What’s the point of having a website if no one ever finds it?

This website, for example, is responsible for the bulk of my own business. I get calls every week from prospects who say, “I found your site. The information is great. I wanted to ask about a project …”

This is not by accident. Like any carefully constructed website, mine is easy to find because of a few basic principles of SEO or “search engine optimization.”

SEO has become a deep and complex area of expertise, but there are a few basics that are responsible for most of the results you get.

Understand how search works. Search engines are complex, but they aren’t very smart. They don’t understand the meaning of what you’re looking for on the Internet. They just look for the words you search for. So if you type “airplane” into Google, it will show you pages where it finds the word “airplane.” If it can’t find that word on a particular page, it won’t show you the page.

Make a list of your keywords. If you’re selling gourmet coffee, make a list of all the words and phrases associated with gourmet coffee and the specific product names and features on your site, such as “gourmet coffee,” “gourmet coffee beans,” “gourmet coffee reviews,” etc.

Use different keywords on every page. Think of each page of your site as a “doorway” into your business. The more doorways, the more people who can come in. Create a separate page for each word or phrase on your keyword list.

Use unique page titles. Don’t confuse the page title with the headline. A page title is what search engines consider the “name” of any given page. It appears in the bar at the top of your browser.

For example, look at the top left of your browser and you’ll see that the title of the page you are reading now is “Simple SEO tips.” But the headline is “5 simple SEO tips to boost your search traffic.”

The page title is the most important place to put your keywords. It should be 5 to 10 words long with your keywords as close to the beginning of the title as possible. The page title should be different on every page of your site. Rewriting your page titles is the easiest way to improve your search engine visibility.

Use keywords in page text. At minimum, this includes using keywords in your headlines and subheads and in the first 200 characters of the page text. Don’t repeat the same keywords over and over hoping to trick search engines. This is called “keyword stuffing” and, while it used to work years ago, it doesn’t today. In fact, most major search engines will penalize you for this. Pages should read naturally, using keywords where they make sense.

There’s a lot more to SEO than these 5 tips, some of it simple, some of it arcane. And what works changes a little every day as search engines evolve and become better at connecting people to the content they’re looking for.

Someday, search engines may be so smart they’ll know what your pages are about regardless of the words you use. But until then, remember that no matter what your page is about, it won’t be found by a search engine for a keyword unless that word appears on the page.

So if you’re selling a vacuum cleaner and insist on calling it a “home dirt remover,” people searching for “vacuum cleaner” simply won’t find it.

Does all this SEO stuff really work? Well, a few years ago I gave my website a total overhaul, using basic SEO principles. Soon, my site went from search purgatory to appearing on pages 1, 2, or 3 for a variety of keywords.

The rule of thumb is, most people won’t search beyond the first few pages. So if your site doesn’t come up high in the results, it’s as if you have no site at all.

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Eye tracking studies have revealed valuable information about how people read and interact with websites. One study, Eyetrack III, published a summary of their eye tracking results for news sites.

While this is just one eye tracking study focused on a particular type of site, I think there are instructive nuggets here for any informational website.

In no particular order, here are 12 results I found particularly interesting.

1.Headlines draw eyes before pictures. This might be surprising for some people since the trend has been to add photos and graphics specifically to draw the eye. Even I have been adding more photos to my blog to spice it up a bit.

But the participants in this study looked at headlines, especially in the upper left of the page, before they looked at photos when they landed on a page. So you can’t rely on eye candy to make up for poor headlines.

2. People scan the first couple words of a headline. Yes, long headlines can work. But this study suggests that people scan the first few words before deciding whether to continue reading.

This means you should front-load your headlines with the most interesting and provocative words. It’s also an argument for getting your keywords up front in headlines.

3. People scan the left side of a list of headlines. This is related to the previous point. When presented with a list of headlines or links, people will scan down the left side, looking at the first couple words, to find something they’re interested in. They don’t necessarily read each line beginning to end.

The implication is the same as before. Get your most mind catching words up front.

4. Your headline must grab attention in less than 1 second. Online readers are grazers. They move fast and nibble. If you want to hook them into spending time reading about something, you have to catch their attention very, very fast.

