Recently, we’ve been focusing on important factors that can affect your Web site’s visibility in the search engines. Last month, we focused on the “anchor text”, the text inside a text link pointing towards a Web page. This month, it’s all about keyword use in your Web page’s copy.

Before we start, let’s get something straight. You should ALWAYS write your copy for your customers and visitors, not the search engines. After all, the search engines don’t actually buy anything, they are just a vehicle to bring people to your site who are looking for something specific. If you write for a search engine with a repetitive use of keywords in ways that make no sense to a human being, you are not focusing on your customers, you are starting to obsess with search engine rankings and ignoring the essence of the Internet: human interaction and emotions.

You need to prepare 600-800 words of copy for a Web page, integrating the 2 or 3 phrases for that page into the copy so it makes sense to the visitor. If you can’t do this yourself, we recommend using a professional service like AllWrite Ink. The money you invest in a well-written page can pay dividends as more people do what you want them to do because of how the copy is written. Again, it’s all about human emotion and how people react to the words they are reading.

Some tips:

• Ask a question, provide and explain your solution—your visitor is there for a reason
• Integrate your keywords into clear headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.) and subheadings
• Rule of thumb: Have at least half your keywords on the top half of your landing pages. Remember… don’t over do it
• The first paragraph should be a summary of the overall article and should include both primary and secondary keywords
• Use 3 or 4 paragraphs—if you have a lot of copy, use more pages with breadcrumb navigation
• Use bullet points—this makes it easier to quickly digest information
• Use humor if applicable—it can be a way to make someone remember your Web site or that page
• Use graphics—a photo or pie chart can replace a 1,000 words
• If you do use graphics, add ALT tags, especially if the image is a link
• Don’t over-elaborate with technical or “biz-speak”—don’t make yourself sound like a textbook
• Where possible, linking text should always be descriptive. Never, ever use “click here” links as they are devoid of context and therefore useless to search engines
• Add “title” attributes to links, tables, and forms
• Don’t use underlines—visitors will think they are links
• Use bold and italic where necessary to stress a point or mention a book title or company
• If you use tables for data, make sure you add a “summary” tag to the opening table tag to describe what that table contains—this is good for screen readers
• Use a keyword density analyzer to check that your keyword phrases are actually in the copy

Lastly, validate your code to make sure it is compliant with current Web standards! This will help it load correctly in browsers and make you a better Web designer.

Next month, we’ll focus on #4: a page’s accessbility (e.g. 404 error pages, redirects, and other technical issues).

DIGG THIS PAGE!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 9:22 am.