London, we know this only too well, miss out one and the other two dilute.

With SEO and keyword insertion, these people can go to the social media platforms, recommend, bookmark, comment, send your link around to their followers, and so on. All this has the potential to bring you more Google juice…and more business.

Be good to hear from anyone with blogging problems…

Polished to a shine or tempting as a treat, properly edited web copy is a joy to read and remember. Read editing tips from award winning website copywriters, London.

Busy business thrives on wonderful words.

1.     Read, review, revise

Read through your written draft of web content or brochure copy, correcting any clumsy, meaningless words, sentences or phrases. The copy should be reader friendly and flow in a concise, consistent way. SEO copywriting and keyword insertion should be natural. For blog writing, your ‘voice’ will be entirely different from an in-house company report.

2.     Respect your reader’s intellect

It’s amazing how many ways people find to say the same thing, in a different way. Your reader will understand a message the first time…as long as the words are well edited. A repeat may appear as a duplicate meaning, a twin word or the same word used several times. Delete them ruthlessly.

3.     A writer is a person who counts words

Before PC’s, writers and journalists spent hours manually counting words to a line, multiplying lines then adding to the columns to get an average word count of a typed document. This is less of a task today but still important. Where there is a word limit, keep to it. For article writing SW London, or in the North of England, this is a must.

4.     Spelling and grammar test

I don’t like using the PC’s grammar or spell check. A well trained editor or anyone writing content for websites will use manual editing with sharp attention to detail. The PC does not give 100% accuracy and over reliance on digital tools soon builds to dependency and forgetfulness. Keep a dictionary and thesaurus to hand.

5.     Your reference library

For article, blog, web or press release writing, to do a first class job, buy some good reference books to check style points: punctuation, spelling, grammar and other fine detail. If you work as a freelance copywriter in SW London or anywhere, your client is unlikely to be aware of your attention to detail, but it will show in the finished copy.

6.     Fonts and formats

Check consistency of font sizes, bold and italic type in your writing copy for web or other documents. Titles, headings, sub titles, sub headings and points of emphasis need to be included in the editing process. Content researched from the internet that has been re-worded by the SEO copywriter may have online formatting that has slipped in such as line breaks or paragraph indentations.

7.     Be hard on yourself

Read the copy from the printed page, not just on screen; this is especially important for work intended for hard copy reading which should be completely different in tone of voice than online work. Screen reading can often lead to errors being missed and this can happen even with top standard, well experienced editors or copywriters for web.

8.     Talk to yourself

A good SEO copywriter will read the words aloud several times, and at an even pace. This will nearly always highlight several faults. As you read, listen to see if there is a smooth flow of words which connect as you speak. If any phrases seem longwinded or clumsy, change them. Copywriters in London, the North or Midlands understand this.

9.     On track

Like many copywriters, I find it difficult to work with the PC track change tool. It is confusing to the eyes and interrupts the natural ‘reading’ of a document. Use your skills of instinct and memory, whilst making simple notes.  In so doing it keeps your eyes sharper, with your mind more focused and with less tech dependency.

10. The final review

Always do a final review when you are fresh in the morning. Editing should not be confused with proofreading. When you have done sufficient grammar checks, a complete sentence or phrase, or even a paragraph may need rewriting, depending on the logical flow, syntax, reader friendly style and layout.

These 10 points are what I call polish…If you have any editing problems, contact me and I’ll see if I can help.

If you target your article writing to what is likely to appeal to your site visitors, you have a great line of easy, welcoming communication opening up, whether writing blogs in south west London or Yorkshire.

Blogs offer an excellent opportunity to join up with social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook; this gives further interaction with clients and readers. Even the giant corporates are recognising the value in being linked to these sites.

The important thing is that you are seen to be 50% social and 50% business. You can interact in a fun, natural way rather than just banging on about how wonderful your service is. This is great, affordable PR. You can still retain your professionalism and people will warm to you as they see you as human with a great personality; they will also recognise you have the service that they or maybe their friend, relation or neighbour, is looking for.

A blog or SEO article is interactive with these social media sites so you can weave your social profile into them naturally, without sounding forced or salesy.

The other good thing that has evolved with social media and blogs is that others can give a third party objective view on your service. Rather than your highly biased view, people can give their opinion. ‘I bought this product from Bloggs & Co; their customer service was excellent, the rugs look fantastic…’

Essential to SEO blog writing – and any online news letter article – is the writing style: it must be engaging, inviting, without cramming in every detail. To be effective with article writing and PR techniques, ‘avoid information overload’ is my golden rule. Use SEO copywriting and it becomes highly interactive marketing, feeding your readers fresh snippets of information on what you do, implying your expert knowledge.

