8 SEO Tips for SEO Copy Writers
Let’s face it. No SEO would ever compare his or her writing skills to that of William Shakespeare. However, it’s very integral to the success of any SEO campaign that you know how to utilize good copywriting skills, with an emphasis on optimizing the content for the search engines.
Here are some SEO Copywriting guidelines you should follow:
1. “Content is King”
Google and other search engines love useful, well-written content. If users find your content useful, they will link to it and they will tell their friends about it. When Google finds these inbound links, that page’s ranking will rise even higher, which in turn will bring in more visitors.
One of the implications of writing well is that you should use as many different words that are as relevant to the title as possible. If your copy uses the same keywords again and again, search engines can tell that the article is shallow and not very useful.
Conversely, is you use a wide vocabulary that is pertinent to the topic, search engines will infer that the article is authoritative, deep and useful. Google’s ability to determine the true value of a piece of writing by examining words other than the keywords is known as latent semantic indexing. For this reason, it is important to use synonyms of your keywords in addition to the keywords you are targeting.
2. Keyword Density
The keywords that you are targeting should appear at the beginning (preferably in the first sentence of the paragraph) in most paragraphs and somewhere near the end of each paragraph. Once you have that down, just focus on producing exceptionally useful and comprehensive content. DO NOT STUFF YOUR ARTICLES WITH KEYWORDS, as this is spammy and search engines can tell and could penalize you. You are also a lot less likely to receive inbound links if your copywriting is poor.
3. Bold, Italics, & Underlined
When you emphasize a word with italics, underlining or bolding, search engines assume that it is an important keyword. Use this to your advantage to tell Google what your important keywords are. Beware: Do not overuse this tactic, or you will confuse the search engines and weaken the effect.
4. META Tags
Use your keywords you wish to show up for in the TITLE as wells as in the META DESCRIPTION & META KEYWORDS tags. Google will love it if the TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORD tags are cohesive. A good rule of thumb is to place the most important keywords at the beginning, as this increases their prominence and helps search engines to weight them accordingly.
Try to avoid repeating keywords in these (or any other) tags to much, as this is considered spam. Instead, focus on using different variations of the target keywords.
5. Use Numbered Lists
For some reason people love to link to lists, so try and name some of your articles as numbered lists, along the lines of “10 ways to improve your website’s Google ranking.” Lists are easy to digest and are popular with bloggers. This may help them go viral in which case they may receive lots of exposure.
6. Alt Tag Your Images
ALT Tags can be viewed by simply hovering over an image. By using creative keyword phrases within your Alt tags, you help your site’s overall SEO efforts.
Benefits of using Alt Tags:
- Add keyword density to the site.
- Allow your site’s images to be scanned & archived in places like Google Images.
- Helps visually impaired users view & understand your site’s images, adding usability.
Consequences of not using Alt Tags:
- Missed opportunities to add valuable keyword density to your site.
- Missed opportunities to have images scanned & archived in places like Google Images.
- Poor experience for visually impaired users.
7. Interlink Your Articles
Cross-linking your pages will ensure that PageRank is shared among the articles on your website; you don’t want a page that massively outperforms the others. Interlinking your pages with contextual links whose anchor text is relevant to the target page will be very important for two reasons:
- Will increase exposure for other articles on the site.
- Will ensure that all of your site’s articles are found.
In addition to spreading PageRank over your websites, this technique will also help you tell Google what your pages are about via good Anchor Text.
8. Synonyms & Plurals
To make your articles relevant to as many search queries as possible, you should use synonyms and/or plurals in your copy. Search engines will love this (see “latent semantic indexing”) and you will qualify for more search terms. It will make ensure that you get referrals for both the plural and singular versions of a given keyword.
Photo Credit: Churl on Flickr
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