We all know that
lion’s share of web traffic comes through search engines. We also know that keywords and links to your site are two things that affect your ranking in search engines. Your keywords tell search engines what you do, and inbound links tell them how important you are. This combination is what determines your relevance. And relevance is what search engines are after.There’s a lot of information around about how to incorporate keyword phrases into your HTML meta tags. But that’s only half battle. You need to think of these tags as street-signs. That’s how search engines view them. They look at your tags and then at your copy. If keywords you use in your tags aren’t used in your copy, your site won’t be indexed for those keywords.
But search engines don’t stop there. They also consider how often keyword phrase is used on page.
To put it simply, if you don’t pepper your site with your primary keywords, you won’t appear in search results when a potential customer searches for those keywords.
But how do you write keyword-rich copy without compromising readability?
Readability is all-important to visitors. And after all, it’s visitors that buy your product or service, not search engines.
By following these 8 simple guidelines, you’ll be able to overhaul copy on your website ensuring it’s agreeable to both search engines and visitors.
1) Categorise your pages Before writing, think about structure of your site. If you haven’t built your site yet, try to create your pages around key offerings or benefits. For example, divide your Second Hand Computers site into separate pages for Macs, and PCs, and then segment again into Notebooks, Desktops, etc. This way, you’ll be able to incorporate very specific keyword phrases into your copy, thereby capturing a very targeted market. If you’re working on an existing site, print out each page and label it with its key point, offering, or benefit.
2) Find out what keywords your customers are searching for Go to www.wordtracker.com and subscribe for a day (this will only cost you about AUD$10). Type in key points, offerings, and benefits you identified for each page, and spend some time analysing what words customers use when they’re searching for these things. These are words you’ll want to use to describe your product or service. (Make sure you read WordTracker’s explanation of their results.)
3) Use phrases, not single words Although this advice isn’t specific to web copy, it’s so important that it’s worth repeating here. Why? Well firstly, there’s too much competition for single keywords. If you’re in computer sales, don’t choose “computers” as your primary keyword. Go to Google and search for “computers” and you’ll see why… Secondly, research shows that customers are becoming more search-savvy – they’re searching for more and more specific strings. They’re learning that by being more specific, they find what they’re looking for much faster. Ask yourself what’s unique about your business? Perhaps you sell cheap second hand computers? Then why not use “cheap second hand computers” as your primary keyword phrase. This way, you’ll not only stand a chance in rankings, you’ll also display in much more targeted searches. In other words, a higher percentage of your site’s visitors will be people after cheap second hand computers. (WordTracker’s results will help you choose most appropriate phrases.)
