SEO Copywriting Guide

Do not consider your web pages only as opportunities to place keywords. As important as anyone feels SEO is, your customers are the ones who buy your products, so don't sit down at your laptop with the goal of writing for search engines. While you may be able to increase your rankings, if your sales decrease what's the point? Affective SEO copywriting pleases both your visitors (potential customers) along with search bots.

Writing for users entails making it very clear who you are and what you offer. Your content should direct people to product or service information, your catalog, and purchasing pages. Customer support and FAQs should be easy to find. If a site is not easy to navigate, or if a buyer can't find your return policy, there's nothing stopping him or her from shopping elsewhere.

Each page of your site should be targeting a keyphrase or two (or three, but be careful about how many you target). When creating content for the page, highlight important terms (your keyphrases) that visitors are likely looking for in a way that will grab their attention. By placing these keyphrases in heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) you are also telling the search engine spiders that these phrases are important to the page.

Of course the above doesn't always follow, because some writers are better than others, and some people may have a difficult time incorporating the phrases they are targeting into their content. So it's not "build it and they will come", but "build it well and they will come". Naturally work your target phrases into your content and heading tags. If you're target a specific term (for example, "tacoma condo") it may be tempting to make your page's title and H1 tag "Tacoma Condo". Of course your site isn't likely about a single Tacoma condominium, so it's a bit deceiving and may push users away. Instead, include your target phrase in a way that makes sense like, "An Agent Specializing In Tacoma Area Condos". You may think that your competitor who just uses "Tacoma Condo" is more savvy and will rank better, but keep in mind that these are all just pieces to the puzzle. If you work harder to generate quality links, the recommended content above can rank higher than a site with the only the target term in the tag (and fewer quality links) and you've also satisfied your visitors by clearly stating your service.

Link to other pages within your content. On each page, link to 2 or 3 other important pages to help link flow, and aid the search engines in understanding which pages are the most important. Linking to your current selection of condos will not just help the search bots, but your users as well. Linking your "condos" page to your "new home" page will help your visitors easily navigate between them if they are considering either type of dwelling, and reinforce to the engines that they are more important than pages not linked to as often.

"Keyword density" is a term thrown around a lot. In my opinion, when the search engines examine content on a page they do so in a way that looks for natural speach/writing patterns. While this is not a sheer "keyword density" check, it does play a role since repeating a keyword a thousand times isn't "natural". Keep your content as natural as possible while stressing your keyphrases. Don't over-target. Use synonyms and phrase variations.

Keep updating. Create a blog to help motivate you to keep adding new content. Blogs are often visited more than static sites because of the frequency of updates. It also give customers a reason to keep checking in. Promote specific products and sales on your blog and it'll become a revenue generator.