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How to Write a SE-friendly Copy for the Web

Written by: Olga Makhnach

Article Overview: It is not a secret to anyone today what copywriting is. Before, World Wide Web had been developed on a larger scale and had been brought to almost every home, copywriting was inseparable from advertising being part of any effective advertising campaign. However, with time, marketing experts started talking about copywriting for the web, and later, about seo copywriting. What is the difference between the latter two?

How to Write a SE-friendly Copy for the Web

The difference is in the “ultimate reader” of the content. The copy can be written for people to read, get useful information, and eventually get motivated to do something, for example, to purchase some thing or service (web copywriting); and for the search engines’ spiders to crawl the site and evaluate several distinct elements of a web page (i.e. keywords, meta-tags etc), and then rank the web page based on the analysis of the produced results (seo copywriting).

A copywriter who wants to write a SE-friendly copy should stick to certain rules, though informal, but rather useful for producing an effective piece of content to help his/her colleagues seo managers get better and faster results in SEO:

1) Keeping the main points at the top of the article.

2) Using keywords in the content (the keywords’ density compiles 7% of all the content).
Practically, keywords may be found in two places on a web page; either in alt- and meta tags (title and description are extremely important) or in the body of the content. Good SEO copywriting is by no means simply stuffing the content with the keywords. This is a creative process, which requires much patience, good knowledge, and feeling of the language. Over-using your keywords may bring a number of negative consequences to the site you are writing for. First, your human readers will feel that the content is too formal and boring and will not read your copy carefully. Secondly, search engines may ban your site as SPAM, and you will have to take time rewriting your content as well as restoring your rankings.

3) Remembering your target audience.
It is crucial to consider the target audience of the site for the structure of the webpage content. Say, if the page is informational, it has to be correctly organized and easy to read. For example, having headlines and headers is a must. On the contrary, if the page aims at selling or promoting something, try to use call to action statements to provoke the customers’ motivation.

4) Staying away from Corporate Style Language.
One of the main slogans of writing for the web is “the shorter – the better”. Avoid writing long and complex sentences. Excessive use of neologisms, phraseological units, jargon, abbreviated word combinations, as well as metaphors, hyperboles and other stylistic devices is unacceptable for seo copywriting, and will decrease your chances for fast SE indexing and ranking.

Overall, an effective search engine-friendly copy reflects a balance between keyword density and positioning, number of words, relevant, interesting text, and the uniqueness of the content. Be careful and attentive when writing for seo purposes. Determine the number of words your content will consist of. Then, estimate how many keywords (7%) you are going to use, and where you will position them not to sound obtrusive. If the information you have on the topic is not enough, start scanning various Internet resources for additional information. Remember that there is no way for a “copy and paste” method when writing for seo. If you use somebody else’s information, paraphrase it! When you are done with the creative process of writing and paraphrasing, devote some time to technical things, i.e. have a look at the way the information is organized; add headlines and headers, highlight some keywords, structure the information. Finally, proofread your copy to avoid misprints, spelling and grammar mistakes, count the number of primary and supplementary keywords you used in your copy, see if it reads fine and interesting. If in your content you refer to some other site, check that the link you have placed works fine, and that the site, you are referring to, is not abandoned, or banned.

Following the above mentioned tips will help you write a bunch of search engine- and human-friendly copies of the highest quality.

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Article Tags: keyword density, meta tags, search engine, search engines, seo copywriting, seo copywriting, service web copywriting



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