1. Content is King!
Before you begin copywriting make sure you have done your keyword research and assigned a selection of keywords (ideally shoot for five or six) to each page of your site. Try to utilize each page’s target keywords at least once within the body content. Use the primary keyword (you might choose the one you deem the most important or relevant to the page, or the keyword with the highest search volume) for each page in the first paragraph, the last paragraph and as many times possible throughout the rest of the body text (without getting ‘spammy’ of course – the script should still make sense).
2. Carefully Consider your Title Tags
There are a couple of things to consider when writing a title tag. For SEO purposes you want a title tag to be succinct and keyword rich. The more diluted a title tag becomes, the less emphasis each keyword is given. So… if for a particular page you really want to hit home for one certain keyword, try stripping everything else from your title tag. Alternatively, in a less competitive market, you might wish to target a few different keyword phrases on a single page. Ultimately the choice is yours, just be sure to separate each keyword phrase with a comma (or a symbol of the like). The second point to consider is that most frequently the title tag will be displayed as the ‘heading’ for your listing in the search engine results. Is your title tag going to ‘convince’ a potential consumer to click through to your site over the others? Lastly, to maintain brand identity you may also wish to end each title tag with a dash followed by your company name.
3. Descriptive Description Tags?
Search engines often pull a page’s description tag to act as the short ‘blurb’ in the search results. There are two main points to consider when writing a description tag.
1) Ideally, your description tag will contain your main keyword phrase within the first few words. Words from the ‘search query’ will be in bold in the search results (i.e. if a user searches for ‘brown dogs’, each time the word ‘brown’ or ‘dogs’ appears in your description it will be in bold) and likely catch the eye of a potential visitor to your site.
2) The description should be enticing in order to persuade a potential customer to click through to your site over the others.
4. Utilize Header Tags
Headings should be catchy (from a ‘traditional’ marketing standpoint) to draw in a reader, but also include your main keywords to emphasize these words in the ‘eye of the spider’. You will also want your heading to relate to your title tag (so as to minimize bounce rates) and remain relevant to the overall content of the page (to maintain your site’s reputation for reliability).
5. Internal Linking – Set Yourself Up for Success
Internal linking (a link from one page of your site to another) is very important to your overall SEO efforts. Try to create at least one internal link to every page of your site. But don’t just go adding links willy nilly, using vague phrases such as ‘click here’ and ‘learn more’ – for an internal link to be truly valuable the link text needs to include a keyword for the destination page. This will be easy if you keep the idea of internal linking in the back of your mind whilst writing your copy. When opportunity arises for you to include a keyword for one of your ‘other’ pages, highlight this keyword in another color, that way when it comes time for content placement you’ll have a visual reminder of all the spots where you had intended for an internal link to go.
6. Emphasize Your Keywords
Search engines consider bold text to be important text, so… put a few of your keywords in bold. But don’t get too carried away! You don’t want to your site to look ‘spammy’. Try opting for one bold term in the introductory paragraph, one in the closing paragraph, and a couple more throughout the body text (depending on the length of your page).
7. Don’t Duplicate!
Keep your content fresh! The search engines want to see that you have new, interesting and relevant information, and they don’t look kindly on websites that copy content from other sites (not to mention the plagiarism issues this raises). Search engines also don’t want to see same content across all the pages of your website. Be sure to write new content for each individual page, relevant to the assigned keywords. If you need to talk about similar points on multiple pages, try taking a different angle and paraphrasing your text rather than repeating it word for word.