SEO Copywriting–A Simple Guide

November 18^th 2010 Sally Ormond copywriter, freelance copywriter, search engine optimisation, SEO copywriter

Many people would have you believe that SEO copywriting is a mystical art that you can only do after many years of training high on a remote Tibetan mountain top.

It’s not—but that’s not to say it is easy. It does take time to get to grips with because you have to learn how the search engine spiders read a web page before you can learn how to write one.

A favourite phrase for many writers who claim to understand search engine optimisation is keyword density. Here’s a tip for you—if anyone throws that one at you run for the hills.

In the olden days, it was thought that keywords were the be-all-and-end-all of SEO. They are very important but the idea that the more you could cram into your website the better is completely wrong. If it was that easy, every web page would be filled with the keyword that person wanted to be listed for which would generate an internet full of gobbledegook.

Sadly you still see websites today created by people who still think cramming is acceptable.

Yes, keywords are important, but it’s where you put them that counts. Writing naturally will automatically insert the optimum number of keywords within your copy without your content sounding ‘forced’. It is far more important to have well written, interesting and relevant copy that will be of interest to your reader.

In other words think of SEO being about relevancy and popularity—your writing has to make you into an authority within your field.

Links and their importance to SEO

To get great rankings you have to attract links from other sites. They are like gold dust to Google. But before you can get your content linked to, you have to get it noticed.

Generating fresh content is vital which you can publicise through social media such as Twitter, Digg, Stumble Upon and Delicious (that’s only a few). Utilising social bookmarking sites and social media will help you spread the word.

You can also create blog posts, Squidoo lenses and Hub Pages through which you can generate more links back to your main website. Basically the more links you have pointing to your site from other websites (relevant to your field), the more authoritative Google will see your site and the higher in the search engine rankings you’ll appear.

SEO hot spots

So basically, to help improve your on page SEO you must concentrate on:

Creating interesting and relevant copy
Include your keywords in your title tag, heading tags, META descriptions and ALT tags
Use social media marketing to spread the word
Use Twitter, blogging and Squidoo to generate links

Not ready to go it alone?

It takes time to fully understand SEO; it takes time to create customer-focused copy that is relevant and interesting; it takes a lot of skill to combine the two.

There are times when it’s worth investing in the expert skills of a professional SEO copywriter. They have already spent many hours mastering SEO techniques so you don’t have to.

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