So how does it work?

Well, it’s a little like reverse SEO. Where a page or a comment can’t be deleted, it can be buried. SEO tactics can be used to push positive news stories higher up the page and negative stories lower down. For $15 a month, apparently, a company called Reputation Defender will “clean up and monitor your internet reputation.” For $30, “you can subscribe to a service that will try to destroy hostile internet content.” — whatever that means.

The fact is it’s pretty hard to cover up your online presence. That’s why so many professional people are worried. If you’re a newly qualified lawyer, the last thing you want is the photos of your party days five or six years ago from Facebook turning up in a Google image search.

Google yourself.

It’s a lot easier to bury bad news than it is to eradicate it. For example, a quick search of “Alastaire Allday” on Google brings you back to mostly the same place: my site, or links to one or the other. Because my site is modern, well-known and regularly updated, Google seems to have practically forgotten that I was once a journalist writing some fairly controversial articles for minor-league publications in an attempt to get noticed. Perhaps not the best thing for my reputation now — but an important part of my past nonetheless.

What else does Google bring up? Well, the only ‘personal’ result on page 1 is a blog post on a friend’s feminist blog. The next personal result is on Page 2, a letter to The Times I wrote some years ago about law and order — but since I wear my politics on my sleeve anyway I’m not too worried. Besides, before you get to that, you have to wade through a blizzard of information about my career as a copywriter, including my profile on the awesome Modern Copywriter blog.

In short, I’m not worried about my online reputation. I’ve been careful not to be photographed doing funny things (very often), my Facebook profile is clean, and my reputation intact.

But what do you do if you don’t have such a great reputation?

It seems to me the answer is clear:

• You should have your own personal website, including your name, so you can make sure your personal brand is the first thing people see and click on.
• Blog regularly, so people have an instant idea about you. You can learn a lot from the way people write, and what they write about.
• Make sure your social media profiles are clean, accurate and noticed by Google. My LinkedIn, for example, is the second result on Google for my name. Worried about dodgy photos? Why not set up a flickr in your name promoting the good side of your life.

In other words, if you can’t hide the bad stuff, make sure the good stuff gets found first. An employer is far more likely to forgive a bad facebook photo if they’ve already seem your impressive portfolio first.

If you’re a business, big or small, all this is still true, in fact, even more so. What business these days doesn’t have a website? And it’s definitely worth paying a reputation manager, or SEO expert, to make sure the right results come first.  No matter how small your business, you need good publicity.

Can a copywriter help? Yes. The better written something is, the more likely it is to get found, or be linked to. Why not employ a professional to write positive news stories about you?

Remember, most people don’t search past the first page on Google.
But don’t forget, it’s harder to destroy information on the internet than bury it.
The internet has a long memory.

The best way of keeping a clean reputation is to not get in trouble in the first place.

Good luck hiding those photos, folks.

What does it do?

In short, Scribe is an SEO analysis tool that provides a full report on a Wordpress post or page once you’ve written it. So rather than suggesting that you build a page around a set of keywords, Scribe analyses you writing and tells you how search engines will see it — indexing keywords based on position and frequency, rather than relying on you inputting keywords for it to analyse.

This review gets a 95% score for SEO purposes!

Scribe’s unique approach might take a few passes to get your head round. I analysed the same page seven times making minor tweaks so I could see how it worked. And admittedly, some of it still doesn’t make sense to me. When looking at my own marketing, I changed the page so that “freelance copywriter” appeared as a keyword more often than any other phrase. Yet it still insisted words like “creative” and “London” were more important. Maybe I haven’t got the hang of it yet, but therein lies the biggest problem. It’s a subscription service and you only get so many reports per month.

The flaw: A limited subscription model

Yes, it’s relatively cheap — $27 will buy you 30 reports a month, but $97 will buy you 300. At a dollar a report, it’s pretty steep. But if you’re a professional buying in bulk, 30 cents seems like a good deal considering the quality and depth of the analysis Scribe provides you — at first. But how much value will does Scribe really give you?

