Writing Effective SEO Copy
========================== The purpose of SEO copywriting is to elevate your site's ranking in the search engines by incorporating targeted keywords and keyword descriptions that are found right in your text. Where do keywords come from? No specific place.
They are basically obtained by finding out how people phrase their requests when they input a request into the search engines. You find these keywords by using the content keyword search tools provided by Overture or Google (more about this later on in this section!)
Once the top ten to twenty keywords are found, articles are then created around each of these key phrases and posted to the web site. This means being very clever about your sentence construction. Keep in mind it is not just the search engine spiders you are trying to please. These should also make sense and appeal to your reader.
Each search engine optimized articles that you post to your websites gives the search engines something to crawl when people type in those key phrases during a search. So in essence the search engine optimized article is mainly a way to increase sales or membership conversions by increasing your visibility in the search engines. In fact you could say that writing keyword paragraphs is one of the most effective ways to increase your web presence.
The most effective SEO writing is SEO writing that is brief. Professional SEO copywriters that keyword paragraphs ideally be about 250 -500 words in length. These types of articles must be well written and informative with at least two of the search terms strategically placed within the text and other on-page elements. Ideally however they should be longer than 100 words.
The key is to find a happy balance between copywriting for people and copywriting for the search engines. Here are some tips to writing more effective SEO copy.
First of all don’t overdo the keywords. You will look incompetent to both the readers and the search engine spiders! Have you ever landed on a page that has been over optimized. Not only does the article usually just seem to “fill space” and not provide any information but it also makes whoever is behind its writing look greedy! To preserve your reputation on the web it is probably a good idea to only employ about three different keywords or keyword phrases per page. You want them to click the link to your site, as opposed to close their browser window in frustration once they read your awkward, badly composed keyword optimized copy!
Don’t write too little! There is such a thing as being too concise when it comes to SEO. People become very disappointed and annoyed when they search for some time for a focused subject only to be led to the same vague definition over and over. Disappointing and irritating people with your shallow search engine copy is no way to get customers or membership conversions.
Be tasteful about the use your keywords. Your keywords should not dominate or overload the piece. One way to tell if your piece makes sense is to read it out loud. If it sounds robotic, repetitive or nonsensical then you have probably laid on the keywords a little too thick.
Write the way you talk. Get to the point as if you were having a conversation and incorporate the keywords into your text afterwards. Excellent search engine optimized copy never sounds like the sentence was deliberately contrived to accommodate the keyword.
Don’t use big words. Try to write in grade four to grade six level conversational language. If you write any loftier you will not be comprehensible to the masses. SEO copy is definitely not the occasion to impress others with your large vocabulary or knowledge of obscure adjective.
Keywords that are too obtrusive or omnipresent are a turn off for everything human that can read. Even if the search engine spiders find them friendly, lousy, forced sounding content is only going to have your visitor clicking the little X at the right hand corner of the browser window after they have decided your writing is incomprehensible.
Use keyword phrases in headlines, titles and sub titles.
There is no point to trying to do this if the keyword phrase that you are trying to incorporate completely distorts the title of your article. Never use a keyword in a title if it obscures the article’s topic or intention. Your best bet is to try to keep the title a complete sentence well at the same time trying to capture the general sense of it by using one or two well-chosen, high ranking keywords.
Use keywords in the first sentence, last sentence and at least once in each paragraph. This is a rule that many professional SEO copywriters follow in attempt to make their technical writing sound more like "natural language." Natural language is a term that SEO copywriters use to describe the process of having to transform spider engine food into something that is understood by humans.
Use keywords as part of bolded, italicized or Bulleted Lists. This type of treatment can help highlight the words or phrases, not only to the reader, but also for the search engine. In terms of people, this type of layout is supposed to perform a bit of subliminal seduction when it comes to them retaining the memory of what your site is supposed to be all about in the first place.
Don’t use too many keywords in one paragraph. Avoid using focused keyword phrases when a more general term is required. Not every generic phrase that you see is an open call to insert a keyword phrase. For example, try to avoid writing "search engine optimized business opportunities" instead of the word "opportunities" if you can help it.
Trying to fit several keywords into a sentence structure that only requires one word makes your copy sound stiff and unnatural.
An example of this kind of overkill would be "You can become a free affiliate member by registering for a free affiliate member enrollment at our free affiliate member website page."
In conclusion the only sure way to test the effectiveness of your copy is by posting it and then searching for it by in an engine such as Google or Overture. If type in the keyword phrase and it turns up on the search engine, then you have done a wonderful job as at SEO copywriter!
Although all of this sounds so easy, it is actually subject to all kinds of inconsistencies and Murphy’s laws.
For one thing SEO is not a guarantee of high rankings even if your SEO is done by an expert. If SEO worked in every single case then every single site on the web that has tried to incorporate would be highly ranked. Of course this isn’t true. The problem is that not all search engine spiders search a page in the same way.
It seems that one page of search engine optimized content can do well in one engine but not as well in another. This has lead to the practice of search engine optimizing several identical articles in different ways in order to appeal to all of the different search engines at once.
The keywords that you use for your page title may also determine whether or not a user will want to view your URL. The out of context page title usually has two parts: a keyword or key phrase that is friendly to the search engine and phrases that distinguishes your page from the thousands of listings that use the same title.
Keep in mind that the first part of the title's intention is to improve your search engine ranking and the second part's intention is to increase the click through rate of your pages once they rank well on the search engines. This is where knowledge of your target market becomes crucial!
Author: Unknown
