The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines

By Jill Whalen
Posted Saturday, September 18, 2004

To successfully rank highly in the search engines, the words on your Web pages should never be an afterthought but a major investment in your search engine optimization campaign.

After your keyword research, writing search-engine-friendly copy should be the very next step in your optimization campaign. For non-competitive keyword phrases, the writing on the page alone can often bring in high rankings without any other special coding and Meta tagging. Once you've become familiar with the ins and outs of SEO writing, you'll be ready to focus on your Title tags, Meta tags and all the other SEO goodies available to you.

Armed with this knowledge and a bit of practice, you'll be able to use your new skills in two very powerful ways:

1)To double-check all newly written, keyword-rich marketing copy (written by you or your copywriters), ensuring that all possible keyword opportunities have been found;

2)To edit existing copy that wasn't originally written with keywords in mind, ensuring that it keeps the original readability and marketing "flow."

Making sure that your keywords are well represented in your copy without losing its readability isn't difficult; however, if you've never done it or thought about it before it can seem like a daunting task. I suggest you read through this special report once to get the gist of it. Then go through each section again, while at the same time checking your own Web site to see if you can put any of the information to use right away. You may be surprised to find all the keyword opportunities your current copy provides you with.

Learn where to place keyword phrases in your Web copy. Whether you're writing keyword-rich marketing copy from scratch or simply changing the keyword focus of your existing copy, it's not always easy to know where to place those pesky keywords so that they don't interrupt the flow of your writing. Through my years of teaching copywriters how to write with keywords in mind and my own editing of keyword-rich copy, I've discovered some very simple but effective techniques.

The purpose of this special report is to show you how and where to place your most important keyword phrases within the visible text copy of your Web pages. There are three main groups of people who will greatly benefit from understanding these techniques:

1)Search engine optimization (SEO) consultants who need to edit the existing copy of their clients' sites as a matter of course.
2)Webmasters and small business owners who are doing their own site optimization.
3)Professional copywriters who want to expand their writing services to include search engine optimization copywriting.

Not a copywriting guide but an SEO copyediting guide. To get the most out of this report, you'll need some knowledge of copywriting (specifically for the Internet) and/or some knowledge of search engine optimization in general. If you're not a professional copywriter, I highly recommend that you read Karon Thackston's Step-By-Step Copywriting Course in addition to this report. Karon and I strongly believe that between her copywriting course and my SEO writing report, your copywriting education will be complete.

About the Author
Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter.

She specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations and seminars. Jill's handbook, "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.