Search Engine-Friendly Copy Makes Sense To Website Visitors

A lesson in basic Search Engine Optimization Theory

David Bailey, CEO

More than ever before, businesses rely on traffic and commerce from their website for daily survival. It's essential to have website content that helps your clients use search engines (and therefore, the search engine's spiders, crawlers and algorithms) to find you.

So, how do you write quality content that will bring interested visitors to your site without losing your site's natural flow and integrity?

There's No Complex Secret To SEO

Listen. It doesn't get any simpler than this: make sure your site has the words and phrases your customers are using to find you. That's it!

Many companies make the mistake of thinking they are smarter than their customer, or worse, not thinking of their customer at all by adding their own favorite colors, topics, designs and content.

I'm reminded of a customer who wanted to design his site in blue and pink solely because they were his late mother's favorite colors. I told him he'd better hope his customers share his mother's impeccable taste.

Instead of your whims, trust the facts and statistics available to you to develop content for your site. If a phrase is searched for most, it means this is most likely what your visitors are interested in.

Getting Started: Relevant Terms

Do your research first and make sure that you are using popular phrases. That's only step one, so don't stop there. Next, consider these phrases in relation to your product and your visitors. If you don't, your site guests will "bounce" off your site; in other words, leave sooner than you wanted them to. That's bad because search engines pay more and more attention to bounces every day. Obviously, we like to keep our bounce rates low -- typically below 20 percent.

When writing content for your site, start with a first sentence that includes the two most popular words/phrases that relate to your product. A good example of this is a travel site I work with: explorearizonatours.com. I'm sure it's no surprise for me to say that this site specializes in providing tours of Arizona, and specifically Grand Canyon tours.

In the case of this site, we want people who are looking for Arizona and Grand Canyon tours to us first and keep people looking for other specific types of tours or more general types of tours away. I don.t want someone looking for "American tours" to this site because that is too general and a small amount of people interested in tours of America actually have an interest in something as specific as Grand Canyon tours or Arizona tours. So, I would have too many people bouncing off my site in this case.

Quick Tips: SEO Friendly First Sentences

Put the phrase you are working on as close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible.
The sentence should be able to hold a secondary search phrase as well.
Use no more than 20 words or 100 characters.

Optimizing Body Text

The body of your copy should be an in-depth study of the first sentence. This should contain what we call string terms. String terms are searches that people type just before or after your main keywords. For instance, when a person types the word "tour" when they are looking for a "Grand Canyon tour." As soon as they go to the search result for tour they will find very broad search results for tours all over the world and bounce back to the search engine and type "Grand Canyon tour" and they would get a still very broad listing of Grand Canyon tours. At this point the visitor would probably get to their point of interest and type "Grand Canyon helicopter tour."

I like to use the first sentence phrase twice in the body text. In the case of explorearizonatours.com, I used same-site link text with the phrase "Grand Canyon Arizona Tours", linking it to my list of Grand Canyon tours for one of the "Arizona tours" uses. I linked it to the Arizona Tourism Alliance using the phrase "For information about Arizona tours and tourism" for its last use.

Provide interesting and useful content for your visitors. They aren't typing in these phrases because they want to find pretty flash pictures highlighting the beautiful Arizona landscape. They want to read about you and your products or services.

Quick Tips: Optimization of Body Text

Use the main term no more than twice more in the text body.
Include no more than 750 words on the front page.
Incorporate one inside-site text link using the main phrase.
Have one outside site link using the main phrase.