March 8th, 2010 by Susie

The first rule of writing any copy with search engine optimization in mind is not to – or at least, not to have SEO as your primary objective. Always write for real people. Pay attention to spelling, grammar, and how the text looks on screen. Giant overlong paragraphs are hard to read, for example, and too many short ones can be irritating and break up the flow. Keep the style good and make sure the text is pleasant to read. If in doubt, have a look through something like the Guardian Style Guide for tips on writing in a clean, professional style.

The content needs to be original. Plagiarism from other websites will drop you down the rankings fast, and may bring a host of other problems to your doorstep. From an SEO perspective, and a legal one, and a moral once, just don’t go there. Feel free to quote, attribute, link, and mention other people’s site content (that is actually good SEO, if done properly), but stay ethical.

It also needs to be interesting and original. The best link building strategy is to create content other people on the web (both regular users and people with authority and influence) will actually want to link to, without you having to ask them. Top quality content, whether it be information or opinion, is much more likely to end up read by more people and passed on. It will bring traffic to your site from searches, and if it’s good, keep them there.

Content also comes back to keywords. Relevance is a term you will hear a lot in SEO circles. Plan out which keywords you want each page to focus on and write the text with those keywords in mind. Choose one or two primary keywords and maybe a couple of related secondary ones for each set of text. Don’t fall into the trap of peppering every sentence with keyword phrases and combinations – search engines are much smarter than that, and to human readers it’ll look spammy and they may not even bother getting to the end of the page. Use our free keyword densities checker tool to ensure you aren’t over-egging the pudding.

Have the primary keywords in the title if possible- it isn’t essential but it helps. Using headings with your keywords in them is also a good idea, but do it where relevant in the text- remember readability is key. The old idea that really long articles are good SEO has pretty much been debunked. It’s also worth keeping a degree of uniqueness between pages you own, so they aren’t competing against each other in the rankings.

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