If you’ve ever wondered how some website that looks like it was an early draft from the proverbial infinite number of monkeys on infinite keyboards managed to get to the top of a search result page instead of something you actually want to read (or something you’ve written), you’ve been victimized by the dark art of search engine optimization (SEO). In the never-ending battle for the top of the Google search results page, and for advertising click-throughs, marketers and bloggers enlist an ever-changing bag of tricks to game search engine algorithms, often with the help of SEO consultants and a collection of tools that track the best tactics of the moment.

I recently got an advance look at the latest version of a tool that helps bring SEO to the masses. InboundWriter, a web-based software-as-a-service offering, coaches bloggers and other writers for the web on how to tweak their content based on best practices tuned to the user's site strategy. The latest version, due out next week, adds a feature that tracks topics on Twitter to find similar material—giving bloggers potential new sources, and marketers an eye on their competition.

Whether giving the masses the power of SEO is a good thing or not is another question entirely—while InboundWriter can optimize pages for search, following its advice to the letter doesn't make you a better writer (though the new Twitter research tool certainly can make you a better-informed one). But like the honey badger, Google doesn't care if you're no Raymond Carver. To get a feel for what SEO experts think determines a "high-quality" page from the standpoint of a search engine, I used InboundWriter to search-optimize this story. I'll let you be the judge of the outcome; InboundWriter gave it a score of 99 out of a possible 100.

Beware of the Panda

In a perfect world, well-written and insightful articles, blogs, and other web content would rise to the top of a search page, lifted meritoriously above the less relevant trash. But in the real world, pages rise and fall based on algorithms. At the same time that web marketers and get-rich-on-the-Internet-quick schemers are constantly trying new ways to game Google’s search algorithms and get to the top of the "organic" results, Google is constantly changing the rules of the game in an attempt to screen out "low-quality" content. Since Google introduced its "Panda" algorithms in February 2011 in an effort to stop "link farming," there have been at least 9 major updates to them, and many other tweaks to how Google's search works.

Just how one writes what would be a "high-quality" page in Google's algorithmic eyes is constantly subject to change—and often has nothing to do with how people would judge content quality. At some organizations where SEO has been institutionalized (including a few I've worked at), the optimization of content for search is a separate process from the production of the content itself, which can lead to some embarrassing and clumsy content. Bloggers and small businesses doing their own websites are, at best, left to cribbing notes from SEO sites and other sources to pull together their best practices of the moment—until the rules change again.

Hands on

InBound Writer is essentially a web-based SEO coaching system. There are two ways to use the service: through InboundWriter’s own web portal, or as a WordPress plugin. Either way, the service is free for optimization of up to 8 documents a month; beyond that, it carries a $20 a month fee, with additional "enterprise" licensing options available that add features such as team workflow.

When you’re starting off from scratch with InboundWriter, you’re presented with your text editing space and a "Topic Research" box, as shown below. Topic Research performs an analysis of articles, blogs and other websites related to the targeted topics for your article. Jay McCarthy, InboundWriter’s vice president of marketing, says the research tool goes out to "the social web, and pulls thousands of articles" from blogs and other sites. Using server-based natural language processing, the service then finds and extracts the most relevant keywords, and ranks them based on the type of search optimization strategy you choose.

You can either write based on up to three terms that you enter to describe what you’re writing about, or just start writing; once you hit 200 words, the software will allow you to choose to let it research keywords for you automatically.

Once you run the term research, InboundWriter generates a set of relevant search terms—including a 0-to-5 star rating of their effectiveness—and it keeps track of how many times you use them in the text of your content. It also tracks your content’s "focus terms"—keywords you use five or more times, which Google and other search engines will then use to determine the relevance of the document to the topic.

As you start to enter text, InboundWriter will also start providing an overall score for your document, as well as tips on how to improve the score—for example, using keywords more consistently to get more focus terms.

