What is SEO copywriting? SEO Copywriting/Professional Copywriting, also known as Search Engine Copywriting, is a new type of copywriting, which involves writing content in a web-friendly way. Search engine copywriting is, in fact, a process of rewriting existing ‘creatively written’ copy. In simple words, keyword based writing is called SEO copywriting. But that doesn’t mean that SEO writing is a mere attempt to insert several unrelated ones; Thesaurus-sounding keywords in the copy just to make it rank high in search engines. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! are always spamming content filled with keywords. Therefore, when planning search engine copywriting, you need to take care of the density of keyword usage in the contents.
Search engine copywriting is different from other copywriting because it is written for both search engines and human browsers. However, SEO copywriting is not extremely difficult but it is a bit tricky. Below are some tips for writing professional copywriting for SEO.
Know your keyword before you start the professional writing: If you know what keyword phrases you are optimizing the page for; it becomes much easier for you to offer SEO copywriting services. As you begin to write, include key phrases throughout the body of the text, not just the first paragraph. For best results, focus your copy on just two or three main keywords. Click here to download the keyword analysis tool.
Keyphrase Frequency for SEO Copywriting: How Often Should You Use Keyphrases? There is a “3% guideline” that states that 3% of your words should be keywords. However, this is ONLY a guide. Don’t kill yourself to achieve a 3% ratio. Remember, your copy has to sell and attract the attention of the engines. Don’t ruin perfectly good copy by forcing keywords where they just don’t fit. So, be careful about keyword frequency, while planning search engine copywriting. To check the keyword density of your web page, download it for free here.
You need to know what the website is about: Before you start SEO copywriting, you need to know the target audience of the website. Once you know your target audience; you know your keywords; now put the two together to create attractive, search engine friendly copy. For example, if your website offers web design and development services, target keywords accordingly.
Optimized on-page text length: It’s a good idea to have enough text on your home page and important section pages for effective search engine copywriting. Search engines like to see 250-500 words of text on a page to assess keyword relevance. Let the beginning of the page text contain your important keywords. Some search engines do not read your page deeply. As such, it becomes important that they read your lead text with the keywords. Avoid placing links on images. Search engines cannot read images.
Professional Writing Using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): CSS or Cascading Style Sheet is a style sheet language that allows you to tell a browser how to render your page. CSS can be used to control text formatting, thus maintaining the visual appeal of text in headers. This separates the presentation style of the documents from the content, which simplifies site maintenance. This includes specifications on the type of font to be used, spacing, color, margin, border, etc. If you want to learn more about CSS, click here.
Search Engine Writing for Meta Tags: Meta tags are used to communicate information to search engine crawlers that a human visitor might not be aware of. It should be noted that meta tags in HTML are not necessary when creating your web pages, but they are necessary in terms of SEO; they can be of great help. Due to their easy handling by webmasters, some Meta Tags (Keywords, Title and Description) have lost the importance they had until a few years ago. There are tools available that automatically generate meta tags. Click here to download the tool.
