Essential SEO Copywriting 1 - 6
 by: Decebal (Dudi) Scraba


An article named "Essential SEO Copywriting" should begin, I guess, with a definition of SEO copywriting - as a starter for our short trip through the "mysteries" of this issue... Let's try: SEO copywriting makes a text (article, web page etc.) readable and likable for human visitors as well as for search engines, by providing valuable information in a coherent manner, structured around well-chosen keywords that are relevant for a specific topic.

.. Did I lose you? Just choose the keywords / keyphrases that are relevant for your topics and write a SEO-wise copy around them. This will help you getting high rankings in search engine results while still making a pleasant reading for your human visitors. Let's get into details and see how SEO copywriting should be completed.

1. Select your relevant keywords (keystrings)

How many keywords for a web page? There are a lot of SEO copywriting expert opinions here. I would say that it is better to have one or (maximum) two primary keystrings plus 3 - 6 secondary keywords. Be creative and keep in mind that you can have a complex keyphrase covering several alternatives. For example, "essential SEO copywriting" covers 3 other keystrings: "essential SEO", "essential copywriting" and "SEO copywriting", all related to the topic of this article / web page.

2. Keywords in META TAGS, targeted and concise

For this article the TITLE TAG is, obviously, "Essential SEO Copywriting". The DESCRIPTION is "Essential SEO copywriting: learn how to write a SEO-wise copy around relevant keywords for high rankings and traffic on your web site" and includes the title. The KEYWORDS META TAG is: "essential seo copywriting, copy, keywords, seo-wise, high rankings".

Keep your title / description / keywords META TAG to maximum 60 / 200 / 1000 characters each. DO NOT repeat a distinct keyword more than 3 times in any of your meta tags!

3. SEO copywriting - for humans

Include valuable and viable information in your SEO-wise copy. Write it in a coherent and easy-readable manner. DO NOT make it a meaningless list of keywords - search engines will penalize it and this isn't SEO copywriting. Check spelling and grammar. Write at least 500 words in the body text of each web page. If we are talking about an expert article, keep the copy around 800 words, structured in smaller sections for easy reading. Give a short subtitle to each section and include here some of the targeted keywords. Keep always in mind who will read your copy: search engine robots AND human visitors (readers).

4. Optimize the keyword density of the copy

Let's assume that you are writing a SEO-wise expert article, in order to promote your business (website). SEO copywriting specialists would say that you must achieve, for the targeted keywords, an optimal density between 2% and 7%. For example, if your keystring is "essential seo copywriting" and you have it repeated 25 times in an 1000 words article, it's density will be 2.5% - within the optimal keywords density range.

DO NOT forget that the text of the article will be placed on a page that will probably enclose also: a script (HTML / CSS), in-site navigation links, outbound links, copyright information, advertising of some sort and/or other type of content. Under these circumstances, the 2.5% initial keywords density may fall below the optimal threshold. So my advice is: try achieving in your article, at least for the primary keywords, a density around 3-5%. DO NOT stuff the copy with keywords, though - it may become unpleasantly unreadable for your visitors.

Make sure to place the main keywords at the beginning, middle and end of the copy.

5. HTML text formatting of your SEO-wise copy

All SEO copywriting specialists concur: increase the importance (for search engines and readers) of your body-text-embedded keywords by using the HTML text formatting tags. Use (heading 1) tag for your page's title, (heading 2) tag for the subtitles, (bold) and (italic) tags to emphasize the keywords scattered around the copy (DO NOT overuse these tags, though).

6. SEO copywriting for the entire website

We have examined the essential seo copywriting topics for one web page. If we are talking about writing the SEO-wise copy for an entire website, then there are some additional rules to follow:

-- DO NOT use image buttons for in-site navigation. Whenever you have on page "A" a link pointing to page "B" of your site, use a text link with the primary keywords of page "B" as anchor text. For example, on my homepage (http://www.ewolwe.com), the anchor text of the link pointing to this article is "Essential SEO Copywriting". Use the same rule for the anchor text of links placed on other sites (domains) that point to pages on your website.

-- use your primary keywords in the URL of the web page (e.g. essential_seo_copywriting.htm)

-- whenever you have a picture on a page, include that page's keywords in the "ALT" tag of the image.

Each section of this article will be detailed in 6 new articles, which will try to cover, in deeper details, the topic of essential seo copywriting. Read more to learn more and good luck to you all!

About The Author
Copyright 2006 Decebal (Dudi) Scraba website optimization and SEO copywriting specialist, owner of http://www.ewolwe.com - Online SEO Guide, Free SEO eBook & Articles