SEO Copywriting Tips

Don’t get hung up on keyword density

In reality, search engines don’t measure keyword density the way I’ve described above. They’re not actually looking for a density of 5% or 3% or 10%. So don’t get hung up on it. Instead, use density calculations only as a yardstick. A density of 3% will give you a page with plenty of instances of your keyword. If you can’t get a density that high without impacting readability, settle for a lower density. You can have some pages with a high density, and some with a low density, and still attain a high search ranking. The important thing is that you use your keywords more often than any other single word or phrase.

Exact string or just all words in the phrase?

If you’re targeting very specific keyword phrases in your copy, you’ll soon discover that it’s quite difficult to do. If you repeat your keyword again and again, your copy can become very unfriendly to readers.

For example, targeting “shoes” is easy; but targeting “blue tennis shoes California” is a lot more difficult. If your web page has 200 words, your keyword phrase has to appear six times for a keyword density of 3%. That’s fine if it’s a single word, because there’ll still be 194 words of normal copy left. The keyword won’t be so noticeable to readers. But if there are four words in the keyword phrase (as in “blue tennis shoes California”), there’ll only be 176 words left. That would make the keyword phrase a lot more noticeable. What’s more, exact keyword phrases can be difficult to incorporate into your copy in a natural way. Try writing a sentence that includes “blue tennis shoes California”, in this exact order…

Fortunately, however, you don’t have to actually target the exact phrase. (It’s better if you do, but you don’t have to.) You can simply target all of the individual words. So instead of repeating the exact phrase “blue tennis shoes California” six times, you’d simply repeat “blue” six times, “tennis” six times, “shoes” six times, and “California” six times. These individual repetitions could appear anywhere on the page. The important thing is that they don’t have to appear next to each other in the exact string “blue tennis shoes California”. Using this approach, you can more easily achieve the density you’re after without sacrificing readability. I will qualify this: when someone searches for “blue tennis shoes California”, all things being equal, a website that targets the exact string “blue tennis shoes California” will rank higher than a website that targets just the individual words. But when are all things ever equal? As always, the important thing to remember is that human visitors are more important than search engines, and that keyword density is not the be-all-and-end-all of SEO.

What if I want to target more than one keyword phrase?

If you’re targeting quite specific keyword phrases in your copy, you’ll find it difficult to aggressively target more than two keyword phrases per page. You can target a few extras (maybe related words), but only incidentally.

For example, let’s say you want your tennis clothing page to rank well when a customer searches for the following phrases.

• “blue tennis shoes California”
• “green tennis skirts West Coast”
• “purple tennis hats”
• “fastest tennis shoes world”

Let’s also assume 400 words per page. Now, if you try to optimize your web copy for all of these phrases, you’ll find that it becomes very difficult to read. Assuming you’re aiming for a keyword density of 3%, you’d need to include all of the words from each of the above phrases more than 10 times. That would mean approx half of the copy on your page would be keywords! The best way around this is to create additional pages. Have a cluster of pages for “blue tennis shoes California”, another cluster of pages for “green tennis skirts West Coast”, another for “purple tennis hats”, etc. This way, only around 10% of your copy will be dedicated to keywords. This results in much more readable, natural-looking pages. And in the above example, it would also result in a much more logically structured site; a well structured site typically wouldn’t discuss all of the above items on the same page.

Where should I use my keywords?

When identifying your site’s subject matter, search engines try to act human. If humans tend to pay close attention to particular parts of a page (e.g. headings), the search engines will do the same. The logic is that they assume your keywords are more likely to appear in those places. So try to include your keywords in:

• text links
• headings (using <h1>, <h2> and <h3> heading tags in your HTML)
• bold tags
• bulleted and numbered lists
• domain names & URLs

Using keywords in headings

Like human visitors, search engines rely on headings to ‘scan’ your site. This means headings play a big part in how the search engines will index your site, and you should try to make them keyword rich. In fact, think about inserting extra headings just for this purpose. Generally this will also help the readability of your site because it will help customers scan read. For example, if you have a page detailing the benefits of purple tennis hats, you could break it up into logical sections with the following headings.

