Writing SEO Copy – 8 Steps to Success
By Glenn Murray | Advertising
Copywriter, Website
Copywriter, Article PR Specialist *
We all know that the lion’s share of web traffic
comes through the search engines. We also know that
keywords and links to your site are the two things that
affect your ranking in the search engines. Your keywords
tell the search engines what you do, and the inbound
links tell them how important you are. This combination
is what determines your relevance. And relevance is
what the search engines are after.
There’s a lot of information around about how
to incorporate keyword phrases into your HTML meta tags.
But that’s only half the battle. You need to think
of these tags as street-signs. That’s how the search
engines view them. They look at your tags and then at
your copy. If the keywords you use in your tags aren’t
used in your copy, your site won’t be indexed for
those keywords.
But the search engines don’t stop there. They
also consider how often the keyword phrase is used on
the page.
To put it simply, if you don’t pepper your site
with your primary keywords, you won’t appear in
the search results when a potential customer searches
for those keywords.
But how do you write keyword-rich copy without compromising
readability?
Readability is all-important to visitors. And after
all, it’s the visitors that buy your product or
service, not search engines.
By following these 8 simple guidelines, you’ll
be able to overhaul the copy on your website ensuring
it’s agreeable to both search engines and visitors.
1) Categorise your pages
Before writing, think about the structure of your site.
If you haven’t built your site yet, try to create
your pages around key offerings or benefits. For example,
divide your Second Hand Computers site into separate
pages for Macs, and PCs, and then segment again into
Notebooks, Desktops, etc. This way, you’ll be able
to incorporate very specific keyword phrases into your
copy, thereby capturing a very targeted market. If you’re
working on an existing site, print out each page and
label it with its key point, offering, or benefit.
2) Find out what keywords your customers are searching
for
Go to www.wordtracker.com and subscribe for a day (this
will only cost you about AUD$10). Type in the key points,
offerings, and benefits you identified for each page,
and spend some time analysing what words customers use
when they’re searching for these things. These
are the words you’ll want to use to describe your
product or service. (Make sure you read WordTracker’s
explanation of their results.)
3) Use phrases, not single words
Although this advice isn’t specific to the web
copy, it’s so important that it’s worth repeating
here. Why? Well firstly, there’s too much competition
for single keywords. If you’re in computer sales,
don’t choose “computers” as your primary
keyword. Go to Google and search for “computers”
and you’ll see why… Secondly, research shows
that customers are becoming more search-savvy –
they’re searching for more and more specific strings.
They’re learning that by being more specific, they
find what they’re looking for much faster. Ask
yourself what’s unique about your business? Perhaps
you sell cheap second hand computers? Then why not use
“cheap second hand computers” as your primary
keyword phrase. This way, you’ll not only stand
a chance in the rankings, you’ll also display in
much more targeted searches. In other words, a higher
percentage of your site’s visitors will be people
after cheap second hand computers. (WordTracker’s
results will help you choose the most appropriate phrases.)
4) Pick the important keyword phrases
Don’t include every keyword phrase on every page.
Focus on one or two keyword phrases on each page. For
your Macs page, focus on “cheap second hand macs”.
For the PCs page, focus on “cheap second hand pcs”,
etc.
5) Be specific
Don’t just say “our computers”. Wherever
you would normally say “our computers”, ask
yourself if you can get away with saying “our cheap
second hand Macs” or “our cheap second hand
PCs”. If this doesn’t affect your readability
too badly, it’s worth doing. It’s a fine balance
though. Remember, your site reflects the quality of
your service. If your site is hard to read, people will
infer a lot about your service…
6) Use keyword phrases in links
Although you shouldn’t focus on every keyword phrase
on every page, it’s a good idea to link your pages
together with text links. This way, when the search
engines look at your site, they’ll see that the
pages are related. Once again, the more text links the
better, especially if the link text is a keyword phrase.
So on your “Cheap Second Hand Macs” page,
include a text link at the bottom to “Cheap Second
Hand PCs”. If you can manage it without affecting
readability, also include one within the copy of the
page. For example, “As well as providing cheap
second hand Macs, we sell high quality cheap second
hand PCs”. TIP: If you don’t want your links
to be underlined and blue, include the following in
your CSS file:
<style type="text/css">
<!--
a {text-decoration: none;}
-->
</style>
Then format the HTML of each link as follows:
As well as providing cheap second hand Macs, we sell
high quality <a href="pcs.htm" style="text-decoration:none"><font
color="#000000">cheap second hand pcs</font></a>.
7) Use keyword phrases in headings
Just as customers rely on headings to scan your site,
so to do search engines. This means headings play a
big part in how the search engines will categorise your
site. Try to include your primary keyword phrases in
your headings. In fact, think about inserting extra
headings just for this purpose. Generally this will
also help the readability of the site because it will
help customers scan read.
8) Test keyword phrase density
Once you’ve made a first pass at the copy, run
it through a density checker to get some metrics. Visit
GoRank's
Keyword Density Analyzer and type in the domain
and keyword phrase you want to analyse. It’ll give
you a percentage for all the important parts of your
page, including copy, title, meta keywords, meta description,
etc. The higher the density the better. Generally speaking,
a density measurement of at least 3-5% is what you’re
looking for. Any less, and you’ll probably need
to take another pass.
Follow these guidelines, and you’ll be well on
your way to effective SEO copy.
Just remember, don’t overdo it. It’s not
easy to find the balance between copy written for search
engines and copy written for customers. In many cases,
this balance will be too difficult to achieve without
professional help. Don’t worry, though. If you’ve
already performed your keyword analysis, a professional
website copywriter should be able to work your primary
keyword phrases into your copy at no extra charge.
* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter, website copywriter, SEO copywriter, and article submission and article PR specialist. He heads copywriting studio, Divine Write,
and is a director of article PR company, Article PR. He can be contacted on Sydney
+612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.DivineWrite.com or http://www.ArticlePR.com for further details, a FREE SEO eBook, or more FREE reprint articles.
