How's your website, then?

I'm not asking whether it's a good site or not -- how could it be, if I didn't write it for you? -- but what its performance is like. Is it slow to load? Does it have problems with certain web browsers? Occasionally you'll find that code working perfectly on, say Internet Explorer, doesn't work with Firefox. And vice-versa. Coding problems?

How should I know? Who... who cares? you ask.

Because it's important. You only have seconds -- tenths of seconds, even -- to make an impression on people who come to your site. If the site isn't working, has dead links or some old code that doesn't work and leaves the site with blank areas, you can bet your life those lovely, potential customers will click away at the drop of a pixel.

Wake up and smell the Mugicha! After reading this post you no longer have any excuses for not knowing. There's a website I often turn to when I want to see how my copywriting site is doing, performance-wise. It makes for uncomfortable reading, sometimes, because it doesn't hesitate to tell me stuff I don't particular want to hear -- the site's too heavy, too many images, too many elements, et depressing cetera. It gives very easy-to-understand advice about the size of your site and how long it'd take to load up.

I have no connection whatsoever with the owners of the site, this isn't an affiliate link, so click in confidence. Here it is:

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Put in the full address of your website and check out what it says. Pretty eye-opening stuff, eh? You didn't realise it was that bad, did you?!

I'm not particularly interested in contacting the owners of the site to ask for their optimisation services, but the results I get when I check my site are very interesting. Useful, too. Oh, and completely free. Check it out.

If you're the person responsible for your website's content, you know how hard it can be to get everything right.

You need to have the raw materials, the facts and figures around which you're creating your copy. You have to think about the tone of what you're writing and how it fits in with the rest of the site. You need to construct your argument carefully, deciding the audience you're writing for. You also have to make sure everything is completely consistent, style-wise. Do you say "you are" or "you're"? Do you have them both? "It is" or "it's"? Stuff that may seem over-analysed and not worth the trouble, but absolutely necessary.

That's why it's so maddening when you get ripped off. When someone trawls through your site, sees something they like, and then just steals it for their own site, maybe changing the odd word here or there. And what can you do? The Internet is global, so anyone, anywhere, could right now be looking at your site and thinking "I'll have a piece of that". What's to stop them changing a few things around and then passing it off as something they wrote themselves?

I'll introduce you to a site I use from time to time. It's called "Copyscape" and means I don't worry about people pinching stuff from my website anymore.

The site allows you to input your website's URL. Press "Go" and their search function will do a trawl of the Internet to see if your text has been stolen. It's completely free and will let you know where and by whom your stuff's been stolen. If you have a large site, their "Premium" service allows you to check up to 10,000 pages in a single click, for 5 cents per search. 10,000 flipping pages! What kind of psychopath has a site with 10,000 pages?!

Anyway. Me? I'm cheap, so I just use the freebie part of it. But why not have a look for yourself? I have no links with the makers of the site whatsoever, I just think it's a handy service. Check it out here:

http://copyscape.com/

Good hunting.

One of the things you should probably do if you're trying to improve your website's position on the search engines is check out what your competition's doing and spy on them from time to time.

Some of what I’ve done on my main site has come through seeing what other websites (not just copywriters) have done and ripping them off. I believe the term du jour for that is "modelling".

Not the actual content of the site -- heaven forbid -- but things like design, use of white space, images, and also what they've decided to do with things like metatags (page titles, page descriptions and keywords). Most of the time I find myself making a revolted face and thinking "Well, I wouldn't do it that way", but you can learn as much about what you want and need to do by seeing examples of what you don't want sometimes.

Checking out a website's metatags can be very instructional and tell you a lot about what the website owner's intentions are. The three main parts to check are:

Title -- the bit you see in the blue bar at the very top of your screen when you look at a website. Very important for SEO, because the search engines look at it as your way of defining who you are and which keywords you want to be found for.

My site's homepage title is: "Daniboy - Marketing Copywriting | SEO Copywriter | Ad Writer". It's 60 characters long -- you should aim for up to 70 characters, maximum; anything more than that gets ignored by the search engines -- and tells you exactly what keywords I want people to find me for.

Description -- the two-line long blurb you see for each site when you have a page of search engine results. It's not given SEO weighting by the search engines, but writing a description that gives an accurate, interesting-sounding view of the page you want clicked will affect how many people looking at the page of search engine results actually bother to click on your link.

My site's homepage description is "My name's Daniel O'Connor and I'm a freelance copywriter. I've written for solo organisations and world-famous corporations. I can write for you, too." It's exactly 150 characters long, which is the length you should aim to hit. Anything longer than 150 will leave characters 151 onwards with the dreaded ellipsis of death that comes about when descriptions are too lon...

