5 common mistakes that hurt your page rankings on Google -- and all are easy to fix

Google's Matt Cutts explains the five most common mistakes that web sites make in setting up their search engine optimization.

They are:

1. Designing pages that are unfriendly to Google's web crawlers.
2. Failing to use keywords on the page in everyday language and in HTML.
3. Thinking too much about generating links and too little about creating compelling content.
4. Investing too little time in creating a memorable title and an enticing description.
5. Failing to take advantage of Google's free webmaster tools.

A good brand journalist can easily fix problems 2 and 3, and can influence 1, 4 and 5.

The best way to engage an audience with your content

"Trust Agents"author Chris Brogan says: 

Ownership. Give them ownership. 

My children both teach me this. My daughter likes various cartoons that she watches on YouTube or Netflix, but when she breaks out the sketchpad and starts creating her own characters for the stories, that’s when there’s something there.

Yes, it's a scary idea (especially for the lawyers). But if we want our content to spread, then brand journalists have to look for ways to give audiences a way to contribute to the content. We also have to act as change agents within our client's corporate culture.

The problem with retweets: How do you correct an error that goes viral?

From Mat Honan at Wired.com: 

Here’s the problem with the way the current system works. Let’s say you tweet something that turns out to be incorrect to your 100 followers. Let’s say 5 of those retweet it to their 100 followers. At this point, some 595 potential people have seen it. (Or at least spambots, but bear with me.) You realize your error, and issue a correction on your Twitter feed. Your 100 original followers may see the update, but it leaves 495 who do not unless those same five people again retweet you. 

In short, while the automatic retweet button on Twitter lets people spread information far and wide beyond your followers, there’s no way to makes sure those same people see your attempts to correct it.

How to build a useful form to help brand journalists to prioritize requests for content creation

Another great idea for the brand journalist from the Content Marketing Institute:

Often requestors only have a vague idea of what their needs are when they ask for content to be created. The request form helps them drill down to their most essential needs — which will help you identify possible ways to incorporate them into your existing content plan, or to minimize the revision process so that you can free up time in your schedule to produce additional content. 

Moreover, the improved communication facilitated by the form helps you produce content that is more targeted, more appropriate, and better able to deliver the kind of results its requestor expects. Marketers also would be wise to use the form themselves, to help flesh out and prioritize their own ideas for content creation.

CMI also encourages content creators to generate a mission statement to help triage these requests:

If you receive content requests that do not support your mission, it may not be worth your effort and time.

Follow this link to find CMI's template for creating a form to prioritize content creation in your company.

Write copy that sells your company's ecosystem instead of just its products

Brian Barrett at Gizmodo says:

Apple isn't a hardware company, or a software company. It's not iOS or iMac. Apple, like Google and Microsoft and anyone else that wants to survive in the 21st century, sells only one thing: an ecosystem. The most powerful one in the world. 

What Apple realized before anybody—and what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have slowly but aggressively come around to—is that the act of buying a phone or a tablet or a computer isn't an isolated incident. Gadgets don't exist on islands. They're one-way tickets to platform archipelagos, to fiercely guarded fiefdoms where everything works in harmony within walls that are high and strong. And the longer you're inside, the harder it is to leave.

A good idea for any brand journalist. If you want customers to adopt your ecosystem, you have to persuade them that it fits their wants (emotion) and meets their needs (logic). The first step is making prospects aware of the ecosystem and how it matches up with their views of the world. That job often falls to the brand journalist.

When looking for a story to tell, look for one that sells more than a product; sell the ecosystem.

Playbook: 42 tactics and 50 case studies in content marketing

The Content Marketing Institute offers a playbook for the brand journalist that covers 42 specific tactics and 50 case studies. You can download it as an e-book or you read it on SlideShare:

2011 CMI Content Marketing Playbook from Content Marketing Institute

Why readers love lists -- and why brand journalists should love to write them

Blogger Jeff Bullas has found out what David Ogilvy discovered in the 1960s and Guy Kawasaki echoed in the 2010s: People like to read and share lists. It's an invaluable lesson for the brand journalist.

