Writing search engine optimized copy

I had a meeting with a frustrated client this week. I hate those--I gotta say, it bugs me when there's a lack of knowledge in the market. For some reason, there's a huge ignorance around the whole world of SEO copywriting, something the web copywriting team at write2market has been doing successfully for years.

So back to the client--and by the way, he's a really sharp person who has built the number three company in his entire industry and is poised to be number one--has a web site that doesn't deliver organic ranking reliably. He wanted greater clarification about what works for ranking from a content perspective. I put together a few things for him to read and thought sharing it on the blog would be a good idea too.

While Write2Market has a lot of internal training material on web copywriting as well as TONS of search engine optimization samples I wanted to provide Google’s own answers.

Here is a link to their webmaster guidelines.

What is especially relevant is the design and content guidelines, which are quoted here and available at the link above (and I added the emphases):

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. (Lisa’s note: this is how they describe SEO. It's important.)
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

I thought you may also want to see Google on SEO.

Once you’ve read, that, you can see exactly what we do on sites. You’ll find our must-do list includes:

• Keyword in h1
• Keywords in h2s
• Keywords bolded, italicized, and/or linked
• Short, blunt page on one topic
• Keywords in page title (browser bar)
• Keyword in “keywords” tag on page (in source code/html)
• Keywords in “meta description” (in source code/html.

We also like to see the main keyword in the URL if at all possible--but that's just our preference and I have never seen Google mention it. Happy ranking--

Lisa

Write2Market’s Casey Fiesler Wins National Burton Writing Award

Atlanta writer recognized alongside screen writer David E. Kelly, Supreme Court Chief Justice Antonin Scalia and author Bryan Garner.

I did nothing here--but I'm happy to share the news. Casey Fiesler, a writer who’s worked with our Atlanta public relations and content development firm for four years, is one of 15 recipients of the coveted Burton Award in Legal Writing in the category of student writing.

2009 Burton Award recipients in other categories include screen writer David E. Kelly, Supreme Court Chief Justice Antonin Scalia and author Bryan Garner. The awards were presented in a gala ceremony the evening of June 15, 2009 at the Library of Congress.

Called the Pulitzer of legal writing, for ten years the Burton Awards have honored writing expertise in the highest traditions of legal scholarship. Casey won for her article published in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law titled “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content.”

Yeah, in a world of stodgy legal pundits and know-it-all's, I'd say "our girl" stood out. Way to go, Casey! Our clients are fortunate to have you.

Freelance writers get how-to guides today

It's about time, too.

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