Writing Web Copy that Search Engines Will Love
It’s been said that the world’s most effective copy is written with the audience (or first reader) firmly in mind. That’s why you sometimes have to write technical white papers not just for the geeks, but for the CFO who will write the check for the enterprise multimillion dollar whatsit you’re describing.
For this reason, all web copy has to pass the first reader test, the first reader in most cases being a search engine.
If your web page isn’t effectively ranked by a search engine, then people won’t find the site you’re writing for. And if they don’t find it, they won’t do business with the company represented by the web site.
And since a lot of people use Google, the advice I’m going to give here will pertain to the way that search engine does its thing.
- When you’re putting together your site copy, always have a set of keywords for the site as a whole and for particular pages. You might have keywords that emphasize a product, benefits, or anything else.
- Make sure that your title tag for all pages is kept short (10-12 words or less) and that you have some of those keywords in that phrase.
- Place those keywords in your meta keywords area, but don’t use more than 8-10 keywords on any one page. Any more than that and you risk lowering your ranking.
- Repeat these same keywords in your main body copy, in your headers (particularly <H1> tags) and your links.
- You can even place keywords in HTML comments on your page and in the ALT attribute of images.
So, for example, if you are selling cosmetic lasers, you might have keywords like lasers, commercial lasers, laser, discount lasers, premium lasers in your meta keyword tag.
To raise your profile, your first header on the page might be “We have the best premium lasers in the world!”. You might have several links to “commercial lasers” and “discount lasers.” If you mention lasers throughout your body copy, so much the better.
All of this repetition tells Google that your page is really about lasers, and it will raise your ranking correspondingly.
For the more advanced among you, if you’re using CSS or Javascript in your web pages, make sure that this code is in separate files and link to them appropriately with the <link> and <script> tags. Placing long streams of CSS and Javascript code directly in your pages may confuse search engines and lower your ranking. This is because the search engine won’t detect body copy in the critical first third of the file.
