Copywriting

Copy is effectively what legitimizes your pages to the search engines. You’ll see pages in the Search Engine from time-to-time that have very little copy, but my observations show this to usually give temporary success. Meaning, you my get a quick boost in the search engines, but over time those listings tend to drop out rather quickly. The goal of the copy on your page should be to keep each page focused on one or two topics/search phrases.

Use section headings in your copy that use and highlight your keyword phrase(s). In the actual HTML, use H1 tags around those headers. Avoid using common words like hompage, home page, www, web page, the, of, it, and, to, etc. in your section headers. Some engines may simply quit indexing a specific tag as soon as it runs across one of these words.

Keyword Density - As you get more experience writing SEO copy, you’ll undoubtly hear many people talk about keyword density (KD). This is basically the ratio of keywords to the rest of the copy on your page expressed as a percentage. So, if your page has 500 total words and 10 of them are your keywords - your KD would be 2%.

Contrary to what some may tell you, there is no magic KD percetage that will guarantee you top listings. KD is just one piece of the puzzle. Generally, shoot for a KD of around 5% and keep your keywords sprinkled throughout the entire body of copy (equally distributed), while also keeping the copy readable and valuable to the user. You can take it a step furthur by analyzing the top several ranked pages for a given keyword phrase and use that information to help you determine your target KD for that same keyword.


Tagged as: SEO, Optimization Tips