Search Engines: Writing Keyword Optimized Copy
Writing
copy for your website is very different from writing
for a brochure or other traditional advertisement.
Catchy slogans and clever hooks that arouse interest
in your audience may work well in traditional advertisements
but online, it usually pays to be more straightforward.
When writing copy for your website, you have to appease
two different audiences - search engines and your
potential clients. The key is to find the balance
of optimizing your site's copy for search engines,
and maintaining its readability and tone for your
visitors.
It is important to know that search engine spiders
rely on the text on your web page to determine it's
content and relevancy. Fancy graphics and Flash intros
may look nice, but search engine spiders aren't able
to pull any relevant content from them. If you're
serious about search engine optimization, you need
to trade in the Flash intro or graphics intensive
homepage for one with that's rich in your keyword
phrases. Home Page
Your
homepage is easily your site's most important page.
It gets the most page views and is the most commonly
linked page within search engines. Plan to write 200-300
words in the copy of your homepage, focusing on two
or three of your most important keyword phrases. This
may seem long but it's the only way you can include
each phrase at least three times without destroying
your marketing message.
Don't try to cram your keyword phrases into the first
paragraph of your copy. Search engine spiders quickly
scan your entire page for every word, so you can include
your keywords where they fit best. In fact, it may
be better to keep your keywords dispersed throughout
the page. When possible, include keywords within your
page headlines and links. Search engines consider
text within these markups to be more important.
It's important to remember that while targeted keywords
in your copy will increase your search engine rankings,
your most important audience is still your paying
clients. Search engines may not care about how articulate
your messages are, but prospective clients do. You
shouldn't ever sacrifice the readability and tone
of your message for the sake of including keywords.
Secondary Pages
Secondary pages within your site allow you to target
different keyword phrases. This is especially useful
when there are multiple phrases with similar meanings.
For example, you may be faced with choosing between
"San Francisco Real Estate" and "San Francisco Properties".
If your website allows you to create additional pages
with customizable content, you can focus on different
keywords with each page. This allows you to cover
all the important phrases without needing to stuff
your homepage with them.
If you have a custom built website, adding new pages
shouldn't be a problem. However, most real estate
websites are template based and aside from your homepage
and profile page, don't provide many opportunities
for you to add search engine friendly content. You
should keep this in mind when purchasing a website
and look for the ability to add custom pages if you
plan on maximizing your exposure on search engines.
Keyword
Editing
Search your text for general terms that you can attach
your keywords to. For instance, if one of your keyword
phrases is "San Francisco luxury homes", you could
make the following optimization:
| Before:
|
Contact
us for a free market report. |
| After:
|
Contact
us for a free report on the San Francisco
luxury homes market. |
You should also use more descriptive listing titles
that include keywords when relevant. For example if
one of your keyword phrases is "Brooklyn Heights apartment",
you can make the following change to a listing title.
| Before:
|
1
Bed Apt - 5555 Main St. |
| After:
|
Single
Bedroom Brooklyn Heights Apartment |
Page Title
The page title is what's displayed at the top of your
browser when you visit any particular web page. Search
engines weigh the Title of your page quite heavily
and you should always include your most important
keyword phrase. It's tempting to use your company
name or your website's domain name as the page title
but this won't help your search engine rankings at
all.
| Good:
|
Berkeley
Hills Real Estate and Community Information |
| Bad:
|
JohnDoe.com
: John Doe Realty Group |
Meta Tags
Meta tags are an invisible part of the HTML that makes
up your web pages. The two meta tags you need to be
concerned about are the Keywords and Description tags.
While most search engines no longer use meta tags
in their rankings, it doesn't hurt include them.
Keywords
The keywords tag consists of a list of key phrases
separated by commas. This is a good place to enter
all of the different variations of all your possible
keyword phrases. You should use the lowercase form
of the words and separate each phrase with only a
comma.
Description
The description tag is a bit more important as a number
of search engines still display the meta description
when your site comes up in a user's search. Not only
should you include your keywords, but also make your
description as compelling as possible in order to
get visitors to your site. Try to keep your descriptions
to under 20 words.
Final
Tip
Make things easy for yourself and choose
a domain name that includes your most important
keyphrase. One enormous advantage of having a keyword
in your domain name is that you can easily write keyword
rich content. The keywords from your domain name will
also appear in all the right places -- links, headlines,
your page title, etc. It'll be easy to scatter your
keyword phrase throughout your copy without being
intrusive.
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Real Estate News and Tools |
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Real Estate Company |
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