Mar 05 2008
SEO Copy
Writing for SEO
To continue on yesterday’s entry, I’d like to run through some quick guidelines for writing copy that you want to be SEO-friendly. I’m not going to touch too much on the more technical aspects of SEO–such as tweaking the meta tags, title tags, description tags, or having Google Sitemaps or anything like that. What I am going to do is run through a list of things you should do as normal practice when writing copy for your website, blog, or someone else’s website or blog. They’re pretty simple, but require getting used to if you want to write effective SEO copy.
I’m going to separate topics in a loose fashion here, so bear with me if I start rambling a little–I’m trying to let the creative spirit come out so you understand how I go about writing copy that I want to rank in search engines. Remember, there are technical things that also go with the content, but I’m going to focus primarily on the actual written words as opposed to ‘what’ you do with those words by making them hyperlinks, etc.
Keywords and Keyword Strings
Let’s face it–unless you’ve been doing this for a number of years, it’s pretty hard to rank for single words or your more common search terms. An entire industry has blown up around SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and it’s no longer a secret. That means it’s harder for you to rank faster for certain keywords. Part of writing copy that will get crawled and ranked means incorporating the keywords you want to rank for (or show up in SERPs, or search engine results pages). But you want to make sure you’re going to be able to compete for those keywords, and eventually rank for them. How? Well, by doing your research. There are a few sites out there that you can use, some of which have free trial offers, but that aren’t all that expensive anyway.
Sites to do Keyword Research
1. wordtracker.com
2. keyworddiscovery.com
3. Google’s keyword tool
4. addme.com/keywordsuggest.htm
5. gorank.com/seotools/ontology/
You can use the above keyword resources to also search for keyword strings (meaning phrases that you would like to rank for), which will likely prove more fruitful in the short term than trying to rank for single words.
Readability
Now that you have your keywords and keyword strings, it’s time to write the actual copy around those keywords. One of the most important things that you want to remember is that the days of tricking the search engines is pretty much over, if it isn’t over already. If you’re trying to rank for the term “website design“, for instance, then you want to write clean copy that is easy to read and that provides a good deal of relevant, new and informative information for the reader, incorporating the term “website design” as appropriate. What you don’t want to do is repeat the term “website design” a thousand times, the idea being that it’s a numbers game to beat the competition. Search engines are smart–probably a lot smarter than the smartest one of us. They know when you’re trying to trick them, and while keyword density is important, the magic number of keywords within content is not known to you or I, so don’t drown your content with your keywords. Make the copy ‘readable.’
Consistency
Once you’ve decided on your keywords, and have written the copy so that normal people can read it without wondering why every other word is the same, make sure you’ve done so with consistency. You want to have no more than two or three keywords per webpage that you’re trying to rank for. If you have another keyword you want to rank for, go on to the next page that deals with that keyword or keyword phrase. Don’t try to jam everything onto the same page. If you simply have to include a keyword on a page that already has a few keywords, then just hyperlink it to the page where you go into more detail on that keyword or keyword phrase (which, by the way, obviously helps with the internal link structure of your SEO).
Headings
Use keywords and keyword phrases in headings
Search engines like Google and Yahoo and the rest are similar to human beings in that they look at headers to know what’s in the rest of the content. Including your keywords and keyword strings within the headings will help the search engines better understand what they will find within the copy, which will make their lives easier and your pages more relevant and better ranked.
I know, seems basic enough. But the reality is that making sure the copy is written for the search engines is crucial to actually showing up in the SERPs. Again, I have not touched in this article on the need to use other technical tactics to ensure your pages are ranked; I have only touched on the copy. There’s much more to maximizing your optimization efforts…so stop on by for future updates on search engine optimization.