In a market flooded with advertising, I would advise any business to use the social media forums and get their voice out there and heard. Why turn away from such simple, yet immensely powerful PR and a way of reaching out to millions? Make it sound lively and exciting that sales of your thermal vests have escalated during the heavy snow falls or how a society wedding or event has meant bumper business for you. An online blog with correct keyword insertion can generate attention from a well targeted audience and boost your company image and sales.

Get blogging and SEO copywriting…I’m happy to give tips, and be great to hear your comments

Whether thinking about internet marketing in south west London or across the UK, ‘embrace the 50s, forget the 80s’. That’s a good line to best describe how social media has turned the clock around…with a modern twist. I wasn’t around in the 50s (honestly) but back then salespeople were more like friends with their customers. Look at an old film and you might see the car dealer enjoying a barbeque with the family he just sold a car to, or the insurance policy guy invited to tea with the elderly couple, to whom he’s just sold insurance. It wasn’t exactly freelance SEO writing, nor was it website copywriting in London town but it was social media and very good PR.

Fast forward to the 80s; aha, technology began to establish its roots, everything became colder and more enterprise orientated. Women in business dressed in power suits to be like businessmen and taken seriously; the one-to-one treatment was lost. In fact, the colder and more remote from its customers the company became, the more it could be in control. Hardly powerful London PR and not a hint of internet marketing.

Fast forward to the 2000s; the customer is now in control because modern day social media jumped in. Yet we find ourselves back in 50s mode, using the modern fashioned tweak that technology offers. Now we have good PR, internet marketing and SEO copywriting in SW London and beyond, all wrapped together.

What’s all this got to do with testimonials? Instead of just word of mouth, social media is the modern way to give testimonials, referrals and recommendations, opening the market to billions.  Away with the shoulder pads, engage with your target audience, join conversations, give free advice and collect some good reviews. Now we’re talking PR again.

Add in some great SEO copywriting. With article and blog writing, you can stay in touch, be generous with your knowledge based advice and tips. This not only wins you respect, it gives the perfect opportunity for people to bookmark you, link to your site, pass it on to their circle of contacts and so on. In fact, social media and SEO copywriting are inextricably linked and it pays to use your keywords well in your blog copy. You can then get even more attention, comments, traffic and back links.

People will retweet and pass your URL around and it all happens without you really having to do very much. In fact all you have to do is get social, relax and allow your customers to be in control, powering your PR engine. Customers are no fools, they can choose who they do business with, and they don’t need to hear you bragging about how good you are. They can find that out for themselves and make their own judgement. That, in a nutshell, is what social media is about.

So hit the target and go for it, be great to hear your comments everyone…

Most are deleted, so get it right

E-mail newsletters/circulars are an easy way to invite fresh interest on your subject and stay in touch with colleagues; it’s a great way to communicate with former, existing and new clients. It’s often forgotten that as with a website, you only have a few seconds to catch interest and keep the reader reading. Most businesses make the mistake of pouring far too much detail into their e-mail newsletters: no-one has the time to go through and download lots of information and images…click goes the delete button.

1. Words like ‘Urgent’ ‘Not to be missed’ ‘Hot Buy’ will send most people running

Write a tightly focused, eye catching but sensible, phrase in the subject line.

2. Avoid boring people, use engaging language

Use words that are conversational and appropriate to your target readers.

3. Make your reader feel comfortable

Let your reader feel at ease; draw them into a conversation, it’s not an advert about you.

4. Less is more

Keep your sentences brief, and your words crisp, concise and easy to assimilate.

5. Keep to the point

Make one point, not 10. Avoid repeating the same thing in several different ways.

6. How appealing are you?

Layout is important; make it attractive and easy to copy & paste or scan.

7. Grammar

Spelling and punctuation must be perfect. Bad English will reflect a poor service.

8. Get personal

Address your e-mail to a person with a name, not just to an anonymous list.

9. Sign on the dotted line

Let your readers know who you are, sign off with your name, not just your position.

10. Give them something to do

Let your recipients know what they should do next – call, email, visit your site?

When the vast majority of e-mails are deleted in the same way that most door drop leaflets are binned, it may be worth getting an experienced copywriter to help you. Time and again, e-mail circulars are successful in winning new clients so why waste a bigger proportion of success by writing a mail that has little appeal?

The rise of the tech crazy world of IT has meant a changing world of writing.  Love it or loathe it, social media marketing is here to stay and so is SEO copywriting with which it can be closely teamed. Why loathe the simplest, most effective way of gaining new business and terrific PR?  Why not use your keywords to maximum effect and bring more Google juice your way? How?

