When writing copy for the web the following should be considered: Your keyword and content strategy would have been determined at the start of your SEO campaign.

1. Do not write copy for Search Engines, write it for your target audience. Take into account how your target audience would go about trying to find a site like yours through search engines and purpose your copy appropriately.
2. Include Calls to Action. Every web page should have a purpose, a specific action you would like the visitor to take. It may be posting a comment (on a blog), purchasing an item (on an e-commerce store) or completing a contact from. Be sure to include one or two calls to action on your copy as users do not always know it is possible to perform those actions.
3. Highlight the important bits. You probably skimmed through this post only reading the text in bold right? We are all short of time, so are your users. By ensuring the main message you are trying to convey is communicated quickly and easily, ensure the calls to action and important information is highlighted by changing the colour, font size or making it bold.
4. Keep It Simple, Stupid. To reach as many people as possible make sure the language used can be understood by everyone. This will give the reader more time to perform the actions you want them to, grass the ideas you are trying to share instead of Googling the definition of big scary words.
5. Include links explaining concepts further. In the start of this blog post I mentioned ‘the start of your SEO campaign’. Notice that it was linked to a previous post that explains the questions that should be asked before starting an SEO campaign.
6. Main points at the begining of a sentence. This saves those reading your copy time and also helps with scanning.
7. Add your SEO copy writing suggestion as a comment. This list is far from complete. Please feel free to post a comment below suggesting an SEO copy writing tip.

SEO Who?

Who are you trying to target with your Search Engine Optimization campaign? Before venturing into the quest to rank number 1 one Google for any keywords you should first consider who your target audience is. The better you define your user, no it is not every user who uses Google (or any other Search Engine) to find information, the easier it will be to target the right keywords/phrases that the user searches for.

SEO What?

What would you like to achieve once the user (your potential customer) has found your blog or your company website via search engines? Would you like them to subscribe to your newsletter, feed, purchase a product or make contact with you? Determining the action you would like the user who has found your website via search results should always be considered before starting an SEO campaign.

SEO Where?

The Where question can be split into 2:

1. Where is the user searching from? (home or work)
2. Where in the world is the ideal user you are targeting with SEO located?

The users who will find your website via search results have different amounts of time at their disposal when comparing browsing from home or work. Once determining this by analyzing your website statistics the length of your copy on your site should be adjusted to allow them to achieve the answer to the ‘What?’ questioned you have just determined.

The location of your ideal user who finds your site via search should also be considered. Your hosting location and domain name play an important role in the Search Engine Result Pages(SERPs) especially with Google.com and Google.co.za. There are also other ways to adjust this but will be discussed in future updates to this site. Subscribe to The SEOblog.co.za newsletter or RSS feed to stay updated.

SEO When?

When will the ideal user be searching for your website? Examples: Is it while they are making a decision on where or from whom to buy property in Cape Town? Or when referring friends to their favourite accommodation in Port Elizabeth and cannot remember your domain name? This is when a simple search will answer their questions.

SEO Why?

Why should your business consider SEO? That answer is easy: more customers, increased cash flow, a return on investmet for the expenditure on your website. If there is anything more you would like to know or are in need of SEO feel free to make contact or leave a comment below.

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1. Dynamic titles – Make sure your pages title tags contain related keywords to your content. Also put yourself in your potential visitor’s shoes – write a title which the visitor will find interesting and possibly click on e.g. seoblog.co.za/seo_tips.php – If you are using Wordpress set the permalink in options to date and name.
2. Deep linking – This is a quick way to tell search engines you have targeted content on your website related to the keyword you are linking. Link to pages within your website using a related keyword to describe the content instead of linking ‘click here’. This could also contribute to your page views and user session times as the visitor will be discovering more content as he reads.
3. Building links – Link building is the key to search engine optimization, especially if you have third party sites linking keywords in their content to your homepage and sub pages. Established websites linking back to your website’s content raises your website’s ‘trust’ level on the internet.
4. Get indexed – If your website is new and haven’t been indexed by search engines getting a back link from a quality site will help alert Google and co to crawl your pages.
5. Think quality links – The impact of a bunch of low quality websites linking to your website will have less effect than one quality established website back link.
6. Setup your XML sitemap – Setup a sitemap using any sitemap generator or any of these plugins if you are on the Wordpress platform. Sitemaps will guide the search engine spiders crawling your pages to all the quality content. If you have loads of content setup different sitemaps to categorize your content for the spiders to crawl.
7. Track your goals – Start off by setuping up SEO campaign goals and then track your progress with Google Analytics. We will go into great detail with this application very soon but for now sign up, add the tracking tags and let Google collect some data so you have stats to work with.
8. SEO Books – Get your hands on these quality search marketing resources – the Quirk eMarketing text book or SitePoints’s SEM Kit.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Chapter 6 – eMarketing Textbook. (website coming soon)

Saluton Mondo! Hello wwworld.