Here’s the rundown on a couple tips and tricks for any website copy that deals with copyrights or registered trademarks as well as for product or brand names that have special characters or that are hard to spell:

Let’s start with the trademark symbol. You have seen this on nearly every product brand, and it is always included in copywriting to ensure that legal ownership of the brand is established. While it is a good idea to include a trademark symbol in your copy, it is a terrible idea, and completely unnecessary to trademark every instance of the term. Over-use of the trademark symbol (™) or registered trademark symbol (®) in your copy will render it cumbersome and your readers will give up sooner than they might otherwise.

The other problem with using these symbols is that practically no one uses them in their search terms. By tacking these symbols to every use of your product name or brand you are limiting the relevancy between your posted content and the actual terms people are using to search for your site.

I recently found a web page containing only three paragraphs of copy with 20 trademark symbols scattered throughout. I found the page very difficult to read and quickly became distracted by all the clutter.

The solution is to trademark only the first instance of any product or brand name on any given page. By doing this you establish the legal ownership of the trademark and leave the successive instances free and clear for easy readability.

Another common problem I see is the use of special characters. You may have an umlaut or circumflex character with a line or dots over the top of a letter, or cedilla in your term with a small tail hanging down like in the word ‘façade’ (with a tail on the ‘c’). In these cases you may be tempted to incorporate the unique character for the sake of your brand, but be aware that almost no one will use it in their search, and the simple addition of a strange character can change the searchability of a word.

Like the solution for trademarks, use the special character in the first incidence of the word, and then use a more common spelling for all subsequent uses of the term.

Next lets quickly explore a brand-relate SEO tip for words that are hard to spell: When writing about a product or brand name, make a point to notice whether it is easy to misspell. Words don’t need to be hard to misspell, for instance some defy common practice by simply re-ordering letters that are more commonly used in a specific order.

Take for instance words that are spelled with ‘ea’ like ‘read’ or ‘instead’. A unique brand that uses the reverse of this (as in ‘AE’) may find that a lot of people are misspelling the term in their Google searches. This is an important consideration.

The solution: You may actually want to incorporate misspellings of your own terms to help capture additional search traffic, or to ensure that people who accidentally get it wrong are still able to find you. I don’t recommend misspelling your primary brands on your home page, but you may do well to miss one or two at the bottom of an occasional blog post.

It is true that in many cases the search engines will recognize a misspelling and direct traffic to the appropriate place, however you also need to consider that competitors may understand this tactic, also, and may be optimizing their copy to take advantage.

To find out if people are searching for misspellings of your brand, go to the Google Keywords Tool and do some research on misspellings. You will certainly be surprised at the number of searches that occur for misspelled words.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

If you are marketing from a website, the more links there are pointing to your website, the more popular it appears to be to the search engines. Think of this as a kind of ‘popularity contest’.

The search engines rely on popularity to help determine how valuable your site is to potential searchers. Although this is not the only criteria the search engines use, this is an important factor in your overall online marketing approach.

It goes like this: search engines are delivering a product to their customers, and that product is search results. The search engines know that you are looking for the most relevant sites possible, and they know, too, that people who find sites to be particularly relevant, they like to link to them. Search engines track the number of links there are to any given website, and use this information to help determine where to place the site in the search rankings to give their customers the most relevant sites to choose from. A site that has more links is deemed more valuable to searchers, and is therefore given a higher priority than a site that has fewer links.

To be clear; this is not the ONLY way a search engine grades a site, and there are certainly cases where more links gets trumped by some other data point. Nevertheless; links are important and it makes sense to build as many quality links as you can.

So, how to build links? There are a couple ways to get you started:

1. Make comments on blogs. Find blogs that discuss your market topic and get involved. Make comments on their posts as often as you can. Most blog sites will allow you to add your URL to the comment. If they don’t, move on. When you do make comments, make sure they are thoughtful and that they contribute to the conversation; you don’t want to be seen as an annoyance.
2. Get involved in forum discussions. Forums are a great place to get involved with other birds of a feather, and allow you to make successive comments. In most cases, you can include your URL in each of your comments. Again, make sure you are contributing to the conversation and building your credibility with valid comments. Don’t get into arguments, and try to avoid being critical of other people in the forum. Basically: Play nice in the sandbox.
3. Post news to free news sites. Whenever you post content to your blog, make sure you are taking advantage of opportunities to repost your content. There are a number of free sites out there that allow you to post your news and articles. For news, simply do a search for ‘Free News Posting‘ to find a list of sites that allow you to post for free. For regular articles, use sites like StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, Delicious.com and even Facebook and Twitter.

Note that all of these sites are free. All it takes is a little elbow grease and your site will begin to shine.