Well, put it this way, chatting over the Internet may seem a fairly tedious, ineffectual way of doing business but wait…

How many mails have you written today that haven’t included a quick one liner: ‘hope you enjoyed your holiday?’ That is social media – and it’s also networking. You just didn’t realise it.

The trouble is most companies tickle social media, blog writing and SEO copywriting; they don’t understand how to use this type of PR properly to get more customers. There’s not enough time, they’re concerned about adopting a bit of a colourful personality. That is the biggest mistake that businesses are making.

It doesn’t mean cheapening your image, or going silly. It means just being yourself, at varying times professional and relaxed.

For serious business gain, social media marketing and SEO copywriting really need a professional to handle it for you. By sending articles and blogs out, well presented with good keyword insertion you gain more than just increasing your Google juice. Once you start giving helpful tips, useful comments, offering guidance and inviting comment, you open the gates to social media and that means powerful PR. The most activity happens off the page so it isn’t a matter of sending out odd little tweets now and again. People reading your articles, blogs and web copy can comment, get in touch and ask for advice, they can retweet your news, send links to their contacts and social media platforms; they can bookmark your page and tell their friends.

After a while, it’s not difficult to see the enormous network of potential customers that are out there, and are aware of your service or product.

This awareness comes at a fraction of the cost of direct marketing, space ads or a whole host of other stuff. It’s an opportunity to be you, a human being, not a static brand. You can get to know your customers and they will get to know you. Careful keyword insertion and article marketing can give social media marketing a terrific boost. The two are interlinked and strengthen each other; don’t just tickle it, tackle it.

Be great to hear your comments…

I prefer to call it a Sociable Marketing Campaign because that’s what social media in the business world is about. How you influence people to buy into your service or product, is what’s important, and discovering just who does the influencing or ‘marketing’. Now, let me put one thing straight, this isn’t just about twittering away to people about your everyday activities. Nor is it about adding Facebook friends.

Internet Marketing goes way beyond this. It’s about business. Let’s get real: business means marketing, selling; it means making a profit which depends largely on people out there making a purchasing decision about your product. Whether you sell a service such as accountancy or plumbing, or manufacture a product such as bathrooms or children’s toys, the fundamentals are the same: you need to make a living.

Well, to do this effectively, you can’t shut yourself in a box and hope that people will somehow discover you – and, more importantly, talk about you. They won’t.

And make no mistake, how people love to talk. They talk about what they’ve just bought, the people who served them, how delighted they were. They even talk about what their friends, partners, family, colleagues have just bought and how pleased they were – or possibly not (more about that in later blogs) – with the product. What a massive influential bunch.

So, the trick is to make yourself known to all those internet marketing influencers – big time. By reaching out to them via a proper social media campaign, you will soon discover they are there in their millions, waiting for you to pop along with just the product they are looking for. Running an effective internet marketing campaign is really no different from any of your marketing activities; you need to tackle it with professional know-how, planning, budget and sustained effort.

So get real, get people talking, get sociable marketing.

The arrival of social media platforms and blogging has dramatically changed the landscape on how we interact with each other, whether with friends or strangers. Billions of people can now make their voice heard: give advice, an opinion, a comment on a concern, recommend or condemn a product or service. By tweeting, posting a blog, reviews, bookmarking or giving comment, they can inform and influence millions of others. So, writing SEO copy today is about creating content that inspires so that people want to let the world know about it by linking to it or sharing it.

With so many people talking about your business, it’s easy to see how your credibility, trust and expert authority helps the pages which you want to rank high for certain keywords.

However, what really determines the ranking criteria of a page is what happens away from the page. By this I mean with links from other sites – and this is not an easy part of SEO.

Enter mainstream social media marketing and here you have a fantastic way for everyday people to have everyday conversations with each other. It’s natural, friendly and Wow! what a great way to attract links with compelling, believable content.

So, if your copy isn’t good enough to attract those favourable, natural links, it doesn’t matter how optimised that content is, no-one is going to pay much attention to it. The location and frequency of keywords is still critical because search engines work by keying in on the various word patterns people are looking for and returning relevant content. Yet that’s not all there is to it and people easily over do it.

Search engines want genuine content pages and not additional ‘doorway’ pages that they can detect as having been created just to achieve high rankings. This is where the skilled SEO copywriter can produce copy that the engines do not then view as suspicious or ‘spam’.

A minimum of approximately 450 words per page is recommended, with one or two targeted and strategically placed search terms, but not too many.

Of course there are other SEO techniques for getting to the top 10 search results other than SEO copywriting. The reason is due to them having a good match to the engine’s algorithm – or criteria. To make matters confusing, search engines change and tweak their algorithms.