• Stylish purple tennis hats
• Tennis hats - purple and practical
• Comfort comes first with purple tennis hats

However, when writing your headings, try to make them a little different from your Title tag, as there is speculation that this may cause penalties. Also, it’s important that you instruct your web developer to tag these headings with the appropriate level heading style (i.e. <h1>, <h2>, <h3>). And finally, try to include your keywords close to the start of each heading. But don’t do this if it stops your headlines from being engaging and compelling.

Using keywords at the start of the page

Many SEO experts believe that the search engines see words at the start of a page as more representative of what your site is about than words at the end (i.e. prominence). So it’s a good idea to make sure you use your keywords toward the start of each page.

Bolding keywords

The jury’s out on whether bolding your keywords is worthwhile for SEO. My personal opinion is that bolding should be used to help visitors scan your page. If keywords aid this cause, use them; if they hinder it, don’t. In practice you’ll probably find that your keywords will make it into those bold sections quite a bit. After all, they’re key to your subject matter, so it’s logical that they’ll occasionally help readers who scan.

Using keywords in bulleted and numbered lists

Although it’s logical, there’s no hard evidence (that I know of) supporting the claim that search engines pay particular attention to the words you use in bulleted and numbered lists. Once again, my recommendation is to use lists for scannability. If your keywords happen to end up there, all the better. If not, no big deal.

Using keywords in domain names and URLs

Once again, the jury’s out. Some people argue that having a domain name that includes your keyword is useful, while others argue that it’s only useful if it’s an exact match. Some say it’s a good idea to separate keywords with hyphens, others say hyphens raise trust issues. And some say it’s completely irrelevant! In any case, most of the time, you won’t have much say in domain names and URLs.

Writing an SEO Copy

The trick to optimizing your copy is using the most important keywords frequently and in the right places, without compromising readability. But how do you define “frequently?” And what are the right places? What if you want to target a few different keywords?And for that matter, what should the wordcount of your pages be? Below are a few tips that will help you out.

What should be the word-count of a page?

You’ll hear a lot about the importance of a lot of content. While I definitely agree that ‘content is king’, there’s no need to write volumes for every page. I recommend approx:

• 100-150 words for your homepage - usability studies show that you should never make your reader scroll down on the Homepage.
• 250-400 words for pages lower in your hierarchy - increase word count as you increase your level of detail.
• 300-1000 words for blog posts

Search engines don’t count your number of words and strike you off the list if you’re too high or too low. They’re only interested in your word count insofar as it’s an indication of the helpfulness of your website. Typically a helpful website will have a lot of words. Note that they consider a lot of other factors as well, not just word count.

How many times should I use a keyword?

You don’t want to fill every page up with your keyword.That’s called ‘keyword stuffing’ – a form of search engine spam. More importantly, it reduces readability, so your visitors won’t stay for long. A good rule of thumb is to try to use your keyword phrase once in every 30 words. This measure is referred to as ‘keyword density’, and it’s expressed as a percentage. A keyword density of around 3% is what you should be aiming for. I’m talking just the copy here. This doesn’t include your menus, footers, sidebars, image captions, etc. e.g. If your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 6 times, its density is 3% (6/200 x 100). Some SEO practitioners recommend a higher density than this some as high as 10%, but in my experience, this usually results in trashy copy.

Increasing keyword density without undermining readability

When you actually sit down and try to write some SEO copy, you’ll see that a keyword density of 3% isn’t easy to achieve. At least to begin with. The easiest way to do it is to be specific. As you write every sentence, ask yourself, “Could I be more specific?” For example, if you sell cheap second hand computers, don’t just say “our computers” or “our products”; ask yourself if you can get away with saying “our cheap second hand computers”.

Similarly, don’t say things like “with our help” instead, say “with the help of our cheap second hand computers”. Once you get the hang of it,you’ll find there are many opportunities to replace generic wording with your keyword phrase. Obviously, there’s a bit of an art to it; sometimes it ends up sounding like you’re repeating your keyword phrase over and over again. If this happens, you may just need to restructure the sentence or paragraph. Always remember: your site reflects the quality of your product or service. If your site is hard to read, people will infer a lot about your offering. Readability is all-important to visitors. And after all, it’s the visitors who buy your product or service, not the search engines.

