SEO Copywriting – Writing for the Reader or Google?

SEO (search engine optimisation) forms the core of true online marketing. It will influence everything from your website design through to your future PPC (pay per click) advertising strategies. Optimisation focuses on the way search engines use words in text to find appropriate results, and it focuses on what words you are using, both in your site, and in the content you are distributing through articles and blogs. This does even include such tools as Facebook marketing and Twitter marketing. Yes, social media marketing is influenced by it. Writing our copy so it is picked up well by search engines (particularly by Google) is important. There is so much talk about SEO writing, even websites that can now improve your articles ‘searchability’. Here are some concrete rules you can follow, and forget about all of the hype.

• Understand the Long-term. It is important for us to take care with each piece of information we distribute online. That is not just for Google. It is for our clients and potential clients. Good content is good content, no matter how we look at it. Creating content just for the purpose of having content, without that content coming from experience and knowledge, is not going to work for anyone.

•  Keywords and Natural Writing. There are those in the SEO writing world who are obtrusively busy about keywords, numbers of keywords, and placement of keywords. A very important question arises: is natural writing better than bending content to match search engines? The answer is actually impossible to know, because we do not know exactly how the search engines get results each time we do a search. Further to that, it is a lot more than just the words on a page that define why any particular page comes up in results. In this case, it is better to choose natural writing over any other form of writing – as long as it is good.

• Titles and Content. Clear titles are obviously very important. They will be the title of the content Google reads, and beyond that, Google will still give choices for Internet users. It is the title of your article and content they will see. Titles need to be direct, and they also need to present a clear issue to a reader. They expect your title and the content to be very related. This makes sense for search engines too.

• Keywords Density. This is a very interesting issue. In this article I have used the word ‘Google’ a number of times. Is there any other way that I can refer to it? Should I have tried to take the term out and replace it for another? There is a limit to the way any word can be naturally used, and yet, at the same time, we cannot not use it because we think the term has been over-used, in terms of optimisation for our article.

• More than the Page. There are many factors to why a particular page will come up in search results. We do not need to overwork a single piece of content to come up in search. Our content, our good content, will, over time, influence our sites ranking and relevance to what users are looking for online. Keeping our content relevant to our business, and keeping our content in tune with current issues of our clients and potential clients will ultimately lead to the importance of our existence. In the end, we become an authority because we know what we are talking about.

Beyond these issues mentioned above, influences such as the importance of the site our articles are posted on, and the proper and clean structure of the HTML5 the page is laid out on, will also greatly influence results. Note that when we say ‘important’, this is in terms of real human reputation, and yet at the same time, it is the sites that have high real human reputations that have very high rankings (as defined by Google). Playing with a few words to get from poor to not-so-poor is hardly worth the effort. Focus on what you know, write it well, and distribute it appropriately. Online marketing does not have to be difficult – just keep it real.

Tags: Copywriting, Featured, SEO

Category: SEO