I have had a number of clients and friends recently ask me for simple
SEO techniques they can do to improve their search engine rankings. It is important to
remember, to succeed in
organic search requires diligence, and an ever-changing, complex combination of strategies.
There is no simple answer, but there some simple things that don't seem to change, year-after- year,
things that most anyone can do to make their pages a little stronger.
Simple SEO Copywriter Strategies
- Page titles. This is probably the most common, and costly mistake I
see in people's websites. They will often have the same title for every page of the site, or
use something that offers them nothing in return. Create a page title that is no more than 75
characters long (including spaces), rich with keywords that are reflected in the body copy.
For now anyway, this is a huge factor in every webpage's organic ranking, and it's really easy
to do correctly.
- Keyword density. This is a much-debated factor of search that has
seen some changes and fluctuations in the past few years. However, I have found that by
targeting only one to three keywords per 250-word page and making sure the terms or phrases
appear in the beginning, middle and end of the body copy, your specific density is not much of
an issue anymore. 250 words has remained pretty constant, but the importance of density has
been much more up-and-down to thwart black-hat practices like keyword stuffing, or spamming.
That all said, I still target between a 3 and 8 percent density for pages in sites
that don't have a lot of other contributing factors that will help them build organic strength
(like back-links, extensive internal linking, large site footprint, etc.). The lower end of
this scale is typically what I do for less competitive terms, the higher end
is the target when it is in a smaller site for a more competitive term. It has always worked
for me this way, and I don't see it changing anytime soon. There are lots of free density
checkers out there--just find a free one you like to use, and check your site's pages to make
sure each one has the density it needs to do what you want it to do.
- Titles, bolding, bullets and headers. Reading simple html tags like H1,
H2 headers, strong or bold tags, or bullets and numbered tags seems to make the search spiders
and the search engines attribute more value to the words held within these
tags. The titles, bolding and bullets in each webpage serve a double purpose for you--they make
your copy easier to scan and understand for the user, and if strategically researched and
created, they also build your relative keyword strength in the search engines.
- Add more content to your site. You have to make regular additions to your
website
to increase what is called your site's "footprint." It makes perfect sense: the more pages your
site has added to it in regular intervals, the more relevant and authoritative the search
engines will see it to be. Start a newsletter, or an
industry-specific blog, or put out regular press releases and post them on your site.
The engines will index these pages if you let them, which increases your
assumed industry relevance: which turns into more traffic, which becomes more opportunity.
You score a really easy thing with any one of these approaches, and a press release with a
carefully, and very specifically worded link back to your site picked up by industry
news-site-scrapers (which is very common) posts your article all over the web, for free.
Makes you appear as a leading authority in much
less time than it takes to actually become an authority at something. Scary, but true.
But in whatever way makes sense to you, add a couple pages a month to your site, letting
it grow in a natural way...this is a very valuable and easy way to increase your site strength.
- Build a site map. I have had a lot of clients that don't think they need a
site map for any number of reasons. What a site map does for you though, is to create a single
page that has a link to every other page in your site. This allows the spiders to find
everything you want them to index in one place, and increases the likelihood that every page of
your site will be indexed. Going back to the footprint concept, the more pages your site has
indexed, the more authoritative you will be considered, and the more traffic you will receive
(at least in theory).
Organic search success is not rocket science but there are simple strategies that combine
good
writing, good code, and good research that will work every time. Don't try to cheat--you will
lose. The world of search is competitive and can often be pretty unforgiving. However, if you
are careful and deliberate in your site construction and promotion, you can easily build and
maintain some regularly increasing traffic, making your success in the search engines grow.
Guaranteed.
Want some more SEO copywriter techniques?
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Call (770)591-5526 or email today for a free consultation about how an SEO copywriter from Articulayers can bolster
your next web project.
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