Search Engine Optimization, or S.E.O., is an important, and in fact vital, part of any business’s online presence. Put simply, S.E.O. is the “tweaking” of a website so that it’ll be displayed right at the top of a search engine’s results pages (y’know, on that first page of results you get on Google, Yahoo! or Bing etc. when you key in a search phrase or words and hit “Search”). This optimization is an important aspect of any kind of search engine marketing that you do; the ultimate aim being to achieving the highest ranking possible for your targeted keywords and phrases.
Basically, it works like this: When an Internet user runs a search using a search engine they’ll more than likely only look over the first page of results laid out before them. Typically, they’ll then either follow a link they found on that first page or they’ll have another go and try another search. They’d only very, very rarely make it as far as the barren wastelands of Page 3. What this means is, if your website is not among the first listed in the search results, its chances of being found by potential customers are actually quite slim. Basically, there is little point in making a website submission to search engines if your site will never appear in the first few pages of results. Sorry.
By taking the time to think about the writing, formatting, and organization of your website and making the appropriate adjustments for S.E.O. purposes, your website will become more “digestible” by search engines and will be ranked more favorably in their databases. The result is, with a little work (and it isn’t that much work that you gotta do), your site will be able to climb from the depths of search engine results Hell (page 2,569), right to the top of the list (page 1, yeah!). This search engine placement will be highly beneficial for any entity seeking a truly strong presence online.
The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of websites on the Internet are not optimized with the search engines in mind. The result here is that your competitors who DO posses well optimized sites will dominate the web traffic generated through the search engines. By optimizing your own site, you and your company can leapfrog the competition and direct traffic away from competitors and toward your own site. After the site is optimized it actually takes very little maintenance to keep your company’s ranking and the effect of the optimization can be seen immediately and for years to come.
Rule 1: Google doesn’t appreciate Shakespeare – people do
Search engines are exceptional consumers of content. They read everything on the Internet they can get their crawlers around. They’ve read every book in every language – twice (as well as several million books more worth of blog posts). Thing is, they don’t really understand it… They couldn’t tell you if the text and websites they read are any good from a critical standpoint. Google can tell you what a sentence or paragraph or article is roughly about without knowing whether it’s prolific in a profound sense or a plentiful one.
For the most part, a search engine such as Google will assign value to content according to the behavior of human readers – not according to some arbitrary algorithm that projects an entry’s staying power. If people like it, Google likes it. So certainly do your SEO copy writing for people.
You can optimize and optimize and optimize, hoping Google will reward your efforts with premium rankings, but if human readers don’t enjoy it, then neither will Google. How does Google know if people like it? By following the links…
Rule 2: Always write engaging content.
Rule 3: That’s already been written about 75 million times, but THAT hasn’t…
Everything (okay 99.9% of stuff) has been written about before at least once. The Internet is very much like The Simpsons where everything has been done before and yet there are still infinite questions left unanswered and there are countless arguments that haven’t been made. There are countless viewpoints that haven’t been introduced yet… As an S.E.O copywriter, it’s your job to find them.
You can get started by identifying the hot topics and trends in your industry – then take an angle on them that nobody else has really considered.
In addition to spotting these Internet trends, perform some critical analysis yourself. Do your due diligence. Search Google for specific industry-related questions. Which ones have no adequate answers? What information might prospective clients or customers want that’s so far been inaccessible to them? Don’t know what information they want and can’t find? Then ask them.
Then, once you’ve identified a fresh topic, write the optimized content for it.
Rule 4: My keyword density formula is WAY better than your keyword density formula
The question here is: What is optimized content? Is it content that follows an exact keyword density formula (so-many instances of a “keyword” per total number of words)? Should you incorporate keywords into every singe sentence? Every paragraph? I heard you’re supposed to infuse one keyword into every seventh sentence – is that even true?
Not really, no … It’s nonsense.
My own thoughts on keyword density are as follows: forget keywords and write naturally (as I emphasized in Rule 1). If your content is about a topic you hope to rank for, odds are you’ll use these keywords or phrases quite naturally. Injecting keywords where they don’t belong will only produce choppy and spammy content that neither Google nor your audience will appreciate. It’s a waste of time.
Furthermore, when it’s clear what your content is about, your readers will unwittingly know what keywords you want them to put in their anchor text links. If The Incredible Car Blog writes a blog about what cars will be like in 2020, odds are those linking to the post will put some variation of “2020 Cars” in the anchor text. And one link like that from a really reputable site is worth more than 1,000 instances of “2020 Cars” included in your original post.
So write honestly and eloquently, be informative and entertaining. One of the best ways to do that is to write something you’d want to read yourself. Don’t worry about optimization when you’re writing. Once you’ve completed the most engaging content in the world, that’s when you go back and optimize it.
Rule 5: The brutally honest secret to optimized content
Rule 6: Duplicate page titles confuse search engines
