Okay, so you’re psyched to get your SEO content rolling… well that’s great! When you’re eagerly chomping at the bit to start assaulting a blank page with copy for your site, the last thing you want is someone digitally handing you an SEO style guide, but that’s what you need to consider before you even type the “w” in “Welcome to Widgets And More.” Allow SEOContentPros.Com to chip in here with its ten top tips to maximize the SEO effectiveness of your copywriting efforts.
1. Make Your SEO Copy Relevant
This one may seem obvious, but it’s easy to stray from your topic (and its key phrases) without even realizing it. Just make sure that, like a good politician (that’s an oxymoron, right?) you remain focused on your message, excluding any extraneous information. That’s not to say you can’t take things where they naturally would go through your copy, but just be careful that you don’t start entirely talking about unrelated topics that may water down the SEO potency of your keywords and key phrases.
2. Who Is Your SEO Target?
This is a big one, because if you don’t take that into consideration, the person who ends up reading your copy will quickly bounce off the page. If your site mainly appeals to middle-aged hippies, then don’t start off on some lengthy l33tsp33k blitzkreig. Not only will your readers not get it, but the kinds of sites that you want to be identified with by the search engines will not be associated with your site due to the vastly different demographic you’re appealing to with the SEO copy.
3. Spellchecking & Grammar For SEO Content
No, we’re not all librarians, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t mean we can’t give our copy a little editing TLC along the way. There are benefits to running your SEO copy through a spellchecker. For one, any keyword or phrase that’s misspelled will not get indexed properly. And unless you want to get into the shady business of targeting misspelled words, this will not help get you the kind of quality traffic you desire. If you can’t properly edit your copy, then by all means hire someone, or pass it along to that friend who wrote papers for you in your college English class.
4. Organize Your Information Wisely (SEO Friendly!)
It doesn’t matter if you have all the great subject matter in the world for your keywords and key phrases. If you don’t know how to hierarchically organize it into neatly manageable chunks of writing, the strength of your overall marketing effort through the SEO copy will suffer. Before you begin writing a passage of text, ask yourself “how does this piece of writing fit into to my website’s plan?” And remember, if you break a lengthy assignment into smaller portions that have their own unique headers and content, that will make them better candidates for indexing than if you cram them all together onto one page.
5. Make Your SEO Copy Timely
Go onto message boards, blogs, social bookmarking sites, and other fresh content centers, especially the ones that relate most closely to your market and its keywords and key phrases. Any posting you notice has a high readership, ranking, or number of replies is a gold mine for you. Immediately make plans to address the same slant with a great article and use it to steer that traffic towards your site by posting it on other forums, newsgroups, etc. It’s just your way of making sure that the popular word gets spread, and that it benefits your SEO as well.
6. Condense Your Information To Maximize SEO Benefit
How concise can you say something? Now is the time to find out. Unless you’re a poetry website (which, if that’s the case, by all means go astray with your use of alliteration, metaphor, and enjambment) there’s no reason you can’t get to the point about things when it comes to writing your SEO content. No one who’s quickly looking for information cares if you can compose a perfectly worded, tear-jerking introduction into your materials. Bottom line: if you can say it clearly and correctly in as few words as possible, your likelihood of being picked up by the search engines improves.
7. Would You Link To Your SEO Content? Blog About It?
Why bother writing anything at all unless it’s something people would be interested in reading! Sure you could write pages and pages about your return policy, but it’s frankly a waste of time. Instead dedicate your time and energy towards fleshing out the information on your site that you would want to read about your subject. Here’s not only your chance to establish yourself as the utmost authority on your keywords and key phrases, but also an opportunity to gain the trust of your readers by giving them the tools they need to make an informed decision about your products and services. If they find it really helpful, they may very well link to your SEO content page in a forum, blog, or on their highly trusted website (we can always shoot for the stars, right?).
8. Use Unique Language Throughout Your SEO Writing
Search engines and people have a striking similarity when it comes to the kind of copy they find boring. They both will yawn if you repeatedly say something the same way. The search engines are smart enough to know if you are trying to pack keywords and key phrases into your copy to the detriment of your content with the sole intention of trying to get indexed for those terms, so why risk getting penalized for such poor-quality SEO content? Instead write in a unique voice that isn’t afraid to phrase things differently. Try to never say the same thing twice in your copy. Pick out an alternate way of relating your terms so that they’ll make the highest impact possible.
9. Write Captivating, Keyword-Rich Headers For Your SEO Copy
Everyone is drawn to a well-worded title, so don’t skimp out with your attention when it comes to creating them for your passages of content. Trying to be sly and clever can work to an extent; that tactic is best used when you’re targeting a demographic that appreciates that brand of humor. Whatever you do, make sure not to let your slick wit get entirely in the way of the keywords and key phrases that you’re trying to get picked up for in your SEO copy. The search engines do consider the wording of your paragraph headers (at all levels), so make sure they contain the gist of what each portion of copy is getting at.
10. Link To Authority Sites From Your SEO Copy
This one doesn’t have much to do with the copy itself, but it still can help get your text picked up by the search engines: pick quality sites with high pagerank (and relevancy to your content) and link to them throughout your SEO writing. Sprinkle them in, don’t make every sentence contain two links! Always use keyword and key phrase text as your links to resources that are relevant to them. Of course, don’t link to your competition, or link to pages that have a lot of advertising by your competition. If you go about this in a highly selective manner that makes sense to a reader (meaning they aren’t jarred by a lack of relevancy when they visit one of the links you put on your page), then they may follow that link. And when you direct enough traffic to an authority, they might do you the ultimate favor of linking to your site, so keep track of where your visitors exit; it might make sense to contact those sites you link to down the road for some favorable reciprocal linking.