A final point: Make sure you choose your sites carefully. As a popularity contest, your reputation is built on the reputation of the sites from which you are linked. The more popular the site, the better. Like being a good friend of the most popular kid in school, you get some of the credibility from the leading sites. Conversely, links from bad sites known for spam or suspicious practices will tend to hurt your site. So be selective.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

We all know Content is King, so this is a big issue and needs to be resolved for our online social marketing to take off and become effective.

Services such as my own ListPipe help by writing great content for you, and then personalizing it so that you can have ownership over the resulting snowball as the content rolls out to your friends and friends of friends.

When developing your own online content, look to sources in three areas:

1. Company or Corporate Website.

There are plenty of stories, news items, and lists of product features on your corporate website to create a story from. Simply pick a product that you like and write a short story about a single component, for instance a single feature or benefit.

One of the reasons we get writer’s block is because there are too many options. I learned this lesson when I used to tell my daughter to clean her room; on some occasions there was so much for her to do that she simply didn’t know where to begin. The job becomes easy once we learn to break it down into bite sized chunks; work on the shoes first, then move to pants, and then shirts, etc. Choose a single feature or benefit, and start from there. No need to do more, just stop at the one item if that’s all you can do.

2. Relevant News Sites.

Look to news sites that cover similar topics as your own, and then give your own opinion about the industry news. You should have a handful of related websites in your browser bookmarks, and you should be browsing them occasionally to see what others in the industry are saying. Frequently you will come across a new story that sparks your interest or raises your motivation to comment. Perfect! Copy a portion of the story and write a paragraph about your thoughts or opinion on the excerpt.

3. Listen to Your Community.

Watch your Facebook or Twitter accounts to see what others are saying about your products or marketplace. Again, this is a great opportunity to formulate an opinion and write about it. Better still, look for opportunities to clarify your friends’ statements or opinions with your own research; referencing other websites and adding research to a social story is a great way to create content and a great way to build credibility for yourself as a researcher-in-the-know. Post it to your blog, and then announce it back to your Facebook or Twitter community.

Finally; one of the barriers to writing is feeling overwhelmed by a false expectation. Particularly with volume; many start an article feeling a need to write a 1200-word article with research, references and footnotes like we learned (and hated) in school. This is not necessary. Shoot for articles between 250 and 300 words. This is three or four paragraphs, or about half a page of writing. Most of us speak this many words in less than a minute of conversation. Next time you are on the phone with a friend, make a note of any comments you feel might make great content for your next post.

In summary; look to your company website, relevant news sites, and your social network for great ideas to write about.

Hate to read? Listen to this week’s podcast social media marketing tip of the week right here…

1. Research
2. Creative writing
3. Linking

Before we get into those, let’s talk about ‘why’.

Keywords are basically the anchor text of your article that help readers, and search engines, determine your relevance. In terms of ‘relevance’, there are no wrong answers; you are not trying to be relevant to a common standard. Rather, you are trying to be relevant to your own chosen topic.

For instance; If you are writing about ‘humanitarianism’, you will want your keywords to be relevant to the subject of ‘humanitarianism’. Relevant terms could be ‘philanthropy’ or ‘charity’. Conversely, you will want to avoid a concentration of key words that are not relevant such as ‘Brittany Spears’ or ‘horseback riding’. Unless, of course, your humanitarianism involves giving a horse to Brittany, but you get the picture.

It all has to do with ‘relevance’. Relevance is how closely related your keywords are to the subject you most want to be indexed for in the search engines. As the search engines scour your post for relevant keywords, they will choose the predominant topics and use those to index your article. In this way, a reader can find you when they search for ‘humanitarianism’ in a search engine. The key for you is in making the relevant keywords within your article easy to identify. The easier it is for a search engine to determine the keywords in your article, the more prominent you will be in the search results for your given topic.

Research

One of the most daunting tasks in effective blogging is in finding the most appropriate keywords. It’s not that hard, but does take a little ‘know-how’.

The first steps in your research are to determine the subject of your article, to outline topics, and to write down your assumed keywords. Assuming keywords is easy; just imagine what your audience might type into a search engine in hopes of finding your specific article.

Next, you’ll want to conduct some scientific research to confirm your choices, or to find viable alternatives.

A great tool for this task is found at http://google.com/keywords . The keyword research tool at Google is as good as any, and takes advantage of Googles remarkable collection of data. Once you enter your assumed keyword idea in their form, and get past the annoying-but-necessary captcha, you’ll be presented with a spreadsheet of data that now requires some study.

Listed in order of relevance, with the most relevant term at the top, you will see a list of related terms with information about how much competition there is for the term, and how many local searches and global searches have been conducted on the term in the last month.