Optimize Your Web Content

Search engines don’t read like humans. We actually make sense of the individual words and their combinations (phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages, page hierarchies, etc). We even read between the lines and take all visual design and aural elements into account.Search Engines aren’t that sophisticated even Google. In fact, they don’t really process meaning at all, they categorize a site’s subject matter based on the words that are used most often in the body copy, headings, links, etc. So content optimization is simply the act of using your target keyword phrases frequently on your site and in the places that matter. ‘Target keyword phrases’ being the words your target customers are searching for when they’re looking for your product or service.

When you optimize your website for a particular word, you’re essentially telling the search engines to include you in the results when people search for that word.As a rule of thumb, the more frequently you use your keywords, the more relevant you’ll be considered by the search engines, and the more likely you are to appear in searches for those words.

What is Link Baiting?

This process of creating great content to attract links is known as ‘link baiting’. The two key components in link baiting are:

1. lots of great content - something people will want to link to (‘Bait the hook’).
2. social media - your avenue for letting people know about your great content (‘Cast the line’). Of course, your content also needs to be optimized for your target keyword phrases so that the search engines know how to index it.

Creating great content & lots of it

Great content can mean virtually anything.Anything that you think your readers would absolutely love to link to. They’ll do this because they want to be useful to their own readers and they’ll gain credibility through their association with your site and its content. It might be any of the following:

• Useful, unique, intriguing, exciting, humorous, controversial or subversive blog posts or videos
• A useful tool that’s only available at your site (e.g. a theme, plugin or web application)
• Industry/niche news (e.g An announcement about a newsworthy event or tool)
• Research results
• Free stuff
• Something entirely different - it all depends on your subject matter and audience,and you’re only limited by your imagination, business intuition and industry awareness

Writing useful, unique blog posts

The key to a useful and unique blog is writing about what you know and what you think. No one else in the world knows exactly what you know, so leverage that uniqueness and expertise. So write stuff that you think your readers won’t already know, and will want to know. Or stuff that they may already know, but would be interested in hearing your take on. Things like trade secrets, handy hints, news, products, white papers, instruction manuals, and so on… And do it often. Partly because this keeps readers engaged, and partly because it keeps the search engine bots coming back more often. Also, as a general rule, search engines equate lots of content with usefulness.

Write in a style that suits your audience

Whatever your subject matter, write in a style that your audience will be comfortable with. If they’re from the old school, don’t write like I am. Don’t use contractions, don’t end sentences with prepositions, and don’t start sentences with “and” or “but”. But if they’re not old school,just use conversational English. In fact, the more of yourself you include in the post, the more engaging it will be. The key is to make it readable.

Remeber to link

Internal links help the search engines figure out what pages you consider important.And external links (links to other sites) can show Google that you’re intent on directing visitors to helpful,relevant content. So do both where relevant. And make your link anchor text keyword rich. Also, when you link to someone else’s blog post, quite often, a snippet of your post and a (nofollow) link to your post will be automatically added to their comments. This is known as a ‘pingback’. The pingback link doesn’t pass on any PageRank, so it’s of no direct SEO benefit to you, but it’s certainly beneficial in terms of building your social media presence. It lets the original blogger know you linked to him or her, and it puts your name and link in front of that blogger’s audience.

Why Create A Great Web Content?

Why is content so important? Well, firstly,your visitors want great content. Without it, they won’t stay long, they won’t come back, and you’re unlikely to convert much of your traffic into revenue. And secondly, great content attracts backlinks. Webmasters will want to link to it.And as you now know, backlinks are the single biggest factor you can manipulate to generate a high ranking.

What’s more, when webmasters voluntarily link to your content because of its quality, those links tend to:

• Come from related sites
• Come from quite a few trusted, important sites
• Point at the page containing your content which may be quite deep in your page hierarchy, not just your Home page
• Be keyword rich, because webmasters naturally use the anchor text to describe the content of the target page
• Have varying anchor test, because each webmaster will describe your content differently

And what would you know? These are exactly the sorts of links that the search engines like to see, because they prove you're part of a credible network of related sites. When a search engine sees a link that satisfies most or all of these conditions, it gives a lot of weight. A handful of links like this is worth hundreds of links from low-ranking/spammy sites, all with the same anchor text.

