Sep 28, 2008 Posted in Marketing Ideas

SEO Copywriting Basics

Let’s talk about SEO copywriting. A lot has been made about SEO or Search Engine Optimization and for good reason.

Imagine knowing exactly what Google and Yahoo are looking for when they rank your website. You could build out multiple websites that would all rank number one on a variety of keywords and you’ll have a continuous stream of visitors and customers and untold riches for the rest of your life.

Well, keep dreaming cuz it just ain’t gonna happen.

A couple of years ago that was my dream. I took a job with a big organization for the sole purpose of cracking the search engine code. I would understand all the SEO copywriting secrets and I’d have a long and happy life servicing customers sent to me by the search engines. I wouldn’t say that I failed in this quest but it wasn’t a spectacular success either.

The reason is that my quest was an impossible one. I think I know a LOT about seo copywriting but I don’t know everything. I did learn that it is best to turn and run from anyone who tells you that they have cracked the code to seo because you’re most likely going to hear a long-winded monologue about algorythms and a lot of stuff that is neither interesting or accurate.

The truth is that there are probably only a handful of people in the world working for Google and Yahoo! that truly know what criteria is used to rank a website. And you can be sure that they are not going to risk their multi-million dollar salaries by letting anything out of the bag. Even if they did, the criteria changes daily so anything they share would be obsolete nearly immediately anyway.

Having said that, there are some seo copywriting basics that all of the experts generally agree on. I’m going to break them down into two categories for simplification. Let’s call these on-site and off-site criteria.

On-site Keyword Criteria

There is a common saying on the Internet, “Content is King.” If you have good content on your site your visitors will find what they’re looking for so they’ll stay on your site longer and come back more often. Search engines also love content and generally speaking, the more pages you have on your site, the higher your search engine ranking will be.

Having said that, you can’t just have words on your site for the sake of building out content. Your content must be relevant and it must be structured in a way that the search engines can find out what your page or site is about and rank you quickly and efficiently. Your keywords or keyword phrases must appear where Google or the other search engines expect to find them. Keywords tell search engines what your site is all about. For more about keywords, read this article.

After you’ve chosen your keywords or keyword phrases, each page of your website should focus on only one keyword or keyword phrase. If you want to target more keyword phrases, add more pages to your site. You do this by including the exact keyword phrase in the following four places on each page:

1. The page title – once
2. The file name – once
3. The Heading – once or twice
4. The body of your text – 4-6% keyword density

That is all there really is to on-site seo. It really is that simple. Now, you can worry about meta-tags and all that other stuff but it is looking more and more like Google and Yahoo are both ignoring these tags because it is too easy to fake. The search engines consider the above as the key places to determine what a page is really about. Having said that if you decide to plaster your keyword phrase throughout your page, the search engines will penalize you because they think you are spamming them. The general rule is 4 to 6% suggests a page is really about that keyword phrase but not so much that you’re actually including it specifically for the search engines.

Too many marketers make the mistake of writing for the search engines. They don’t realize that if a live person visits your site through a search engine and returns to the search engine within seconds because she hasn’t found what she was looking for, the search engine will recognize this and penalize you for it. Yes, they really are that smart. So always remember to write pages for other people first and foremost and you’ll be fine.

Off-site SEO Criteria

Before 2004 or so, on-site content was the key ingredient that the search engines looked at when ranking a site. However, website owners got wise and started ‘keyword stuffing’ pages and file names so the search engines (way smarter than the average bear – mostly because we’re playing by rules that they create and change without anyone else being involved) adapted and started to consider off-site factors.

The most important factor that they started to consider were inbound links. When another site links to your site the search engines consider this a vote of confidence. The more sites that link to you, the higher your site will rank.

Of course, it isn’t quite as easy as this. Google has something called ‘page rank’ which means that they take into account the quality of the site that is linking to you. A page rank of 0 suggests that Google either doesn’t know about your site or doesn’t consider it a quality source of information whereas a page rank of 10 would be the ultimate source for that particular topic. For example, IF you were able to get Google (page rank of 10) to link to your site, it would probably be more valuable than having 500 other sites (with much lower page rank) to link to you.

The lesson is that you want as many other sites as possible to link to you. Understanding this is one thing but getting it done is quite another. The fastest and most effective way to do this is by writing and submitting articles. I’ve talked about this in other articles. Another way is by adding a link exchange to your site. You offer to put a link to another site in exchange for that site owner to link back to you.

At the end of the day, seo comes down to two things. First, you need relevant content on your site that is interesting to your visitors and easy for the search engines to determine what your site is about. Second, you need to get those inbound links. What to do isn’t rocket science. Getting it done is another matter but that is food for another article, isn’t it?

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If you’re looking for ways to generate free sales leads without cold-calling, I offer the Crash Course in Modern Sales Prospecting. It is completely free.

Eric Haaranen

www.modernsalesprospecting.com

www.nicepeoplecansell.com

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