Wingnut SEO

Every new client I have ever dealt with has asked the same thing: “How should I write copy to be SEO friendly?”

This is the document that I have handed out for the past year and a half. I didn’t write all of it - most of it came from forums and blogs that are no longer active.

Enjoy

The Basics of SEO Copywriting
Writing for the search engines would be an easy task if all one needed to do was stuff content for website with keywords. But this is certainly not the fact. SEO Copywriting is a challenging task that involves writing content that appeals to search engines as well as to the human eyes. Given below are steps that can help a SEO copywriter in writing search engine friendly online content which is effective.

Researching for Keywords
One thing that differentiates online content from offline content (print) is the use of keywords. Any search engine friendly content needs to make use of keywords and not just that, the keywords need to be arranged in the most strategic manner within the copy giving the impression of professionalism to the reader and a search engine friendly feed to the search bots. So researching and analyzing keywords becomes the primary part of SEO based copywriting.

The important question that you need to ask yourself before researching for keywords is

* What is the Copy all about?
* Who would be interested in the copy?

Answering these two questions can prove extremely helpful when researching for keywords. There are many tools online that can help you find the keywords that people have actually used when looking for similar content. Some good tools that you can use are overture search keywords and worktracker.

Planning the Copy
Planning the copy involves finding out the content that needs to be added in reference to the keywords. This also involves arranging the keywords in an ascending order based on their importance levels. The top keyword is the one that you would be optimizing for and all other keywords will be used as secondary ones.

For instance: A company offering e-mail marketing solutions for small businesses can have the following hierarchy of keywords based on research.
1.) Small Business Email Marketing Services
2.) Small Business Email Marketing Service
3.) SMB Email Marketing services
4.) SMB Email Marketing Service
5.) Affordable Email Marketing Services
6.) Affordable Email Marketing Service

It should be noted that in the above example the keywords have been arranged in hierarchy based on the importance. This means that the first keyword ‘Small Business Email Marketing Services’ is the most important and needs to be optimized to the fullest. All other keywords that follow will act like complementary keywords. The most important keyword will be used as the title, in the heading and included within the first few lines in the content.

Most Important keyword will be included in the;

* Title of the web page
* Heading of the copy
* First few lines of the copy
* Ending lines of the copy
* In bold within the copy

Writing a SEO friendly heading

Search engines place more importance to the heading (especially those placed within heading tags) of a document and not only that, even humans tend to read the heading first. If the heading is good then people proceed towards the copy; if the heading looks bad people might simply turn away. So writing a highly descriptive heading becomes extremely important.

To write a search engine friendly copy, it becomes almost inevitable to include the most important keyword in the heading. The keyword becomes stronger in the eye of the search bots if it is used in the title of the webpage as well. The heading can include only the keyword if it describes the content that follows in a perfect manner; but in most cases this is not possible. In such cases the heading can use three to four additional words with the keyword. Care should be exercised that the keyword is not altered in any manner and even if it is broken the order of the keyword is not changed.

For instance: To write a heading for a copy that describes online marketing services offered by a company which is to be optimized for the keyword ‘online marketing services’ one can write ‘Comprehensive online marketing services for Small Businesses’.

In the above example you will find that the keyword “online marketing seervices” has been complemented by the words ‘comprehensive’ and ’small businesses’ to make the heading more attractive. Though it should be noted that adding more words to a keyword can dilute it.

Writing the SEO friendly Copy
The best way to write an SEO friendly copy is by planning the copy based on the keywords. This will ensure that the copy looks clean and the keywords look blended in, instead of giving an appearance that some words have been inserted later.

The copy should be planned in such a way that the most important keyword (the keyword which has been used in the heading, title, alt tags and Meta tags) is used within the first few lines. These lines are given most importance by search engines and many search engines tend to cache only the first few lines to form their database.

In addition to the first few lines the important keyword can also appear in the main body of the copy and near the ending lines. Care must be taken to ensure that a single keyword is not overused, as this could give rise to the problems of keyword stuffing.

All other keywords can be used within the body section of the copy in the most natural manner. For any copy depending on the length it is best to restrict the use of keywords to a maximum of three to four unique ones. Copy should at-least be 200 words in length with keywords used in the most natural manner.

Breaking unusual keywords
Most People tend to make use of highly unusable keywords while searching online. The problem here is that it becomes extremely difficult to write meaningful copies using such keywords. Inserting them would mean spoiling the entire image of the copy and avoiding them would mean loosing out on visitors.

The solution here is to break up unusual keywords without changing the order and use them in the copy as natural ones. For instance a keyword like ‘marketing email solutions’ can be used in the copy after breaking it up like; ‘We offer online marketing and email solutions ‘. It can be noted that the keyword has been broken down into two without changing the order. This strategy can be adopted even for headings and title tags.

Breaking up bigger copies
Relevant links can be provided within the copy and the copy can be broken up into two in-case it has more than 1000 words. Breaking up copy can give you a chance to optimize for two different keywords by keeping the second level keyword as important in the second copy (refer keyword hierarchy above). Linking to the second copy from the first copy using the second important keyword or the keyword that is going to be important for the second copy will add to its importance. This is because search bots place high level of important to keywords that contain hyperlinks to another page that has content related to the keyword description.

For instance a copy that describes two different services offered by a company can be broken up into two based on the type of service and the first copy can be linked to the second and the second to the first with necessary keywords.

Providing links within the copy
Providing relevant links within a copy is an extremely good practice, but care must be taken not to overdo it. Too many links within a copy makes reading difficult and may give a complex look to a document. Links can be giving using keywords as anchor texts (to documents which relate to the keyword) wherever possible.