Bullas writes on ragan.com:

I can hear some of you yawning. The reality is, in a time-poor world, giving people a list of things to do—for example, 10 tips for creating a great video—is the type of headline and article people click on. Packaging and chunking information tells your readers you won't waste their time. Lists are also easy to read and view. This type of content works well. 

Mark Regan calls this "refrigerator journalism." Reader's Digest built an empire on this format. David Wallechinsky created a series of best sellers in the 1970s with it.

Back when I reported for the Dallas Business Journal, our most popular and anticipated annual product was ... The Book of Lists.  We charged $35 per copy. It was that in demand.

My advice on writing lists for any brand journalist:

1. Learn it.
2. Live it.
3. Love it.

The Unique Selling Proposition: How to craft a USP for your client's product

The Unique Selling Proposition should be in the toolbox of every brand journalist.

Also known as the USP, the Unique Selling Proposition was the brainchild of advertising copywriter Rosser Reeves, one of the original Mad Men of the 1950s and ‘60s. He and his partner Ted Bates are among the models used to create the show’s lead character, Don Draper.

Reeves created the USP in the late 1940s to bring social science to “hard sell” advertising. He applied it to create some of the most effective print, radio and TV advertising of his day:

• M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand.
• Only Anacin has four leading headache remedies.
• Wonder Bread helps build strong bodies in eight ways.
• Certs breath mints with a magic drop of retsyn.
• Colgate cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth.
• Only Viceroy gives you 20,000 filter traps in every filter.

Somehow, Reeves has fallen into obscurity while a handful of his peers remain well known: David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Mary Wells, George Lois and Leo Burnett. Common wisdom in marketing and advertising says Reeves’s “hard sell” approach gave way to the Creative Revolution that overtook advertising in the late 1960s.

And yet the Unique Selling Proposition is as robust today as it was 60 years ago:

• Geico: “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.”
• Apple iPod: “A thousand songs in your pocket.”
• Direct TV Genie: “Enjoy HD DVR Service in every room with just one HR DVR.”
• Southwest Airlines: “Bags fly free.”
• Axe shower gel: “Nothing beats an astronaut.”

You’ve may have read about the USP in books on copywriting, advertising and marketing. Unfortunately, the term has become as casually garbled in current use as “meme” and “nimrod.” Even Reeves called it “perhaps the most misused series of letters in advertising.”

Fortunately, Reeves laid out the rules of the USP in his 1961 book, “Reality in Advertising,” which is now sadly out of print. Here is how he described the USP.

“USP is a precise term and it deserves a precise definition:

1. “Each advertisement must make a proposition to the customer. … ‘Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit.’"
2. “The proposition must be one the competition cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique – either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
3. “The proposition must be so strong that it can … pull over new customers to your product.”

In other words: A USP is a unique and clear proposition that will grab attention and sell a product or service to a customer.

So, how does the Unique Selling Proposition work for the brand journalist?

First, we have to recognize that brand journalism is a form of advertising. If your only goal with your brand journalism is to attract attention, or spread awareness, or entertain an audience … then you are short-changing your clients. The goal is always to either sell the product outright, or (more likely) cause the prospect to take a specific action toward buying the product.

Second, we should also realize that the USP has a second cousin in journalism: the story angle. The angle is the approach to the story that makes it most interesting to the specific audience we are attempting to attract. It “sells” the story to the editor as well as to the reader or viewer.

The angle tells us what to put into the story and what to leave out. It tells us how to write the headline. It tells us how structure the story.

The USP serves the same function. Once we establish the Unique Selling Proposition, we have a north star to guide our research, our story structure, our headline, our selection of keywords, and our copywriting.

SEO for the brand journalist: Make it easier for Google to find your content

Mastering the art and science of SEO copywriting is essential for the brand journalist.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” This is the strategy we use to attract the attention of Google and other search engines.

The easier we make it for our target customers to find our web articles, the happier we make our clients.

You may have heard about also sorts of secret formulas for improving SEO. Many folks think SEO is a job for the information technology gurus. That may have been true, but Google ended that with its most recent updates to its algorithm.