I used up most of my ten free tries making very, very minor tweaks to my copy. Infuriatingly, Scribe charges per report, not per page — so even though I was perhaps only changing a word at a time, it still counted as another report. So it’s probably better to get value for money by writing two or three very different versions of your post, and comparing those. But copywriting can often be a tweak-by-tweak process, especially when the client gets involved. Personally, I’d be a lot happier seeing an unlimited reporting option — or are the folks behind Scribe really trying to tell me that it costs them nearly 30 cents every time I request a report? I’m willing to bet that the marginal cost of each additional report is next to nothing.

OK, so I’d have to write one blogpost a day and analyse each one ten times to run out of pre-paid reports, but I can imagine quite a few pro bloggers doing just that, if they’re ‘tweakers’ like me.

I guess this is a very back-handed endorsement of Scribe.

The Scribe SEO plugin is easy to use, valuable, and I can see myself using it, a lot. There’s really nothing else like it on the market at the moment, and a web version and MS Word version are on their way. But the pay model doesn’t sit well with a tweak-by-tweak approach to writing. Which is, obviously, the best way to learn.

I think Pat O’Brien’s review of Scribe says it best:

“I think the intro price [$27 for 300 reports] was great, but the full price may be a bit much for some. But that’s true about a lot of products.”

I’ve got some very keyword heavy blogposts to write this month for some of my clients, blogposts that are purely for SEO optimization purposes. I still say that original content and linkbuilding should usually come first when blogging, with on-page SEO coming a distant second. SEO copy frequently looks lifeless and clumsy. Scribe is better, because it analyses your copy after it’s written. But it’s still more important to write copy that actual people, not robots, will read.

I’ll be using Scribe to double-check my posts this month. But as a pro blogger, I’m scoring 95% first time — so how much use is this software going to be to me in the long term?

Scribe wins bonus points for

• being very user friendly and easy to set up
• showing you how a search engine is likely to see your page
• providing reports in plain English, not tech-speak
  
• offering helpful suggestions to improve your copy, title and meta tags

but

• it may be hard for beginners to understand why certain changes improve or worsen SEO
• …without requesting a lot of reports with only minor changes
• …which cost at least thirty cents a time.
• …and pro users already skilled at SEO best practices might not learn anything new.

Is it a game changer? Probably not.
Is it good for intermediate users? Yes.
Is it worth the price? That’s for you to decide.

But it’s not SEO. SEO involves vast amounts of repetition, as well as angling in every possible keyword you can on any given page so you can be sure you’re covering as many bases as possible. It seems to me that people want their sites to get searched for, but they don’t want “SEO copy” any more. People have moved on.

Fact: what looks good to a search engine doesn’t look good to the naked eye.

People want sales copy. Not SEO copy.

Yet they still want organic traffic from google and the like.

This is what I advise my customers:

1. Get your <title> right. Load it with keywords. It makes an enormous difference to search engines, and people don’t read it much.

2. If you’re using wordpress, use the All in one SEO pack — that’s where you need SEO copy. The SEO pack will  handle your title, description, and keywords (meta tags).

3. While you’re at it, make sure your permalinks are SEO friendly. It’s another good place to add a keyword or two.

4. Blog. If you have a six page brochure / portfolio site but you blog once a week, in six weeks you’ll have doubled the size of your site. That’s twice as many pages with keywords about your business people will potentially search for. Not only that, it’ll encourage increased traffic, repeat visits and inbound links to your site. All these things will help raise your site’s search engine ranking.

5. Use localization where possible. If you’re based in a small to medium sized town with little competition (but at least some demand) put your location somewhere prominent. You’re the only game in town. Exploit that fact. It’s also wise to submit your site to Google Local where possible, so people searching for your service who live in your area will see it automatically.

That’s five suggestions. And none of them have been “use SEO copywriting” to pad out your site. Sure, adding lots of keywords, etc, might make a difference. But it will negatively affect user experience when people actually start visiting your site.

People like short, snappy informative headlines. They also like originality — which SEO copywriting prohibits.

It’s a cost-benefit analysis situation. As far as I’m concerned, concentrating too much on SEO ruins the look and feel of your site. And, with the five SEO strategies in place I’ve mentioned above, you shouldn’t ever need to use it.

So the short answer?

Yes, SEO matters. But BTL style SEO copywriting is an ineffective strategy.

If you’ve got a website and you don’t know what SEO is, you might as well sell your computer and buy a typewriter. Or at least rip your modem out of the wall. Let me guess — you’re still on 56k, right?

