seo copy

Copy for a website which is written in a way that search engines, as well as visitors to your website, will find attractive will make the biggest possible difference to how your business performs on-line.

There is a great deal of advice as to how you should optimise your website for search engine performance, but basically it comes down to two simple rules.

One. Your websites ranking in a search will be improved if you have good reciprocal links with other sites that are well ranked and have content that is similar or complimentary to your own.

Two. Your websites ranking will be improved if the copy is written in a search engine friendly way.

In an ideal world each page will have between 300 and 500 words of copy that has a 5% frequency of your keywords. That means that if you have 300 words of copy and one of your keywords is ‘marketing’ then the word ‘marketing’ should appear on that page 15 times.

In the past, web designers and internet marketers could pull a number of tricks such as hiding white type on a white background so that keywords could be littered all over the page and increase a sites apparent relevance to a particular search term. That’s no longer the case and Google may well de-list your site if you try that.

Google, which is the most important of all the search engines at the moment, looks after its business by providing the most accurate and best possible search results. So they are looking for sites that have content that is informative and contains the most relevance to a particular search word or phrase. That means careful choice of keywords that are likely to be included in any search for your site and including them in the website copy in a relevant and persuasive way.

But there is no point in getting your site rated high in the listings if when someone visits the copy isn’t compelling or informative.

Web copy has to be written with both audiences in mind, your customers or visitors and the search engines.

There is one further aspect of web-based copywriting that can be incredibly useful for your business. If you have a database of people who may well be interested in your goods or services, e-newsletters are a powerful way to stay in touch with them. A newsletter can inform them of special offers, a new product or service that you are launching or simply to keep your company front of mind.

A monthly e-newsletter for one particular local company raised unique site visits from a weekly average of a couple of hundred to over two thousand visits following each newsletter broadcast.