Competitive search terms may not always be the ones where huge numbers of results are returned. Using search terms tends to work for those that are not so competitive, rather than for ones where millions of people are trying to gain top rankings for their sites.

And don’t forget, whilst this can help to bring people from the search engines to the website, if the site fails to sell its products to them, there isn’t much point in them coming.

Here we come back to the frequencies and densities of targeted keywords in the optimisation process, pitching keyword research against the face of changing algorithms. What is its importance to Google in relevance and quality?  You have to:

• spoon feed search engines
• create content that Google loves
• create good link building strategies

Well, if you choose your copywriter well, you can achieve all three of these strategies so your web site attracts people, inspires reading and converts readers to customers.

Summary: SEO copywriting is the art of writing words that will make your customers love you and help improve your search results. It is about creating copy that retains, sells, persuades customers to buy into your product or service so you get maximum impact from your website. SEO web copywriting services mean better rankings and improved conversions. Effective copywriting means optimised content marketing.

Did you know that internet marketing is a handy little tool – and more than just SEO (search engine optimisation)? Yay, on- and offline marketing can be mixed…and you get a colourful, ribbon wrapped package as a result. It’s about backing up your company with other strong companies and creating scrumptious power packed bonds. This is exactly what happened to us with Forest FM, Dorset’s first community radio station.

SEJ stumbled upon this radio station in an online search (hey, great SEO!). After learning about their history: more than 10 years serving the area to the west of the beautiful, renowned New Forest, and their commitment with the community they aim to please, it sounded super fantastic. Then there is their excellent campaigning for a 24hr radio service, charged with music alternatives and support to local business…Wow, how could we resist? Here was clearly a brill company to link with; so far, so yummy.

After talking to Steve at Forest Radio, sounded cool (not Steve, the radio ads) we decided we were going to go ahead with a marketing campaign with Forest. The process was smooth as silk – ah, a sure sign of the kind of business we were dealing with. Steve was great, going beyond the call of duty until we were happy with the final resulting ad.

Woo, hoo, it’s going live any day now so listen in everyone! And guess what, off- and online too, well, what a perfect tasty treat. This means SEJ will be booming into New Forest homes via the radio and to the nation’s computers via the internet. And, hey, who knows, maybe someone who has a business abroad will hear it and respond, giving SEJ an international lift. Does it get any better?

So, how do I know what makes a good business to link with?

• Do a Google search: if they show up in the results, they know what they are doing: they are being proactive and putting an effort on their SEO. They want to be found, and they are waiting for you to find them

• Visit their website. What is their history? Do they show signs of having worked hard to get where they are and understanding how nurturing good relations is so important in business?

• Give them a call. How do they sound? Friendly, supportive and proactive? Or dull, stressed and ‘can’t be bothered’ type?

• Get linked: propose to them about your idea for linking. How is it received? Do they sound genuinely interested? If not, don’t waste your energy, there are plenty of great companies out there waiting for you, just like Forest FM and cool Steve.

Communicating offline in the good old ‘pick up the phone’ style can win modern, online international marketing benefits. You see, don’t forget that behind every pc there’s a human being, just like Steve, just like you…and me.

You can listen to our radio ad here
You can visit and listen to Forest FM here

The Power of Twitter (a first hand experience!)

Does Social Media work for business? What’s the point of spending time on Twitter?
Sending tweets can, and does, generate business. What’s more, it often happens without trying and with no thought of ‘marketing’. You can influence and generate business for others too. Read on and I’ll not only tell you, I’ll show you:

The story so far…
When Vettel won the F1 Grand Prix championship at Abu Dhabi how could I, as an F1 follower, resist sending out a fun flavoured Tweet?
I couldn’t and I didn’t. With no more thought, off went the tweet.
Aha, back came a reply…a new follower from Germany – and another F1 fan!
So what did I do? I tweeted back of course, and in German. Well, I am fluent in the language so it made sense.

The reply came and, to my delight, in German. A few days and one or two tweets later, auf Deutsch natűrlich, another reply came back, this time telling me about the F1 store.
Hey, toll! Soun

ded just great. Xmas approaching and with a perfect Christmas present in mind I tweeted back. Could I have the link please?

The link was tweeted. I called, I ordered, I paid. Just the job, a successful business transaction completed:

Social Media works, it can win buckets of business for you too. This arose from an incidental influencer: there are thousands more out there ready to influence thousands of others about your service or product.

Have you had a similar experience?

Have you ever visited a website you saw recommended on Twitter?

Do you have clients coming from Social Media?