But let’s assume for a moment you don’t know what SEO is. To be honest, unless you’re a web developer/marketer/copywriter, you don’t really need to know what it is. That’s what you pay us for. Right?

Still, a passing familiarity couldn’t hurt. Here is a good, quick guide on how to write for SEO. If you’re going to write your own copy (rather than, cough cough, pay a professional to do it for you) you could do a lot worse than start here.

But I want to go out on a limb a bit and say this. SEO is not the be all and end all of writing for the web. It is an important aspect of it. But the fundamentals of good writing still apply. Hype always accompanies any new industry. I laughed so hard this week at this absurd proclamation that “[mobile phone] apps are going to be as big as the internet!” Really?

My one experience with mobile phone apps was when I asked a friend to look up some train times on his iPhone. He had a choice – either pay a fiver for the app that connected to the website to search for times. Or look it up directly, on Mobile Safari, for free. Guess which one he picked?

Mobile phone companies have always been shameless self promoters. Anyone remember the hype about WAP a few years ago? Thought not. Similarly, SEO based copywriting/design agencies have a vested interest in selling you the primacy of an SEO solution. Don’t forget that, when you’re forking out your hard earned cash.

SEO is about getting people there. Driving up hits to your site.

Good copy is about keeping them there — then selling them something.

The two aren’t mutually exclusive. But they are different skills.

Less isn’t always more. Sure it’s important to be concise, but too many sites have become a game of buzzword bingo, bland corporate jargon that’s designed to give a good ranking on Google. Copywriting sites are perfect examples. They’re inevitably well constructed, but invariably bland.

The most important thing when considering copy is this: what makes you stand out from the crowd?

The answer: an outstanding copywriter!

It’s worth noting that this freelancer on Copyblogger doesn’t even mention SEO as one of his ten key skills for copywriters.

By all means concentrate on an SEO strategy for your landing page. Get the visitors in. Get hits on your site. But don’t forget to back it up with substance. Build up a dialogue. Be different. Make your customers remember your name.

There are plenty of strategies that don’t require specially written copy, just well written copy. Linkbait is one of the best — produce something that people want to see, and they will share it with their friends. Word of mouth isn’t half bad, either. That’s like linkbait, only in real life.

SEO is more than just the text on your page. It’s about linking strategies, social networking, the whole package. Good copy should still be good copy. Your landing page may need to contain catchphrases. But your site shouldn’t be riddled with cliche.

Yet times are changing. Already it’s being argued that Facebook is killing SEO. Essentially, ‘linkbait’ is what’s going to drive hits to your website in the future. It’s another one of those fancy buzzwords, but it’s nothing new. It’s just a modern form of a technique that has worked for generations — in fact, forever. It’s a personal recommendation.

Yes, there are a myriad of tricks a writer can use to draw more visitors to your site. But at the end of the day, it’s the quality of the content that keeps people coming back, quality that people will tell their friends about. Online and offline, it’s all about the brand image.

If you’re trying to sell people something, they’re still going to be looking at two things: the quality of the product offered, and the right price. Keep them happy and they will tell their friends they’re happy. It’s hardly brain science, or rocket surgery. With the ludicrously high turnover of buzzwords on the web, it’s easy to start believing the hype.

SEO, like twitter, was very much a buzzword of last year. We mustn’t diminish its importance, but it’s also vital to remember the fundamentals. Writing for the web is very much like writing anywhere else. It’s a one-on-one conversation between you and your client, and you need to build up a rapport. The fundamentals of writing for the web should still be good copy. SEO is the icing on the cake.

It’s easy to get bowled over by buzzwords. SEO is vital now but with ‘linkbait’ strategies becoming more important, the basics of good writing remain. Incidentally, my father called me last week. He runs a very successful business, had a laptop when they were big as briefcases, and bought his first mobile phone in the eighties. These days he’s never more than thirty seconds away by BlackBerry. He said to me, ‘I’ve seen your latest blog post. What the hell is twitter?’

I was proud of him. It’s precisely the attitude a company director should take. If you need any further proof that fools rush in, take a look at how Habitat made fools out of themselves twittering this week. Or Jordan.

‘Nuff said.