No nonsense. No meandering copy. No “throat clearing” to fill space. You have to get to the point instantly.

5. Smaller type promotes closer reading. This makes sense because smaller type is harder to read. So, to read it, you have to really focus. Larger type promotes scanning rather than reading.

Be careful with this one. No one is suggesting you shrink your web type to make it barely legible. I think the takeaway is to avoid making your type too big if you want close reading and avoid making it too small if you want to communicate rapidly.

6. Navigation at the top of the page works best. I find this interesting from a design point of view since many sites now use side navigation. I take this one with grain of salt, since the study also shows that side navigation can work fine.

The point may be that anything at the top of a page will be seen immediately. And since top navigation must be simple because of space limits, top navigation is probably much simpler to use.

7. Short paragraphs encourage reading. No surprise here. Even in print this is true. Big blocks of type look imposing and difficult, like reading a Faulkner novel where a paragraph goes on seemingly forever.

In online writing as in most ad writing, you have to forget normal paragraph development. Breaks should be logical, but they’re organized into a flow of ideas rather than distinct paragraphs.

8. Introductory paragraphs enjoy high readership. Just to be clear, an intro paragraph is a content summary that appears after the headline and before the main text. It’s common in some news writing. I’ve also used it in print ads which are designed in the form of an article, often called an “advertorial.”

The downside is that while intros get read, this study says they don’t affect readership of the main text. Maybe they help improve comprehension. The study doesn’t say.

9. Ad placement in the top and left positions works best. For anyone familiar with “heat maps,” this make sense. The eye tends to start in the upper left of a page. So an ad, or anything else, in that area will be noticed.

This is another one you have to be wary of. Ad blindness tends to happen when people get used to seeing ads in a particular place. So even the prime upper left area won’t work so well if you always put ads there.

10. People notice ads placed close to popular content. Obviously. This mimics the well-known idea in the offline world where ads are placed anywhere eyeballs point.

This is why ads right over a urinal work. Men look straight ahead, usually at a blank wall 12 inches from their face when standing at a urinal, so any reading material there will get read.

11. People read text ads more than graphic ads. Not everyone will agree with this one. But it makes sense if you consider that information is usually in the form of text. So people looking for information are looking for text, not pictures.

However, graphics can be useful for conveying information that is difficult to communicate in pure text, such as how something looks, mathematical information, before and after comparisons, etc. Which leads us to the last tactic.

12. Multimedia works better than text for unfamiliar or conceptual information. Reading relies on people having some understanding of the subject. The more familiar they are with the subject, the faster and easier reading is.

If you’re trying to describe a process, for example, a video or illustration conveys this information better than text.

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Everyone understands the idea of theft. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, it’s stealing. This includes intellectual property, such as written content. If you didn’t write it, it doesn’t belong to you and you can’t use it without permission.

Easy, right? Well, apparently, it’s not such a clear idea any longer.

The Internet has made content theft simple and pervasive.  From taking music and artwork to the wholesale heisting of entire Web sites, theft happens all the time.

One of the most common forms of content theft is the stealing of blog content through a technique known as “feed scraping.”

Every blog, including this one, publishes a “feed.” The idea behind feeds is to syndicate your content so that it gets wider circulation. You can, for example, subscribe to the Direct Creative feed here. When I publish a new item, you either get it e-mailed to you or it shows up in whatever feedreading program you choose, including many popular browsers.

But what some people do is take this feed and republish it on their own site, usually as a fast, easy way to add content that attracts traffic for their own ads and affiliate links.

Why am I talking about this? Because my content is stolen frequently. At least one site I’ve seen is made up of nothing but my articles and a bunch of Google AdSense ads. Recently, I found a site purportedly on direct mail that had republished about a dozen of my blog posts with no permission, no byline, and no links to my original posts.

I looked up the contact information with a WHOIS search, and e-mailed the site administrator. I told him to stop stealing my content. To his credit, he responded and was nice about it, but maintained that he wasn’t stealing anything.

I’m sorry that you feel I’m stealing your content, but I’m simply using a common feed aggregator to beef up content for some of my blogs.

“Beef up.” Translated: I don’t want to write my own content. I’d rather steal it.