Do Not Spam!

It’s almost impossible to spam unintentionally. Search engine spamming usually involves quite a bit of work and knowledge. But just to be sure, here’s a quick look at what you shouldn’t be doing.

What is search engine spam?

- A website is considered search engine spam if it violates a specific set of rules in an attempt to seem like a better or more relevant website. In other words,if it tries to trick the search engines into thinking that it’s something it’s not.

What is On-page spam?

- it is a deceptive stuff that appears on your website. Here are some examples of an On-page spamming.

• Cloaking - Showing one thing to search engines and something completely different to visitors.
• JavaScript Redirects - Because search engines don’t usually execute complex JavaScript, some spammers will create a page that looks innocent and genuine to search engines, but when a visitor arrives, they’re automatically redirected to a page selling Viagra, Health Products, etc.
• Hidden Content - Some webmasters just repeat their keywords again and again and again, on every page, then hide it from visitors. These keywords aren’t in sentences, they’re just words, and they provide no value. That’s why they’re hidden, and that’s why it’s considered spam.The intent is to trick the search engines into thinking that the site contains lots of keyword rich, helpful content, when, in fact, the keyword rich content is just keywords; nothing more.These spammers hide their keywords by using very, very, very small writing (1pt font), or by using a font color that’s the same as the background color.
• Keyword Stuffing - Severely overdoing your keyword density. Try to stick to around 3% keyword density. This is the most reader-friendly density. Usually anything over 5% starts to seem very contrived.
• Doorway Pages - Page after of almost identical pages intended to simply provide lots and lots of keyword-rich content and links, without providing any genuine value to readers.
• Scraping - Spammers who are lazy or incapable of creating their own content will steal it from other sites, blogs, articles and forums, then re-use it on their own site without permission, and without attributing it to its original author. The intent is to create lots of keyword rich content on their website, and trick the search engines into thinking their site is valuable, without actually doing any of the work themselves.

How To Resolve Duplicate Content Problems

You have more than one version of any page - Multiple versions of the same page is clearly duplicate content. Ex. A print-friendly version and the regular display version.) The risk is that Google may choose the wrong one to display in the SERPs.

• Solution: Use a no_follow link to the print-friendly version. This will ensure that Google’s bots don’t crawl it, and that it won’t be indexed. The HTML of a nofollow link looks like this: <a href="page.htm" rel="nofollow">go to page</a>
• Or use your robots.txt file to tell the search bots not to crawl the print friendly version.

You reference any page with more than one URL - Even though there’s really only one page, the search engines interpret each discrete URL as a different page. The reason for this problem is No canonical URL specified. A canonical URL is the master URL of your home page. The one that displays whenever your home page displays. For most sites, it would be http://www.yourdomain.com. Test if your site has a canonical URL specified. Open your browser and visit each of the following URLs:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/
• http://yourdomain.com/
• http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html/
• http://yourdomain.com/index.html/

If your homepage displays, but the URL stays exactly as you typed it, you have not specified a canonical URL, and you have duplicate content.

• Solution: Choose one of the above as your canonical URL. It doesn’t really matter which one. Then redirect the others to it with 301 redirects. Read more here 301 Redirects.
• Specify your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools (you have to register first). To do this, at the Dashboard, click your site, then click Settings and choose an option under Preferred domain. This is the equivalent of a 301 redirect for Google. But it has no impact on the other search engines, so you should still set up proper 301 redirects.

Someone has plagiarize your content - If someone has plagiarized your content, Google may mistakenly identify their plagiarized version as the original. This is unlikely,however, because most webmasters who plagiarize content are unlikely to have a very credible, authoritative site.

• Solution: You can contact the offender and ask that they remove the content, and you can also report the plagiarism to Google (http://www.google.com/dmca.html). You can also proactively monitor who’s plagiarizing your content using Copyscape.

