New digital marketing series from yours truly

UPDATE - 2022: These articles are now offline, but since they are still very popular, I updated them and shared them in a new blog post, read it here 

Hello, long time, no see... That's because I was working on a full-time publishing project inhouse while doing all my freelance writing in the wee hours of the morning. I wrote a few online travel guides for a tour operator - a bit surreal since I was waxing lyrical about sunny, unspoilt beaches while sitting by a hot radiator - and keyed in a few articles on digital marketing for SMEs for the Digital Response's blog (pictured above - link to articles at the bottom of this post).

So far I have written four guest posts, which you might be interested in browsing - you might find themes I have touched upon in previous posts on this blog, but it's all new, improved stuff, honest! Here they are in chronological order:

1. 8 steps to digital domination: how to start a digital marketing campaign from scratch
2. Creative content to capture customers: content is king!
3. What is SEO? Search engine optimization for SMEs: SEO made simple
4. Social media: your launch pad for interactive engagement: SM for B2C & B2B

Is SEO dying?

Is SEO dying? Shall we call the undertakers and order
a plot and tombstone? Typical, I just started this blasted blog

This morning I read an article on Forbes that intrigued me so much I'm changing the schedule of my posts to mull over it. A kind of STOP PRESS, STOP PRESS, BREAKING NEWS moment. 

The first half of the deadline is alarming: The Death of SEO... then it continues: the Rise of Social, PR, And Real Content. Phew, huge relief, I thought my career choice got canned, but no, I’m fine and dandy as a copywriter. But what about my newly launched SEO sideline?

Let’s rewind. An SEO guru made this statement over a business lunch: “Google is in the process of making the SEO industry obsolete, SEO will be dead in two years.”

Ken Krogue, the article's writer, was justifiably blown away. He posted this “bomb” on his blog and got a mixed bag of comments, several not very complimentary. Then Ken (if I may use his first name - we are all friends in the virtual world) goes on to describe what SEO is and the difference between white hat and black hat SEO. Now, this post is not going to be a blow-by-blow account of this intriguing article, so read the rest for yourself here.

White hat, black hat SEO

I agree that Google wants (no, demands) good quality content, but as a white-hat SEO copywriter I sometimes feel that there are dark arts still lurking: websites that are just a long list of links, ripped-off content from legitimate sites, or (worse) they are pretty good on the surface but have a page somewhere where the black arts are deployed to massage rankings. I find it particularly irritating when this is done by a smug copywriter who thinks he/she is the bee’s knees, yet has used dodgy SEO to get a high ranking for a keyword that is not relevant to their business but is a potential money spinner. I do rant about that on Twitter a bit, but I’m not the only one.... Others are getting pissed off about it, after all we all want to maintain a good image about our industry of choice.

So the white hatters are trying to fly the flag of quality content. Trouble is that this good  content is time consuming to produce and costs money - money that some clients are not prepared to pay. Yes, they are prepared to pay the designer top rates (mostly - designers feel free to share), but the copywriter? Oh, no, they don’t have much left in the budget for copy, the SEO specialist they hired after the designer has seen to that. So does this all mean that SEO copywriters will rule? I mean, content is king, all these digital conferences are saying that loud... Will the SEO expert wither and die? Will white hatters trounce the black hatters?

Well, those black hatters won’t leave without a fight. But yes, eventually the black hatters will have to go, the link builders will get shafted and the keywords stuffers will get stuffed.

Google is working on it. The Penguin update has started the process but I have a sneaky feeling it will be a slow death - think Star Wars, Darth Vader was a challenging foe to say the least. The dark side has plenty of wiles to deploy.

Power to the social media people

So links are dead ducks, hello Social Media! A social media strategy is vital for exposure. Everybody knows that, but do companies? Who is the real social media specialist? Usually somebody who has a communications background, in plain words, somebody who can write engaging copy. These specialists will come from  journalism, marketing, advertising and PR backgrounds. 