Why is this important for you? If you have a business blog, post good content, and have a fair amount of traffic, it’s likely that your content is being stolen. This is not only irritating, unethical, and illegal, it can actually hurt your blog. Republishing your articles will create duplicate Web content that can siphon off traffic and lower your placement on search engine results.

And just in case you’re not convinced that this sort of thing is wrong, here’s what Jonathan Baily from Plagiarism Today has to say about it:

… scraping is a classic example of what is not fair use. It takes the whole work, reproduces it, usually for commercial purposes and often without attribution, while offering no commentary, criticism or educational value. It also significantly damages the market for the work by creating a duplicate version of it.

Is there anything you can do to stop content theft? Yes.

• You can publish only excerpts in your feed instead of full content. This is an option in FeedBurner and other feed services. This makes your feed less useful, but knocks out most feed scrapers.

• You can add a copyright notice or Creative Common License to your feed that specifies what rights you grant to others. Again, some feed services such as FeedBurner let you insert some kind of copyright notice automatically.

• You can install a blog plugin, such as CopyFeed for WordPress, that will insert a configurable copyright warning and set up a digital fingerprint that lets you search the Web for content theft. I’ve just installed this and will see how it works.

• You can also do manual searches for the post titles on your blog to discover who is lifting your content. Or you can set up Google Alerts to automatically search for and report on key words, post titles, or your blog address.

And what do you do when you find a thief? It depends on how miffed you are.

I suggest that you contact the Web site owner and either ask him or her to remove the content or comply with whatever reprint conditions you want. I generally want people to ask me for permission, give me a byline with the article, and provide a clickable link back to my site or to the original content.

There’s a lot of debate on whether or how much duplicate content hurts you. I’d rather not have it, but my articles are all over the Web, so that cat’s out of the bag for me. I usually fair pretty well in the search rankings and my site has been around for many years, so I’m probably not penalized too much. But if your site is new, it could be a different story.

This is just another business issue you have to deal with since the Web is such an important part of marketing now and since blogs are one of the primary tools of the trade.

Have you experienced content theft? What did you do about it? I want to hear what you have to say on this issue.

Update: The guy who scraped my content and said he wasn’t stealing just e-mailed me to say that since he sees scraped content all over the place, he really didn’t know it was wrong. He gave a detailed explanation as his apology … and I believe him. He also made good by adding bylines and links on his site.

A lot of theft is dastardly, but perhaps a lot of it is due to ignorance of copyright and just not taking the time to think about it. Now I feel bad for being terse with the guy, but in the end all is well.

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For copywriters, every advertising medium has its unique requirements.

Direct mail requires you to know postal specifications. Radio advertising requires you to write exceptionally lean. E-mail marketing requires you to deal with the eccentricities of spam and e-mail design.

Then there’s the Web. And one of the requirements these days, according to many gurus, is SEO, search engine optimization. The idea seems pretty simple: to rank well, a Web page must use the keywords people are searching for. Of course, in practice it’s a bit more difficult. In fact, it can be an arcane art that seems to change almost daily.

There are varying points of view on SEO. Many copywriters embrace it. But some think it’s overblown. I have my own ideas, but I’m curious …

What do YOU think? Is SEO important to you? Do you think a copywriter should make SEO a priority when writing for the Web? Or should it be secondary to good on-page copy? How far have you gone to teach yourself SEO?

Related posts:

1. Copywriter Information Center now live!
2. 5 copywriting cheats to write better and faster

I know you’ve seen stupid Web site design before. But you’ve never seen anything this absurd.

Take a look at the site for the Leo Burnett Advertising Agency. If you dare. I can’t even describe it. You have to see it for yourself.

What the blue freakin’ blazes were they thinking?

I challenge you … no … I DARE you to find a site that is less user friendly or more self-indulgent.

Okay, the pencil thingy is fun to play with. But c’mon. This is the main site for a major worldwide ad agency? Really?

If this is how they advertise their own agency, what can clients expect for their millions of dollars? And if this was their best idea for a Web site, what sort of ideas did they reject???

The boobs who designed this site couldn’t learn a thing from my article on killing Web site traffic. Maybe you could, though.

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