How to Write Copy for SEO

In my last post, I discussed some of the essential skills that any budding copywriter can use to get started.  If you’re writing on the internet, however, SEO – search engine optimisation – is virtually required to be a part of your strategy.  You want people to find your content, right?  Here’s how to make sure your copy and the sites you’re promoting can be found in a search engine.

1. Watch Your Keywords

Keyword density is no longer the order of the day – you can spam your article with as many keywords as you like but it won’t help you.  It won’t get you more traffic and it will turn people away from your article before they’ve even had the opportunity to look at it.  Keyword stuffed copy doesn’t do anything for anyone.

Instead, place your keywords intelligently.  Make sure they’re in there but remember that you’re writing for people, not just machines.  If your copy isn’t readable, no one will be interested.  So sprinkle them in two or three times, or even just once if you can’t make it work, and focus more on writing something that is interesting and helpful.

The most useful place you can put your keyword is in the headline.  That’s useful for people, too – they want to know what your article is about, and it had better be about that keyword!

2. Write link-worthy content

Inbound links are arguably the most important part of SEO.  If no one is linking to your site, search engines won’t think it’s worth much and it won’t come up in results.  So seize on important, relevant content.  Write compelling headlines that answer a question or concern that your audience might have.  If you can provide a unique or controversial angle on a pressing, current issue, you’ve got yourself some fantastic linkbait.  Just make sure the rest of your article follows up on the headline.

This is tough; I recommend trying a variety of different posts and not getting discouraged if the first few don’t work out.  It’s best to test lots of different types of headlines and see what others are doing that gets attention.  Then try to replicate it yourself.

It’s important to make sure people see the content once you’ve written it.  Don’t forget to submit your article to social bookmarking sites, Twitter, Facebook, or all three.  If you have a few blogging contacts, ask them to post about it or link to it on their sites.

3. Link out when blogging

It’s a struggle to give away link juice to relevant links in your article.  But it is unnatural not to link to other sites – especially when the links are important.  And reciprocal linking can help build your credibility and get you gratitude and attention from other bloggers.  In return, you’ll receive more links to your site.  These links will not only benefit your SEO, they will also build you as an authority and get more people to your site naturally.

If you’ve written link-worthy content and back it up with links and references from others, you’ll be golden.  In short, if you need a reference to another blogger or site, include it.

4. Add a meta description

When writing a page that you want to rank in search engines, make sure you also write a compelling meta description.  This is important because the text normally appears in search engines right below your headline – the importance of which I mentioned in my last post about copywriting.  Those 150 characters are essential for getting people to click through to your article, buy your product, or head to your client’s website.

It’s especially important that your entire site and your cornerstone content – the stuff that people really want to read and which you want to rank – have particularly compelling meta descriptions.  Those 150 characters may take you as much time as writing another article, but it’s worth it to get people to your site.

5. Write at length

Search engines value authority and posts that are in depth and creative.  A crawler can’t ascertain that information, though, so very often the search engines choose to prioritise length.  If you write a 200 word long article about flowers and your competitor writes one that is 500 words long, with all else being equal the search engine will place the latter first in search results.  It’s not a guarantee, because all else is almost never equal, but it’s certainly worth doing.

So, when possible, choose subjects that will allow you to write anywhere from 300 to 800 words about them.  That way you won’t bore your readers with unnecessary words but you’ll provide plenty of content for search engines to crawl and use to rank you.  And don’t forget; the more you write, the more long-tail keywords your site will rank for, often terms you didn’t even realise you could target.  You could get more traffic with a fraction of extra effort.

These are just five of the many SEO copywriting ideas I’ve learned here at WMpS; stay tuned to our blog for more.