5 SEO Copywriter Strategies

October 31st, 2008 No Comments   Posted in SEO

1. Page titles. This is probably the most common, and costly mistake I see in people’s websites. They will often have the same title for every page of the site, or use something that offers them nothing in return. Create a page title that is no more than 75 characters long (including spaces), rich with keywords that are reflected in the body copy. For now anyway, this is a huge factor in every webpage’s organic ranking, and it’s really easy to do correctly.

2. Keyword density. This is a much-debated factor of search that has seen some changes and fluctuations in the past few years. However, I have found that by targeting only one to three keywords per 250-word page and making sure the terms or phrases appear in the beginning, middle and end of the body copy, your specific density is not much of an issue anymore. 250 words has remained pretty constant, but the importance of density has been much more up-and-down to thwart black-hat practices like keyword stuffing, or spamming. That all said, I still target between a 3 and 8 percent density for pages in sites that don’t have a lot of other contributing factors that will help them build organic strength (like back-links, extensive internal linking, large site footprint, etc.). The lower end of this scale is typically what I do for less competitive terms, the higher end is the target when it is in a smaller site for a more competitive term. It has always worked for me this way, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. There are lots of free density checkers out there–just find a free one you like to use, and check your site’s pages to make sure each one has the density it needs to do what you want it to do.

3. Titles, bolding, bullets and headers. Reading simple html tags like H1, H2 headers, strong or bold tags, or bullets and numbered tags seems to make the search spiders and the search engines attribute more value to the words held within these tags. The titles, bolding and bullets in each webpage serve a double purpose for you–they make your copy easier to scan and understand for the user, and if strategically researched and created, they also build your relative keyword strength in the search engines.

4. Add more content to your site. You have to make regular additions to your website to increase what is called your site’s “footprint.” It makes perfect sense: the more pages your site has added to it in regular intervals, the more relevant and authoritative the search engines will see it to be. Start a newsletter, or an industry-specific blog, or put out regular press releases and post them on your site. The engines will index these pages if you let them, which increases your assumed industry relevance: which turns into more traffic, which becomes more opportunity. You score a really easy thing with any one of these approaches, and a press release with a carefully, and very specifically worded link back to your site picked up by industry news-site-scrapers (which is very common) posts your article all over the web, for free. Makes you appear as a leading authority in much less time than it takes to actually become an authority at something. Scary, but true. But in whatever way makes sense to you, add a couple pages a month to your site, letting it grow in a natural way…this is a very valuable and easy way to increase your site strength.

5. Build a site map. I have had a lot of clients that don’t think they need a site map for any number of reasons. What a site map does for you though, is to create a single page that has a link to every other page in your site. This allows the spiders to find everything you want them to index in one place, and increases the likelihood that every page of your site will be indexed. Going back to the footprint concept, the more pages your site has indexed, the more authoritative you will be considered, and the more traffic you will receive (at least in theory).