To be truly effective, your web content should address two audiences – the search engines and your site visitors. Let’s begin by looking at how to satisfy the first of these here.
Start by planning a web page for each of your services or products. The search engines decide the relevance of a page to a search query by rating the key phrases in your content, so the first task is to research these for each page of your site and then integrate them seamlessly into your copy (more on this next time).
Note we’re talking key phrases here, not single keywords which are far too general and will produce an unmanageable number of search results. In the new Moving Finger site, for example, I’m likely to have a specific page on my newsletter writing services for which a targeted key phrase might be ‘business newsletter copywriting’ (rather than just ‘newsletters’). Not only does this describe a particular aspect of my business making it relevant to the search engines, it’s also one that is likely to be used by searchers to produce a more highly targeted number of prospects.
You can select the most relevant key phrases for each of your pages with research tools such as Wordtracker or Google’s free keyword tool. Alternatively use the services of a search engine optimisation (SEO) expert. Test drive further options by conducting searches using your own key phrases and by asking customers what words they would choose to look for your services. Check out your competitors’ sites as well. You’ll be able to see the key phrases they use in each page’s title tag as well as those featured in the individual page content.
Check competitiveness
The next step is to check the competitiveness of the top ranking key phrases you’ve identified. I’ve found this best left to an SEO specialist but you can also do this yourself using analysis software such as WebCEO.
In basic terms, the competitiveness of any given key phrase is based on the number of pages held in a search engine’s database which have been optimised for that phrase – the more there are, the harder it will be for your page to be ranked for that phrase.
Nevertheless if you’ve researched your potential key phrases well you should be able to identify plenty of relevant alternatives for which the competition is weaker, and which mirror those used by your potential customers.
Focus on these and you will give yourself a realistic chance of achieving decent search engine rankings.
Coming up in part 2: Making your copy readable
