What you should know to start SEO Copywriting - Beginners Guide
One thing we stress at Sterling with all of our clients is that they become familiar with the basics of SEO. Search engine optimisation is a vast subject, but if you are going to manage your own site by adding new content, news, blog posts etc, or perhaps just market yourself online with a press release here and there, you should know your basics of SEO. You may think, "hey you are giving away your business". No, no - these are simply the basics everyone should know these days to keep quality of SEO on their sites. SEO Campaigns require much more aggressive tactics.
Journalists and copywriters who deal in the creation of general news or magazine/brochure/printed content live in a different world to the SEO Copywriter. It is not that either are more difficult, it is just the technique and the purpose which have differences. I don't profess to be Matt Cutts of Google, but these guidelines for SEO copywriting are workable, by the book points which should be known and followed.
SEO in Titles
The title is important on any page, article or directory listing. This gives Google and other search engines and immediate idea of what the keyword focus of your content will be. Therefore, for pages, like the example above (fluffy rabbits) you would make sure you include the keyword in your title, preferably near the beginning.
Adipiscing elit. Fluffy rabbits sit amet quis arcu. Vivamus nec faucibus nibh. Quisque porta erat nunc, in malesuada tellus. Sed dapibus congue porttitor...FLUFFY RABBITS - THE EVOLUTION OF FLUFFYNESS
Etc...
SEO in the Content
The next thing you should understand is that one of the essential points search engines will determine page strength on is keywords usage. The content quantity divided by the number of keywords will greatly increase the SEO health of your page (explained in more details below). It is only fair the search engines operate like this, because one of the primary goals of the major search engines is to provide viewers, helpful and related results.
1 So, when copywriting for search engines you should break down your content into independent content blocks of about 200 words per keyword subject. It doesn't have to be, but for our purposes in keyword density we will start with this number.
2Within this 200 word content block you should use the keyword about 4 times (to smother this block of content would be considered 'keyword padding' and can result in penalization')
So now you have 200 words (approx) plus approximately 4 mentions of your keyword. Example:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, fluffy rabbits adipiscing elit. Ut lorem leo, dapibus et pulvinar sed, scelerisque eu lorem. Vivamus imperdiet leo odio, vitae elementum diam. Donec convallis lorem non purus lacinia rhoncus. Ut in malesuada mauris. Cras iaculis molestie lectus, non facilisis erat gravida eget. Fusce pharetra orci eu augue convallis eu sodales augue dapibus. Morbi non elit augue. Etiam vel est mauris. Donec quis condimentum diam. Donec quis elit a augue luctus fluffy rabbits sit amet quis arcu. Vivamus nec faucibus nibh. Quisque porta erat nunc, in malesuada tellus. Sed dapibus congue porttitor.
Sed pulvinar dictum lectus, vel fluffy rabbits massa commodo ut. Ut blandit urna vitae mauris consectetur eget vehicula odio dignissim. In sed quam non felis sollicitudin ultricies. Quisque consectetur sem in lacus eleifend in lobortis libero vestibulum. Aenean rutrum nibh sed lorem facilisis sed tristique quam adipiscing. Morbi tempor felis id leo ornare tempor. Aliquam eu erat quis massa dictum placerat ut tincidunt magna. Suspendisse ligula velit, mattis a tincidunt at, egestas sed nibh. Maecenas purus arcu, fluffy rabbits id rhoncus quis, varius eu ipsum. Quisque ultricies placerat leo, nec ullamcorper libero eleifend quis. Aliquam quam sem, convallis eu condimentum quis, mattis sed nibh. Aliquam posuere tempus orci, vel.
3For each article (or post if you prefer) you must have an article title that contains at least two keywords which you want to stress in the content.
4If you are focusing on 2 or more keywords, it is a good idea to have a brief summary of all your keywords at the beginning of the article. Perhaps an introduction to your article explaining what subjects you will cover.
5Use bulleted and numbered lists to organize information. Google will sometimes pull lists from a page and feature them under search results if they appear to have value.
6if you go beyond 200 words per article then divide the content blocks using subtitles with html formatting (section headings, etc.). These are called Header 2,3 etc.
7Try not to pack your keywords into one sentence. Space them out at the beginning, middle and end of the content block.
8There are several tools available to analyze the frequency of keywords in your text, be careful not to exaggerate; the frequency must be controlled and the quality of your content must be kept.
9Part of good page SEO is the usage of bold and italics to stress the keywords and highlighting key concepts. This is considered when ranking your page importance for certain subjects and fields.
10Use internal links to relevant content on your site (for example, if you're talking about fluffy rabbit toys you may want to add add a link to pages where visitors can find out more about where to buy them on your site, links to related fluffy toys etc).
11If you are writing about a subject which is quite competitive on the web, start with "long-tail keywords" as you will find it easier to rank on longer search terms than short, competitive terms. An example would be "Pink fluffy rabbit toy" or "battery powered rabbit toys".
Just remember, don't pad your content or titles with the keywords - It will not help, and in actual fact may get the page penalised or worse removed from the search listings.
As mentioned previously, search engine optimisation is a vast subject. The above guidelines won't guarantee a first place result on Google but with a little extra work from a good London SEO company, you will achieve it if you keep these in mind with every page or article.
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