This is a guest post by James Harper, the online marketing manager at Boom, a UK-based seo agency.
You know how to write great copy for your website, but do you know how to make sure it’s well optimized and search engine friendly? If no one can find your website with your killer content, your copy will go to waste.
Don’t Panic
Follow these simple SEO writing guidelines for content that search engines love, to boost your rankings and attract more visitors to your website.
Use keywords in the right place at the right time
You may have read some SEO copywriting articles that tell you to worry about your keyword density, the number of time your keywords appear on a page. Don’t believe this, you only need to repeat your keywords 3 or 4 times in a page – the important thing is to use them in the right places.
So where should your keywords go?
1. The Headline – if your page is all about that keyword, why wouldn’t you use it in the headline?
2. Subheadings. These help to make your copy easier to read, and give you a chance to highlight your keyword.
3. Highlighted text, bold and italics in particular. Avoid using bold simply to style your articles. Search engines assume you will highlight only the most important and relevant elements of an article, if you want to rank well that should include your keywords.
4. The first and last paragraph. You don’t have to follow this strictly, but search engines like to see consistency – with one page talking about the same topic from beginning to end. It’s easier for readers too.
Simple really isn’t it?
Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Want people who see your website in the search engine results to visit? Then you need to strike a fine balance when writing your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions.
SEO guidelines dictate that Titles and Descriptions need to contain your keywords, but you also need to sell the benefits of your website. To get it right, it can help you to approach them the way you would a pay per click ad.
The best pay per click ads not only contain keywords, but also they promote benefits in short, snappy sentences and include a call to action.
Think Beyond the Copy
This post is all about writing great SEO copy, but there are many other elements that help to improve the optimization of your page.
Making use of optimized and eye-catching images can help to make your page more user-friendly while giving search engines more keyword juice. Encouraging comments on your blog posts adds more on topic and potentially keyword-rich content to your page.
Make sure that any content that you embed – pdfs, videos and more – follows all the SEO guidelines to keep your page focused.
SEO writing guidelines aren’t complicated and shouldn’t be difficult to follow. Just make sure that you don’t get carried away with creating content for the search engines, or your killer copy will die a death.
