Does the language you use on your website or blog affect your search engine rankings?

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By language here I don’t mean English or Portuguese or French; by language I mean the words and phrases that you use in order to create content for your website or blog.

Creating search engine optimized content is all about conveying the right message for the appropriate search terms. Whenever you are writing for your website you have to keep in mind – if it is important – for what search expressions your website should draw traffic from various search engines. For instance, my website is about offering content writing and online copywriting services. So any mixture of these expressions must get me higher rankings if I want to keep doing business through search engines.

There are many webmasters and Internet marketing experts that suggest that one shouldn’t solely depend on search engine traffic and this is true. Nonetheless the majority of your traffic comes from search engines if you don’t have thousands of incoming links from other web sites and blogs and you haven’t got tons of money to invest in online advertising. Traffic from search engines can be an invaluable, low-cost opportunity that you must leverage, and this can be done by using language that conveys the most appropriate message to the search engine algorithms so that they can rank your website or individual web pages accordingly.

Language definitely affects your search engine rankings at least in the current context. People talk about semantic optimization, and even natural language processing, but right now it doesn’t seem to be happening. The actual words still matter. If I am promoting content writing I’m not getting search engine traffic if people are searching for a creative writer, even if I wish I did and suggested subtly somewhere on my website – I get found if people are looking for a content writer because I talk so much about content writing.

This I learnt the hard way. Before deciding to become a content writer I used to design and develop websites. Due to some vague reason I ended up optimizing my website for the term “Web designing” rather than “Web designer”. I featured on the first page of Google for Web designing for a good two years and I didn’t generate much business (blogging hadn’t arrived at that time otherwise I would have converted the website into a blog). I should have actually optimized my website for web designer (of course the good side is I became a content writer). These are the small things that can have long-lasting repercussions if you’re not careful about the language you use on your website.

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What type of content actually moves your visitors?

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You publish content on your website or blog with a purpose. In fact whenever you publish something on your website or blog (from now onwards I’ll only say website and you can assume it for your blog too), you want it to do something. You don’t publish content without purpose. This is why in order to come up with effective and compelling content you must be clear about its purpose. Ask yourself the following questions:

Do you want people to purchase something from your website, or subscribe to your service or RSS feeds, or hire you, after reading your content?
Do you want them to click the advertisements that you have published on your website?
Do you want them to engage in conversation in order to build your brand?
Do you want them to promote your content on their own websites and blogs and on various social media and social networking websites?
Do you want to increase your search engine traffic?
Do you want to improve your conversion rate?

There can be many more questions but these are the fundamental questions you should ask yourself while creating your content strategy. Once you know what you want to actually achieve by publishing content on your website you can generate better content.

We all want to publish content that moves our visitors into taking some desired action. Your visitors will be moved if your content gives them what they seek. So after figuring out what you want your content to achieve for you, you have to figure out what it achieves for your visitors. Does it provide something that they desperately need?

When a visitor comes to your website he or she is normally:

Trying to purchase something in order to satisfy a need or an urge
Looking for a solution to a nagging problem
Looking for information that he or she may not find easily somewhere else
Searching for entertainment or amusement
Seeking advice or encouragement, or love
Looking for an outlet
Looking for a service provider

Again they can be hundreds of more reasons for people to come to your website, you had to figure that out.

So in order to come up with content that moves your visitors:

You must know why people should come to your website
How your content is going to convey that you really have what they seek, and do it convincingly

Branding with a customized content

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The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

Over the Internet branding acquires a unique importance because often your presence, product and services are existing in a virtual world – people, your prospective customers, can view the images of your products or services, or even attain some digital samples if possible, but they cannot do more than that. They cannot touch or feel your offerings. If they want to purchase a pair of trousers from you, they cannot try it before buying it.

So to inspire confidence among your consumers branding becomes more important. Branding convinces them that yes, whatever they buy from you is going to be up to the mark, and buying from you doesn’t involve more risk than, say, buying from a brick-and-mortar store.

How do you establish such a brand presence on the Internet? Testimonials, recommendations and affirmations from existing customers and clients surely help. But what also helps is the way you communicate, the content on your website, your blog, and your social profile.

We operate in a conversation economy these days: what you say, and how you say it, can have immediate repercussions. Your latest blog post or article can reach the farthest corners of the planet within a few seconds with a couple of tweets or a few hundred diggs. Your content can go a long way to help you establish your brand on the Internet.