Scratch the surface and you will find that marketing principles have not changed much. They might have acquired shiny new buzzwords but they are based on consumer behaviour, which is based on human instincts, which haven’t changed. Humans are still trapped in the Freudian dichotomy of sex and death. Sex sells, death does too, albeit indirectly (life is short, you cannot miss out on this and that! Buy that car, live in the fast lane and so on...).

Saintly SEO, I’m getting all philosophical here... COD alert! So basically, you need good content. The problem is what is good content? Which themes and voices engage? This is the challenge. It’s not all about pretty words, it’s finding something that strikes a chord - writing for the web is not like writing for print media, oh no. 

But, the article continues, it’s not only about copy - it’s about images, videos and all things creative. You will probably know that tagging images and videos is a basic SEO strategy that works. If you have videos and images in your blog or website, do spare some time captioning them adequately. And do the same when writing for Pinterest, as this enlightened colleague explains (click here).

And to end this post, I leave you with Ken’s summing-up quote: “It is the overly aggressive marketers that always spoil it for everyone.” I know plenty of those, guilty of starting conversations in LinkedIn that are actually thinly veiled sales pitches.

P.S. This is a Seth-Godin-quotation-free zone. Sethsayers, please refrain from quoting.

What is SEO?

Wikipedia says: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural," or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic"), search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list...


This is a good definition of what SEO is (if you want to read the whole lot just click Wikipedia). A website is much like any product, it needs some sort of marketing so web surfers can find it. Whether you are running a business or just creating a website as a hobby, you will want to engage with others, which is the point of the internet (read its fascinating story here). The internet is a network after all. It allows sharing of resources and information. And a lot of it is still free. Of course, this depends from country to country - personally I have found that Italian sites are less generous with free content compared to British and American websites.


Tons of free stuff online
The cynic in you will think: but why are companies and individuals offering stuff for free? There is a variety of reasons: personal promotion, brand engagement (marketing, advertising, corporate identity), willingness to contribute (many people like to help so take on unpaid volunteering roles, so why not be helpful online?), the thrill of being an authority, followed by people all over the world (if you like to wear an expert hat, that is), creativity (artists, writers, musicians...) and inclusiveness (yes, if you live in an isolated area or work from home, virtual watercoolers and answering people's questions/dilemmas can make you feel part of a community). 


Hang on, this is not an academic tome. Back to the point, SEO allows your website to get good rankings for your selected keywords. What is this keyword business? Well, as in real life people are really fond of labelling things and people, the same occurs in the virtual world. If you want surfers to find your website or blog, sprinkle relevant words that relate to it. Not any odd words off the top of your head, specific ones that rank high in searches. 


Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Google keyword tool

When I offer any SEO advice, this is where I go to find the right keywords for any business (including mine). Shooting keywords at random is not a good idea, nor is keyword stuffing (read about Penguin and Panda here). You need to find out which keywords rank high and use those in your website and blog (if you are using Blogger, keywords are called Labels). So you found your keywords/labels, what's next? 


To illustrate my example I am copying and pasting part of the source of amazon.co.uk below. Can you see the real words among the gobbledygook (aka html code)? So go to your site's source and put those relevant keywords in. I'd have a nice sentence about you in the description line, rather than disjointed words, search engines like this best. Really, just a short one describing your business. If you want more about going to the source, click here. And if you want to know what an SEO specialist is, click here.

	<meta name="description" content="Low prices on digital cameras, MP3, sports equipment, books, music, DVDs, video games, home &amp; garden and much more. Free UK delivery on Amazon orders."/>
	<meta name="keywords" content="digital camera, LCD TV, books, DVD, low prices, video games, pc games, software, electronics, home, garden, video, amazon"/>
	And with this I sign off and let you mull it over. DEEP END WARNING! If you are working in marketing, you might want to check out this great discussion on LinkedIn:  What is the next 'BIG thing' in digital marketing? You will have to join the Digital Marketing group to do so as it's a closed group.

How to SEO: what's in a name?

SEO is like a rollecoaster ride, everybody is on a steep learning curve.
Expertise comes and goes at the beat of an algorithm

Hello fellow surfer,

I wanted to call this blog SEO 4 Stupid but had to bow to optimization rules and choose the search friendly How to SEO. If, like me, you are an ex print journalist, you will get my drift - the internet is not “puntastic” (certainly not in titles, crossheads and image tagging, thank-you-very-much).