You syndicate content - If you publish content on your site and also syndicate it,your site’s version may not appear in the SERPs. If one of the sites that has reprinted your article has more domain authority than yours, their syndicated version may appear in the SERPs instead of yours.Also, other webmasters may link to the syndicated version instead of yours.

• Solution: One way to try and avoid this situation is to always publish the article on your site a day or two before you syndicate it. Another is to always link back to the original from the syndicated. Whatever the case, the backlink from the syndicated article still contributes to your ranking. You just may not get as much direct search-driven traffic to the article which really isn’t the point of content syndication, anyway.

Avoid Duplicate Content In Your Website/Blog

You have duplicate content when:

• You have more than one version of any page
• You reference any page with more than one URL
• Someone plagiarizes your content
• You syndicate content

And it’s a problem for two reasons:

1. Duplicate content filter - Let’s say there are two pages of identical content out there on the Web. Google doesn’t want to list both in the SERPs, because it’s after variety for searchers. The duplicate content filter identifies the pages, then Google applies intelligence to decide which is the original. It then lists only that one in the SERPs. The other one misses out. Problem is, Google may choose the wrong version to display in the SERPs. There’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.
2. PageRank dilution – Some webmasters will link to one page/URL and some will link to another, so your PageRank is spread across multiple pages, instead of being focused on one. Note, however, that Google claims that they handle this pretty well, by consolidating the PageRank of all the links.

Truth About Making Dynamic URLs to Static URLs

When a site’s content is called from a database, its URLs are normally generated. You can tell if a URL is dynamic because it’ll have characters like “?”, “=” and “&” in it. This is typical of sites that utilize a Content Management System (CMS) - including blogs. Example:

http://www.website.com/main.php?category=books&subject=biography

Static URLs, on the other hand, are tied to their content, and are generally a combination of the page’s filename and directory location. Example:

http://www.website.com/projects.htm

The 3 main problems with dynamic URLs are:

1. They can lead to duplicate content issues.
2. Search engines can have trouble reading them properly
3. They reduce click-thrus from search engine results, they’re harder to remember, share and write down, they’re easily clipped, they’re often not keyword rich, and they often don’t give readers any clue about what to expect at the destination site.

These issues can be overcome by rewriting your dynamic URLs in such a way that they become static. For example, the following dynamic URL:

http://www.website.com/main.php?category=books&subject=biography

Could be rewritten to become the following static URL:

http://www.website.com/pagebooks-biography.htm

Unfortunately, static URL rewriting is not without risks of its own. If done incorrectly, it can cause Google problems crawling and indexing your pages. Google now outrightly advocates dynamic URLs:

Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.Of course, it’s important to remember that Google’s a public company, answerable to shareholders. It’s ability to crawl and index dynamic URLs better than its competitors is a significant competitive advantage, if leveraged. My advice is, if you’re using a CMS that doesn’t offer trustworthy dynamic URL rewriting, stick with dynamic URLs. If, however, your CMS rewrites dynamic URLs very well (e.g. WordPress or any CMS using mod_rewrite), then consider rewriting to static URLs - if it will help your customers and aid your promotions significantly. Rewriting dynamic URLs isn’t likely to have a huge impact on your rankings, so I would avoid it unless I was sure it wasn’t going to cause problems.

Check For Broken Links

Broken links are bad for visitors because they convey the impression that your site is not well maintained, and they‘re bad for SEO because they can stop the search engine bots from crawling all your pages.Note that Google specifically advises webmasters to check for broken links. It’s entirely possible that Google views broken links as a sign that your site is in poor repair, just as human visitors do,and that the existence of broken links may impact your ranking simply because Google wants well maintained sites at the top of its SERPs. You can use a tool called Xenu to find broken links. It’s simple to use and the reports are self-explanatory.

Add Titles To Internal Links

HTML links can include a Title which becomes a tool tip when a visitor hovers their mouse over the link.They’re also read out by screen readers for the vision-impaired people. Because this aids accessibility and helps reduce visitor disorientation, and because it’s indicative of the content of the destination page, search engines crawl it and it plays a part in how they index the page. Link titles look like this:
<a href="http://www.example.com/products.htm" title="Cheap Products">Products</a>