Improve Your Website Copywriting in 5 Simple Steps

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Pure Ink | 3 Comments

Great website copywriting has to balance search engine optimisation and readability in order to appeal to the search engines and your target audience. However, the golden rule of website copywriting is to write for your audience first and the search engines secondly. How do you do this? By following the five simple steps below…

1.    Keep your keywords simple

Cramming too many keywords into one website page will make the copy difficult to write and it’ll be tricky to keep the theme of the page focused. If you find you have too many keywords and too much to write about then break your theme down. You can always use any extra ideas and related keywords for new web pages or blog posts.

2.    Remember relevance

There should be a clear connection between your keywords, the theme of your article, the links in your article and the pages that these links click through to. The more focused you make the theme of a page, the easier it is to write and the clearer it is for your visitors and the search engines to see what the page is about.

3.   Keep your writing natural

There was a time when you could get away with writing pages of keyword-stuffed content which ranked well in the search engines. Times have changed though and search engines have become smarter. Search engines such as Google now recognise that content stuffed with keywords is often useless for website visitors which means that pages like these are now unlikely to rank well. The best way to create a page which works for your visitors is to write it for your visitors. If you’ve chosen a specific theme then your keywords will appear naturally in the content anyway.

4.   Optimise images

Images work particularly well on longer web pages as they break up the text and can clearly illustrate a point. Images can also be optimised so they boost your on page optimisation and they could also appear in the image search results of search engines. Describe what the image is (preferably using a keyword) in the image ALT tag via your website’s content management system to ‘name’ your image. There’s more information on optimising images on this screencast from Site Visibility.

5.   Include links

Including links in your copywriting serves the dual purpose of providing further information to visitors and proving to the search engines that the content is well researched and written for the reader. Again, relevance is important here and linking through to authoritative and related websites will further highlight the theme of your page to the search engines. You may also get an added bonus of the website you link to linking back to your website.

Improving your website copywriting and creating content which works for the search engines and visitors is straightforward if you use these five steps.

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