Writing SEO Copy - 8 Steps to Success

Summary: 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.

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