March 15th, 2010 by Susie

Effective SEO must appeal to both the human user and the search engine bot.

This means that generally, the content itself should be grammatically correct, spelt properly and easy to read. Ultimately, in order for search engine spiders to locate your site in the first instance and rank it highly, it must also be relevant.

But there is more to effective SEO copywriting than running a quick spell check over everything before you upload it.  Find out more with our top five tricks for effective search engine optimization copywriting below.

1.    Maximise your meta tags
Meta tags refer to your title, keywords and descriptions. They are essential in helping search engine robots and human users locate your site but the danger is – either through a lack of confidence or knowledge– adding too many, and even worse, adding too many of the wrong ones. Meta tags, like all keywords (and more on this in the next point) need to be short and sweet.

2.    Get some killer keywords
The most important thing about keywords is not stuffing as many you can randomly in your content, meta tags and anywhere else, but choosing them wisely. How? Choose keywords that are relevant to your website and market. Think about words that other people will type into search engines to find you – never forget that you are trying to attract search engine spiders AND people so don’t sacrifice one for the other. Finally, put your keywords where they are needed most: in the tag, in the title and then use the keywords a few times in the content of that page.

3.    High-five headings!
Any copy requires structure to make it inviting (or at least not off-putting) and easy to negotiate your way around. This is true of content in print as well as online. We have all been in the situation when, faced with a block of text on the screen in front of us, we have frowned in annoyance and clicked away a second later. Headings help break up text, help readers skim through your content to find the most relevant section for them, and anchor the page for search engine spiders. Remember that the best SEO attracts search engine bots and human users – a select one or two headings dividing up your content will do exactly this.

4.    Be careful with content
In a nutshell, content is what attracts the search engine spiders to your website, drawn in by the relevance of the copy on your site to the search engine keywords that have been typed in. It IS as simple as that, but content is easily forgotten with the emphasis on the look and feel of a new website. The appearance of a site is important to attract human users, and the plethora of options in website design is both mindboggling and seductive, but, search engine spiders can’t see visuals, and no user will regard a pretty site as a suitable trade-off for poor content.

5.    The bonus of blogs
A blog is great for search engine optimisation because in many ways it acts like an additional website while offering the opportunity for social media marketing. It also ticks off so many SEO tools, techniques and tricks: content? Tick! Internal and external links? Tick! Search engine spiders love these and they love the text-based navigation that blogs offer them. As with all aspects of SEO, it is important that the blog is relevant and targeted.