These tips may help your SEO copywriting efforts
SEO copywriting is a unique creature, pairing creative content with technical guidelines. To be successful at the craft one must strike a chord with the audience members by appealing to their emotions, self interests and mind set, while still following keyword phrase parameters that have been forged by Google.
I consider SEO copywriting to be the ultimate mental workout. It combines the objective focus of the left brain with the subjective focus of the right brain; the creativity of stringing words together meets the analytical design of adding specific keywords and following other previously determined SEO “rules”.
These rules have been created to ultimately weed out the true content creators from the spammers. It was a necessary action to take in order to keep credibility in the industry, and allow great content to be found more easily.
As the internet continues to evolve and its penetration into society grows deeper, the steps involved in SEO copywriting change as well. Specifications become increasingly more detailed and steps get added to the process of SEO copywriting.
Below I have outlined a few steps of SEO copywriting that escape copywriters from time to time. Considering these steps in the future may help lead to better page ranks in Google.
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3 Commonly Overlooked SEO Copywriting Steps
Commonly Overlooked SEO Copywriting Tip #1: Proper Linking – I still come across links in articles that are not embedded. Google prefers to have actual content linked with embedded links, opposed to the content creator writing out the link.
For example, if you want to post a link to a free report on Content Marketing Strategy Basics, do it as I just did. Do not say, “Visit the free report here” and then insert a link. You will potentially lose some credibility with Google if you choose to do the latter option.
Commonly Overlooked SEO Copywriting Tip #2: Formatting of Words – When possible, consider making your keywords and keyword phrases bold or italicized. Doing so will help search engines understand that the word in bold or italics is one of your keywords. You will want to do this while keeping your content editorial sound. Don’t make it blatantly obvious to your readers that you are highlighting keywords or they may be turned off to it.
I have also read that underlining keywords falls into the same category with bold and italics. I would however not recommend using underlines all that much. Underlined words or phrases might confuse the readers by leading them to think that the underlines are actually links. This could create frustration that stops visitors from returning to your website.
Commonly Overlooked SEO Copywriting Tip #3: File Names – If you are including direct downloads involving file names, be sure to add your primary keywords to the file name as well as the directory it’s in. This will have some SEO benefit for you. Doing so will make your URL, domain name and file name all relevant to your keyword-rich content.
Keeping these overlooked SEO copywriting tips in mind while performing your SEO duties may result in better page ranks. For more on SEO copywriting, register now for our upcoming SEO Copywriting Workshop Webinar, hosted by Mequoda’s Chief Copywriter Peter A. Schaible.