Google wants to put SEO in the hands of copywriters. That’s good news for every brand journalist. Today, SEO is primarily a function of how we write our stories, not how they are coded.

The first step is to identify the keywords you want to use in your SEO copy. These are the words that help customers find your story with an online search.

Generally, the keywords are a phrase that you will use frequently in your article.

For example, I recently wrote a brand journalism article about diagnostic testing for the West Nile virus. Using Google’s keyword search tool, I figured out that about there are about 310,000 searches each month for the words “West Nile virus” and about 110,000 for “symptoms of West Nile virus.” So I made sure to use those keywords often in the story.

How often? You don’t want to “stuff” your story with keywords. Google will penalize you for doing that.

Aim instead to use the keywords throughout the text as a rate of between 2 percent and 5 percent. That’s about once every 100 words. That level of keyword density appears to be the Google’s sweet spot for SEO copy.

To get the most out of your keywords, you will want to include them in:

• The title of your article: Keep it really simple. Write a real headline with a subject and a predicate. Put the keywords up front, if you can. For example: “How to diagnose the West Nile virus in horses” or “West Nile virus: How to diagnose the disease in horses.”
• Sub-titles: To make your brand journalism more easy to read, try inserting a sub-title every few paragraphs in each story. In addition to breaking up long blocks of text, sub-titles give you yet another opportunity to work your keywords into your SEO copy without a penalty. Google loves sub-titles, especially when they help it define what you article is about. Readers love them, too.
• The suffix of the page’s URL: What you don’t want is a long, irrelevant page URL, like this one: example.domain.com/news/article/0,,30200-1303092,00.html. Instead, aim to create a URL like this: example.domain.com/news/article/WestNileVirus. You can do this easily by typing the key words into your title and hitting “save” before you put in your actual headline. Some programs also allow you to edit your page URL later in the process. In some cases, you may need your client’s webmaster to help you out.
• Anchor text: This is just another phrase for the words we use to create links from one page to another page. Avoid using a link like “click here.” Instead, create a link using your keywords.
• Images: Google reads only text. It can’t see images. But it can see text that is embedded in the image’s menu. When you upload an image, go to the image’s menu and enter your keywords into the space marked “alt tags.” Now Google can recognize your image and will know how to identify it for searchers.
• Navigation menu: If your keywords apply to your entire site, consider adding them to the navigation links. That will also boost your client’s SEO by giving even more emphasis to the pages to which they lead.

Two other tips, both of which may require you to work with your client’s webmaster:

1. Create a site map for your client’s entire site.
2. Enter specific keywords into the metadata for every page, not just the home page.

How to create content through crowdsourcing

Susan Gunelius blogs at Entrepreneur.com:

Brands like The Huffington Post and American Express OPEN Forum grew exponentially thanks to crowdsourcing. Both tapped into the crowd of industry experts and invited them to write free content for the websites. In exchange, writers received free links back to their own sites and an opportunity to get in front of larger audiences than they could reach on their own. 

You can do the same thing by inviting customers, authors, business partners, and anyone else who could benefit from free cross-promotion or simply would enjoy having a place to publish their opinions online to write content for your business blog. ... 

Keep in mind, content can come in many forms, including reviews, comments, images, video, and more. 

How Instagram and Vine are changing how we report and consume news

TechNewsDaily's Leslie Meredith reports at Mashable:

Photojournalist Ben Lowy even used his iPhone and Instagram to cover turmoil in Libya last summer. He wrote that using a phone, rather than an intimidating DSLR camera, allowed him to get closer to subjects. He believes Instagram photos get more attention because viewers feel as if they are looking at a friend's photos. 

Filters have also come to Getty Images, which offers high-end stock photography. Percolate, a startup that provides a social media publishing service for brands, announced a new service that lets its clients select photos from Getty Images, add their logo and apply filters from Aviary, the photo-editing app that powers Twitter's in-app photo editor. 

But filters are just the beginning. Vine, Twitter's 6-second video app, is also changing the way news is shown. For instance, Vine's looping format can heighten emotion as viewers see a video clip repeated over and over again.