Web surfers search using simple, plain words. If you are looking for a restaurant that serves good food, you are more likely to use plain English (aka good restaurants in Milan), you are not going to type “mouthwatering meals in Milan”, unless you are pretty weird and like alliterations too much for your own good. But hang on, I did just that and got a mixed bag with mouth watering and mouth-watering and mouthwatering used all randomly (the subeditor in me curled up and died there). Predictably the search “good restaurants in Milan” yielded better websites, so there you are, just ignore those voices in your head and you will be fine.

Who runs How to SEO?

I'm an ex stupid (I hope), ex digital dummy, ex technosaurus.... call me what you like. For byte sake, I grew up using a typewriter, got my first PC at 29, started in journalism when there was no internet... Yes we used encyclopedias and the humble phone for fact-checking back then.

Basically I’m old compared to many surfers, but not past it. I started dabbling online around the time of the millennium bug (what happened to that, eh?) with a website hosted on the old trusty Geocities (RIP) called London Cheapskate (RIP and Amen). I became a blogger in 2005 and totally embraced digital in 2008. Why? Because I was a print journalist, the recession came and I had to do something else. So in 2008 I designed my own website altering a template. I spent less than £40 on it but hours of toil to learn how to optimize it, though. I wrote an article about the process for an US site in early 2011 (http://suite101.com/article/setting-up-a-website-on-a-budget-a339771). A lot of things have changed SEOwise since then, but the basic advice still stands.

What are my credentials?

I’m self taught. I do have a degree but it has nothing to do with SEO (don’t judge, the internet wasn’t there, at least not for public consumption). I could say that I’m an alumni of the University of Google. I have found heaps of useful free tutorials and learnt a lot in the past four years. I learnt on-the-job too, having worked on digital marketing/advertising campaigns, run blogs and written digital features for online publications.

So here is a public thankyou for all the generous techies who share their expertise on the web. I learnt nearly everything I know from you. SEO is a fast moving, slippery to grasp, rollercoaster ride, so you can say I’m still learning – whoever tells you they know everything about SEO is lying. Nobody knows what will happen next, which social media tools will grab surfers' fancy (Pinterest now and perhaps troubled Yahoo’s Pipes later?), what piece of software will revolutionise web use – except tech innovators, of course. Sadly I’m not one and, like the hamster, my wheel is spinning faster to catch up.

Content is king, so what?

Finally! A marketing conference in London backed what all us scribblers already knew, that good copy is crucial for SEO. All those link builders and key stuffers got their fingers burnt when Google launched the Panda and Penguin updates. I have no sympathy for content farms, people who talk about SEO like it’s a dark art or self-styled SEO experts. How can you be an expert of something that moves at such a fast pace! Not even Socrates claimed he knew it all (being a classical Greek philosopher he was talking of knowledge rather than the web). So I do hope those dodgy link builders are being dodged and the key stuffers are getting stuffed.

Optimize to capitalise

So you have great content to offer your readers, what now? That’s where this blog comes in, explaining what SEO is and what it can do for you. I will share what I learnt and showcase really helpful articles (no mumbo jambo here) that explain in plain words what SEO is all about. I have started on a smaller scale on Twitter with my #TweetsforSEO, so follow @simonecas to nab those if your attention span is limited to 140 characters. I will be writing simple posts here but also throw in advanced stuff here and there. I will signpost these with a DEEP END WARNING. So if you are just starting out as a surfing SEOer, you can easily skip those hints till you are ready.

Disclaimer: Everybody is a SEO learner, myself included. I don’t know it all (my partner might disagree, but let’s not have a domestic here). So please comment if I get the wrong end of the stick and/or you have some great tips to share. If I had to tag myself, here are my keywords: SEO copywriter, marketing copywriter, journalist, editor, writer, newsletter designer. If you want to know more, visit www.simonecastello.co.uk. 


P.S. I hope you join in so I'm not talking to my monitor or, worse still, have another conversation with the voices in my head.