The search engines expect you to have original titles and descriptions for every page of your site, by the way. Just as every page of your site is unique (right?), so the way you describe it should be unique. No repetition of titles and descriptions. Yes, it is a pain.

Keywords -- not given any SEO weight, but an interesting way for you to judge the intentions of the person writing the page you're viewing.

My homepage keywords are -- and yes, I know this is too long and should be pruned -- "copywriter, copy-writer, copy writer, copywriting, copy-writing, copy writing, copywrite, copy-write, copy write, writing copy, write copy, technical copywriter, technical copy-writer, technical copy writer, SEO copywriter, SEO copy-writer, SEO copy write". I KNOW! How many possible combinations of "copywriter" can there be?

That sounds incredibly time consuming, though, doesn't it? Having to plough through the background HTML of every website you want to spy on looking for the stuff you need hidden in the code?

Here's an add-on for Firefox that will change the nature of your espionage. It's called SearchStatus and makes life very easy when you want to quickly check out what your adversary is trying to do with his/her/its site:

Here’s the link:

http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

This is what it will show you once you download the add-on:

• Meta Tags -- as discussed above -- titles, descriptions and keywords
• See in Archive.org -- almost magically interesting: Archive.org takes regular snapshots of websites over the years and stores them in its cache. Use this function to see how a website has changed over the years
  
• Whois information -- see how long a website's been in existence -- it's important, because domain age is given a weighting in SEO. The older, the better
  
• Show sitemap.xml -- view all the pages on the website, even the ones that aren't linked to from the main menu (other than the ones that are specifically barred from public view)
  
• Keyword Density -- see how much the site writer is trying to pound the reader over the head with the repetition of their chosen keywords
• And much, much more
  

It’s gold, pure gold. You may not know what some of the things I’ve written above actually mean right now, but try it out and see. Check up on your enemies. I guarantee it’ll help your website’s SEO.

Oh, and hey, nearly forgot to mention: if you have read this far and thought "Nice, I learned something from this", why not click on the "Tweet" and "Like" buttons below? I will love you long time if you do this.

A quickie today. But it's a goodie.

If you're in charge of your website and how it appears on the search engines, you've definitely heard of Google's "Panda" and "Penguin" updates.

No? Well, simply, they were major changes to the algorithm Google uses to decide which sites rank well (and which ones don't). Meaningless, spammy links to your website were no longer given credit -- in fact, Google penalised sites it thought were using slimy methods to "game" their algorithm. Have a look at this page on my main website for more info.

Some sites saw their positions on Google go through the floor (which, of course, directly affected how many potential customers were finding them). Some sites actually did better than before.

Do you have any idea how your site did? No? Interested in finding out?

All you need to find out is a current Google Analytics account that is able to go back a couple of years. If you haven't yet set up an account or have only done so recently, this won't, I'm afraid, work for you.

Then go to Barracuda Digital's "Panguin" tool. It'll show you the dates of the major updates and how your site's traffic was affected in a very easy-to-follow graph. You'll no longer have any doubt about whether your site was affected by the updates.

It was a... sobering* experience for me.

*I'm using the word "sobering" in its less conventional "Heartbreaking, promoting suicidal feelings" definition.

Ever heard of the “long tail”?

It’s something Amazon.com and all big retailers are aware of and work to use effectively. To give a quick definition, it’s where the collective demand for less-popular items (say, “Fly Fishing” by J.R. Hartley) can be greater than the demand for the most popular items (the Harry Potters and Dan Browns) added together.

How can this be?

It’s because there aren’t that many really popular items, but there are loads of less popular (but still profit-making) items.

So whereas the big-name items get all the publicity and marketing efforts directed towards them, a lot of the real money gets made in lesser-known, less-competitive markets.

This can apply equally well to your website and the phrases you’re hoping to be found for on the search engines. You’ll have your big-hitter keywords and keyphrases, sure, but there will also be a much greater number of word combinations people will use to reach you that you weren’t even aware of.

Until now.

If you're responsible for your site's optimisation, I’m about to recommend that you try using a bit of paid-for online software called “HitTail”. I’m not associated with them in any way and can’t guarantee that your particular site will be a perfect match for what they offer, but give 'em a try.

HitTail lets you know in real time how people are finding you and gives suggestions on promising keywords and keyphrases that you might think harder about working to optimise. Some of the suggestions might be slightly off base -- it’s an algorithmic bit of software, after all, not put together by humans -- but a lot will make you think “Aha! Hhhmm, hadn’t thought of that one before. I’ll try it!”

It all helps your website to be found on the search engines, which can’t be bad. Give it a go! They offer a 21-day trial, so at the very least you’ll have three weeks of free suggestions.

Here’s the URL:

http://www.hittail.com/

It’s pretty easy to set up on your site -- all you need to do is add a tiny bit of code to the site's background HTML -- so g’wan!