Your job now is to find keyword alternatives that have a good balance of competition vs hits. The higher the competition value, the more the keyword is used in other blogs and the lower the chances are for you to stick out among the crowd. High competition keywords are tempting because of the high number of hits they usually receive. However you may do better by selecting a low competition term and shooting for a greater piece of a smaller pie. You don’t necessarily need to avoid high competition terms, so long as you are working in the lower competition ones, too.

Note that further down in the spreadsheet you will find a list of alternative terms that may help in your creative writing exercise.

Creative Writing

Perhaps the most difficult step in your effort to incorporate keywords, creative writing now requires that you come up with a story, and develop the ability to include terms in an appropriate density. You’ll want to include as many as 10 percent keywords to your SEO copywritng. Tricky, but over time it becomes second nature. Ten percent may be a bit too much for some articles, so shoot for a minimum of five percent.

It is also important to maintain ‘human readability’. The search engines understand language, grammar, and punctuation, so you will want to pay attention to these important aspects of writing to avoid appearing as spam and receiving an index penalty. Write your article in natural language, and use keywords as often as you can without creating lists or appearing to be blatant.

Be sure to modify your keywords with localization as well as with descriptive terms. There are two ways to modify your keywords;

1. With a descriptive modifier, so that if our primary keyword is ‘humanitarian’, we can say ‘humanitarian relief’ to make it a stronger keyword phrase.
2. With a localization such as ‘Miami Humanitarian’, which helps the search engines localize my search index for people within the Miami area searching for the term ‘humanitarian’.

Localization has become one of the most important aspects of keyword usage because of the mobile revolution, where people search from a mobile device to find local products and services. The search engines have responded with more localized search results and listings. You can take advantage of this simply by adding the name of your town in front of a keyword.

Keyword Linking

Finally, be sure to link your keywords to appropriate pages around your site, or to an appropriate page on your home site. A few rules of thumb to consider include:

Don’t link excessively. In a 300-word article it is appropriate to link 3-4 keywords. More and you will appear to be spamming, and will dilute the authority you are giving to each keyword. (Authority is a measurement of strength based on the relevance of the article.)

Don’t link a specific keyword more than once; no need to waste authority on the same keyword. Keep it simple for the search engines to follow, and don’t waste their time by leading them to the same place from the same keyword multiple times.

Use alternate tags to add information to your links. This is a great way to help the search engines understand more clearly your terms and their specific modifiers.

I talked about keywords in this week’s tech call with Paul Jensen. Here’s an excerpt if you’re the listening type:

When posting to a blog, frequency is often a leading factor. Post length is not as critical, but there are some guidelines.

Writing as few as 50-100 words is adequate. That’s about one or two paragraphs. An article of this length is easy enough to produce without racking your brain for something good to produce, and provides enough juice for the search engines while being short enough to keep your human audience reading.

A perfectly sized post will be about 300 words. This is a good amount of info to provide for SEO, and is just enough for a quick read by your friends. Articles that approach 600 words are too much and risk getting truncated by the search engines, or not finished by humans who loose interest at the 300-400 mark. (interest isn’t fair; usually it’s that we don’t have a lot of time to absorb your wordy story.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

A few weeks ago, Google confirmed this in an article titled Google Becomes More Local. The article was not about Google’s plans to open local shops across the country, it was about Google’s understanding that when we search for products and services, we usually want them in the geographic area from which we are searching.

Apple, too, recently revealed that they will support geolocation services in their new iPhone 3.0 software. Geolocation services will allow you to search from your iPhone and receive results based on your current location. Imagine standing on a city corner and searching for ’sushi’ and getting step-by-step directions to the nearest location for lunch. Pretty cool, and very powerful.

To take advantage of these new technologies, and to attract local search traffic to your site, you need to be incorporating geo-tagging and geo-centric keywords. One of the easiest ways to do this is to include the name of your city or town as a modifier for keywords in your articles. For instance, instead of simply stating that you are a ’sushi restaurant’, you might mention that you are an ‘Provo sushi restaurant‘. Using the name of your city helps the search engines understand your location, and is a good way to help capture a typical keyword search.

It helps to understand what your customers may be looking for when they type in a keyword string in a search engine. knowing they may be looking for your service in your town, or even local surrounding cities, will help you attract local customers to your site.

ListPipe articles always include geo-tagging. Our articles are linked using a combination of city names and keywords to help search engines better judge the type of service our customers are providing to a geographic area.

This is true in all forms of writing, but is most critical when writing your marketing content. It is especially critical when writing for the web, because you are working to appeal to human readership as well as search engines.

I was treated to a wonderful video on the web that illustrates the powerful meaning of words. The video at the following link is five minutes long. I don’t think you will find the time wasted; check it out.

HISTORIA DE UN LETRERO (THE STORY OF A SIGN)

The Story of a Sign