Ninja Tactics for Writing Copy that Search Engines Love
You may think that good writing is good content when it comes to websites, especially if it engages the reader. While that may be true, there’s nothing better than good writing that people come across easily because it’s composed in a way that search engines love. The best way to improve your chances of being discovered by readers is to write the kind of copy that search engines eat like candy. If this sounds intriguing to you, then read on.
You need to start with keywords. A keyword is a term that people search for, and that is relevant to your client’s product or service. You want to identify the keyword that you are most likely to get results with, which usually means it has a high search/competition ratio. The more often a term is searched and the lower the competition, the better your results will be. You can research keywords with Google’s keyword tool.
When you compose a topic, make sure you use the keyword in your title. This is very important. You also want to think about synonyms for your keyword. In the case of this article, the keyword I am optimizing for is the phrase search engines. As I write, I want to mention this term, as well as words like searches and phrases like search engine results. Ultimately, my goal is to populate the copy with at least a few occurrences of the term, but not over-saturate my copy with it. I should mention that there are other words in this article that are also being optimized, including copy, article, and keyword. There is some argument about the appropriate word density, but in my experience, an average of around 6-7% is more likely to earn higher search engine rankings.
Once your copy is written, there are a few more steps that you want your webmaster to follow through with. A picture might be included in your post, and in the HTML code, you will want to provide text that will act as a substitution for the picture, if the picture can’t be loaded. In code-speak, this is called ALT text. The ALT text should include your keyword or key phrase. Also, your webmaster should provide links from your article to other articles on the website, and those articles should contain at least one instance of the keyword. Your webmaster should format the title using an H1 tag, and make one occurrence of your keyword bold, using the bold tag. It is important that these steps are done, but not overdone. Otherwise, the search engine algorithms will not take your copy seriously. The idea is to make your copy appear to be relevant and important, using the few semantic devices available to the search engine robots.
There’s one more step to this Ninja tactic. You want to create inbound links to your copy once it’s published on the website. If you know people who are highly interested in the subject of your article and write blogs or articles, ask them if they’d be interested in mentioning your copy and linking to it. This creates an inbound link from another person’s website. Even if you don’t know someone, you can still create inbound links yourself. There are more than 100 million blogs out there, and surely there are a few active blogs that your article is relevant to. If that blog allows comments, you can write a comment that references your story, and create a link to it. In time, the search engine spiders will find this link, and recognize that it connects to your article, sweetening your popularity.
There is no guarantee that your article will become #1 in Google’s rankings, or anyone else’s, but you will improve your results by following these steps as they are outlined here. It may seem unfair or even corrupt to write copy that influences the search engines, but is that any less fair than writing copy that influences readers? I don’t think so.
For another perspective on blogging, please consider this article.
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