If you are a copywriter, you need to know how to SEO optimize an article. If you do, both readers and Google bots will read and love your content. If you do not, Google will never find your content, you’ll never get indexed, and the no readers will find your site. This means that nobody will read your opus. If Google can’t find you, nobody will read what you have written.
Here’s a thorough overview of SEO copy writing for your viewing pleasure.
Use High-Quality, Original Content On Your Site
“Original” means at least 25% different from any other content, and preferably 50% different. Any less and you risk having your content picked up as “duplicate content” and virtually excluded from search engine results because of this. High-quality content will keep visitors on your website for longer. Some search engines (notably Google) pay attention to this, and your page earns kudos for being so evidently interesting. If you’re not sure run it through Copyscape.
Use High-Converting Keywords
You’re not looking at words that are simply popular searches, but words that are profitable. For any website you have two kinds of keywords: Product-specific keywords and all the rest e.g. ‘Rocket Languages’ as keyword has less traffic than ‘learn French’ but will likely have higher conversion rate.
Insert Your Keyword Into The First 50 Words
When indexing your site, most search engines focus on the first part of your page so it’s important that this section is particularly relevant. For this reason it’s essential that you insert you main keyword phrase into the first 50 words of your article.
Have A Keyword Density Of At Least 1%
This means that you must insert your keyword phrase in the body of your article at a frequency of once every 100 words. We recommend a keyword density range of between 1% and 4%. Analyze the keyword density of any page is to use the Page Analysis tool in Traffic Travis.
Word your title tags carefully
No more than 70 characters. 2-4 keywords/keyword phrases per page.
Depth Of URL –
No More Than Four.
Bad example: www.mysite.com/people/places/things/noun/danny/car
Include Your Keywords In Your Internal Links
The search engines use the words in your text link or anchor text to determine the nature of the page that you’re linking to. You can maximize your SEO by connecting the pages that focus on each keyword to create content silos. Internal links will help to:
• Ensure that your website gets properly indexed and that the search engines can find all pages
• Build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase
• Increase the PageRank of internal pages
Use H1 Tags And Use Them Well.
Your headline should be relevant to what the visitor is searching for. Matching the headline to the search term is the easiest way to do this. H1 tags are the first things that the search engines look at when indexing your page and ideally, they will give a good indication of what your page is all about. If your H1 tags contain your keywords, then your page will be seen as more relevant.
Unfortunately, many people don’t use H1 tags because the default style is a huge font that’s not very pleasing to the eye! However, it’s not too difficult to use CSS to alter the style of these tags and it’s well worth the effort.
Often with your less popular keywords you’ll find that you can get quite a high ranking just from an H1 tag, whereas a keyword with more competition might not give you so much benefit.
Another important place that keywords can appear is in subheads that aid the reader in navigating down the page.
Note: If you are using the Thesis Theme, like I do on most of my other sites, you don’t have to worry about H1 tags.
Meta Tags: Meta Keywords And Descriptions
Meta keywords: Don’t use a keyword in your keyword tag unless you will also use that word in the body of the content of your page. If you use keywords in your keyword meta tag then don’t use them in the content of your page you may raise a spam flag.
No more than 50, suggest up to 20, separate each keyword or key phrase with a comma. Bruce Clay suggests capitalizing the first letter of each word. The keywords must be relevant to your web page.
Meta description no more than 155 characters
Give Google a description of your page that it will use when it lists your website in the results pages (doesn’t show up on page). Expand on the title, establish the theme. A good rule of thumb is just to include words that the page is targeting for e.g. Spanish words, Spanish love words.
External Linking
Should use keyword anchor text to link. As a rule of thumb, if you’re targeting a competitive keyword, the page of your site that addresses that keyword needs to have roughly 100 pages pointing to it; for a less competitive keyword, fewer links are needed.
Getting Inbound Links
Use real content to educate prospects e.g. guide/tutorial/article.
Craft content so compelling that other people want to make note of it by linking back to you. The same emotional forces that prompt us to buy can also cause us to link, bookmark, and Digg.
Answer the question so much better and comprehensively than the competition does, and chances are better that your effort becomes worth linking to.
A few link sources you should consider:
• Links from blogs are helpful, particularly if the blogs are highly regarded and well-ranked.
• E-zine articles can be especially valuable because syndication can create 20-30 more pages from just one article.
• PR websites that publish optimized press releases with links can create a multiplier effect.
• Certain forums and directories that are oriented to SEO are highly regarded by search engines. SEOmoz and SEO Book are good resources for these types of directories.
Linking best practices include:
• The clickable link text contains your keywords, not the company name
• Descriptive text surrounding the link also contains keywords
URL Paths
Google also checks URLs, and it is a huge advantage to have a top-level domain that includes a relevant keyword or two. That extends to using keywords throughout a URL in sub-folders and page names. The longevity of a top-level domain also plays a role in rankings.
Keyword List
Make sure you do a thorough keyword expansion by scouring your competitor sites and noting any keywords you may have missed. You don’t want to leave any popular keywords out, but you also want to ensure you are getting high impact. Once you have expanded your keyword list, boil it down to the 10-20 key phrases that convert best for your leads.
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