Useful, relevant and well-meaning content helps you generate a community around your presence. There are many entrepreneurs who did nothing but nurture a community around their blogs or websites. They spent more than a year generating awesome content and establishing their loyalty, and consequently, their brands. Eventually there came a time when their visitors themselves started saying that they would buy or subscribe to anything recommended or promoted by those blog or website publishers. So when these content publishers started selling on their blogs and websites, they had a ready-made market that was eagerly waiting to do business with them.

Customized content means generating content your audience can relate to. A person who publishes a blog on SEO and whose advise benefits his or her audience has a greater chance of succeeding when he or she decides to provide professional SEO services. Many among his or her current readers will eagerly become his or her clients because they are aware of the fact that he or she can really help improve their search engine rankings. Similarly, a person who writes authoritative material on management consulting has a greater chance of converting his or her visitors into his or her clients.

You can apply this branded content technique to any business.

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Why it pays to have your own business

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The more I read about the economy the more relieved I feel for having my own business. Hasn’t the economic downturn affected my online writing business? Sure it has, but I’m not worried about losing my job. I just need to market more, I just need to put more relevant content on my website, and I’m already doing this and it is already showing positive results. In fact, although I won’t say it’s good that it happened, the economic downturn has been a blessing in disguise. I realized it was not possible to survive within the current format of my work. I needed to expand.

A good thing about doing business online is that if your business is low, have more traffic to your website. Does more traffic mean more business? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t; it depends on the type of traffic you are able to generate. Even if you are getting one query per week (actually, this happened 4-5 months ago), it shows there’s some business out there you can get. For instance, if 30 unique visitors per day get you one query per week, 60 unique visitors surely must get more, and so should 90 or 100 visitors per day. What about 200 visitors per day? Am I building castles in the wind? I certainly am if I’m generating random traffic for my website. I have to increase targeted traffic, not just any traffic.

My website’s conversion rate is quite good, for me, as an individual freelance content writer. Even with 30 unique visitors per day I was managing (still do sometimes) 1 query per day. Agreed, not every query turns into business, but for me, even if 2 queries turn into business every week, I was quite happy and satisfied. Of course these days I’ve managed to generate more queries because I’m regularly outsourcing my work. I’m getting more queries because I’m increasing my traffic.

In order to survive in tough economic condition, I had to rethink the way I was promoting my business, turning in the assignments, and taking care of the generic infrastructure. I was already spending good 10-12 hours on my business, and just couldn’t afford to put in more hours given my singing practice and the needs of my family. Whatever I had to do, I had to do within these hours. In order to maximize my potential I had to do more of what I was good at and do less of what I was taking longer to finish.

Ironically, the biggest hurdle on my way to increasing my business was my work. What the heck are you talking about? you must be thinking, aren’t you here to do work? Sure I am and I definitely want more work. But the problem was, I was doing work almost all the time and there was no time left for promotion, marketing, brand building and networking: all these activities are needed to not only increase your business, but also to get more decent, high-paying projects.

Although I’m a good writer, I’m also good at getting work, at convincing people to give me work. As I mentioned above, I’ve been making a decent living by just getting 30 unique visitors to my website every day. But this is not a good way of working. I’ve been active on the Internet, first as a web designer and developer and then as a content writer and copywriter for almost 9 years now and people hardly know me. I haven’t able to create even one marginally successful blog, and I started blogging when people used to manually add pages to their manually-managed blogs and hardly 200 people knew what the strange-sounding word meant. In order to increase my workflow, and change my freelance work into a proper business, I decided to change all this.

These days I’m focusing more on getting work. I’m increasing my search engine traffic, I’m adding content to my website with greater speed and regularity, I’m trying to improve the quality of content on my website and I’m becoming more socially active on the Internet by interacting on social networking websites and blogs. And the work? Fortunately, I’ve found some really good writers; in fact, some of them write better than me. I’m not outsourcing 100% work yet, but if they continue to write high-quality stuff I might soon. Getting other writers has also given me an opportunity to take on assignments I wouldn’t touch previously: lesser paying assignments from Asia, especially from India.

All this happened because I owned my work, my business and I was free to make changes my business needed first, to survive the economic downturn, and second, to grow. I’ve achieved the first thing – surviving – and now I’m focusing on the second. What are you doing to survive and thrive?