Jan 13, 2013

Writing Effective SEO Copy

SEO copywriting can be viewed as one of those skills that can take your website higher in the search engines. We want to discuss this more and offer some helpful tips so you can see better rankings.


How does a writer produce good SEO copywriting? The reason why many people fail at creating effective SEO copy is because they don’t focus on the content and rather look at other factors. You need to have content that is compelling and good so your readers will actually want to continue reading the material. The life blood of search engines is user satisfaction, so they really only want to rank content that is of good quality and useful. If you provide the highest quality content, then some websites may want to link to you on their own. Your website must either have something extremely interesting, funny, or otherwise very informative for this to happen, though.

The truth about that is it’s a bit rare and not the way to go when it comes to getting backlinks. Apart from that, when you’re creating your content, make sure that you use keyword variations so that you don’t end up keyword stuffing. Ok, when you find yourself really needing to repeat a keyword too many times, then just the appropriate synonym for it – no problem. Keywords used with too much frequency can look like keyword stuffing and you could get penalized by Google and others. Using appropriate and relevant keywords becomes a totally new picture with the search engines, and it is looked upon favorably. Then you’re talking about LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing, and then it’s all well and good with Google. So this all has to do with the degree of relatedness of the various words on your site relative to the main keywords you’re optimized for, etc.

Another SEO copywriting tip that you can take home is the use of bullet points in your content to make it more organized, readable and above all, appealing. Be sure to list your bullet points and make them short and to the point. It also adds a lot of white space to the page, making the content more scannable. The net result is your readers will understand pretty fast what the most important items are in your article, or copy. Is there an SEO benefit here? Search engines view bullet points positively when ranking pages, which means using them would definitely help you boost your search engine ranking.

Never, but never do fluff – every word in excellent copy has a reason for being there, so never violate that principle. Of course every word of the copy must be part of your plan for that sales page, in other words – it must be relevant. The readers of your copy appreciate relevant information as much as the search engines. That has nothing to do with the quantity of your copy, in fact that consideration should never enter your mind. It’s not hard to write with enough quality and still hit your target for length. The length can vary with the situation, but a good rule of thumb is to aim for roughly 400 words. However, this is subjective and really it is your call. For example, if you’re trying to explain something that’s taking you more than 1,000 words, then by all means keep it that way. Just like with keywords, don’t pad your writing just because maybe it looks more impressive, etc.

Just try to provide good information and help for your readers, and that just usually works out best. Always continue your learning and build on what you’ve read today. But do keep in mind that you should never stuff your keywords anywhere, Google is heavy on that one. Keep moving forward and improving your SEO copywriting skills and you’ll be fine.

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