That score, and the tips, are based on three "strategy" settings that can be configured for every document through menus launched from the left side of the page. The "Search and Social" strategy, as shown below, configures the set of rules applied against the page based on whether you’re shooting for search popularity (by using more commonly used search terms to boost the probability your page will come up in search results), or to minimize search competition (using less-commonly used terms that will make sure people looking for a specific keyword will find you without finding your competitors), or a balance between the two. InboundWriter will re-rank the keywords in its list in terms of importance based on the strategy, and shift the recommendations for improvement that the service makes based on the changes.

For example, when I set the search strategy for this article to "Minimize Search Competition", InboundWriter suggested using the term "SEO" less, since it was not as highly ranked to minimize the number of competitive results of a search, and instead emphasize something like "social web" or "relevant keywords."

An optimized article would mean working "social web" and "relevant keywords" into this story five times. This is why you might run across web pages that seem to gratuitously use "social web" and "relevant keywords," even when they don’t seem to have anything to do with what the page is about. Which would make "relevant keywords" irrelevant.

You can also configure the "advertising strategy" for your content. If you’re using Google AdSense to present context-sensitive ads alongside or within your content, selecting this strategy will prompt the service to check against third-party sites to find which keywords related to your topic have the highest cost-per-click. McCarthy said that InboundWriter "hits third-party APIs for the competitiveness and CPC value for terms." Depending on what degree you decided AdSense is important to your advertising strategy—very, somewhat, or not at all—InboundWriter re-ranks keywords to get the desired level of advertising impact.





The last strategy setting taken into account by InboundWriter is "reader targeting." Using analysis of the vocabulary and grammar of your content, the service will assess the document based on how well it matches the target educational level of the audience, and make recommendations about adjustment. For example, if I decided this story was targeted at elementary school students, InboundWriter will advise me that the content is "too sophisticated" for that target audience in the "Steps to Improve My Score" box, as shown here.

Sensing the buzz

Beating the search engines senseless with keywords is all well and good, but it doesn’t actually help writers do research before they start producing content. That’s where InboundWriter’s latest feature comes in. Called "Buzz", this piece of the web service uses the natural language processing used to research keywords to keep track of what other people are saying about the topics you’ve written about—by mining Twitter. McCarthy says that this same capability can and will be applied to other social networks in the future.

Unlike some Twitter-tracking services, such as Salesforce.com’s Radian6, InboundWriter’s Buzz is less concerned with what people say in their tweets as what they link to. It keys in on the keywords in the tweets themselves, and then follows shared links, tracking the terms they use and how frequently they’re mentioned by Twitter users (using a scale of chili peppers to display their degree of "hotness"), what hashtags are used with the stories on Twitter, and who promoted them.

This can be useful if you’re a blogger and looking for related content to link to, or to get a feeling for what stories are getting the most attention in the Twitterverse. Buzz scans the entire public Twitter feed, and not just the people you choose to follow, so it can dig much deeper.

There’s a competitive analysis spin to Buzz as well—the information gleaned from the Twitter mining can be used to tailor and promote your own content on social media. "If I’m a beat writer, focused on skincare products," McCarthy said, "I can see who I’m competing with for content. It gives me an idea on what sort of unique take I want to take, and trends that pop up. When there are hashtags, I’ll see those, so I can see what tags a competitor is putting on content and use them."

How the sausages are made

Admittedly, as someone who is a professional writer and has helped small businesses set up blogs, there are a few things that are attractive to me about InboundWriter, and a few things that just totally rub me the wrong way. Just like the Internet it is served across, InboundWriter is just an information source, and it can be used for good or evil.

The Twitter-tracking, which was not fully operational when I tested the product, could by itself be worth a $20 a month fee to highly-focused bloggers and marketers trying to catch the next hot hashtag. The audience targeting analytics could help coax people to adjust their writing to better suit their target audience. But the one thing that InboundWriter doesn’t do is keep you from being a crappy writer in the first place.

McCarthy admitted that perhaps aiming to hit the highest possible score against InboundWriter's metrics wasn't a best practice in itself. He suggested that customers using the software may want to set a target for writers to hit between 60 and 70 for their content, rather than over-gaming the search engines and sacrificing readability. And after all, at the end of the day, the quality of content isn't judged by Google's Panda algorithm—it's judged by the impression human beings have of the site after they've read it. Social web. Relevant keywords.