The promotional power of SEO copywriting

We hear a lot these days about the mystical art of copy based search engine optimisation, or “SEO copywriting” as it’s more commonly known. Well, I’m here to tell you that much of what you’ve heard is probably a load of old smoke and mirrors.

Like magicians of old, but without the silly colourful capes and the bunnies, SEO savvy copy experts have been pulling the proverbial wool over our eyes for years and what’s worse is that we’ve let them. Usually perfectly sensible companies have queued up to spend money on SEO copywriting with little or no knowledge about what they are paying for or simply accepting the equivalent of “just trust me” before signing off sizable sums. It is no surprise that with disappointing results came a dark age of distrust in those peddling SEO copy services as the pendulum of sensible scepticism swung too far in the other direction.

There is no doubt that in today’s online business world SEO copywriting plays an important role. An efficiently optimised website can make all the difference to the visibility of your online presence to those all important customer gate-keepers, the search engines. Optimise your website to be found, draw in new customers and improve your profitability, don’t optimise and miss out on this promotional opportunity and be consigned to the obscurity of page 3 or beyond in the search results – or as we like to call it, the abyss.

The bad old days of SEO copywriting

Since the inception of the search engine, first page positioning has become the Holy Grail of online business. In the bad old days SEO experts would employ an “anything it takes” approach to attempt to outsmart the search engines. Many of these tactics involved copy:

• Invisible copy – Colouring copy the same as its background so it became invisible to the human eye but still visible to search engines then filling the page with those all important keywords.
• Invisible pages – Creating pages that could not be accessed by human visitors as they were not on the main navigation but could also contain masses of keywords.
• Keyword stuffing – Where the copy on the page was written with such a density of keywords that it became practically unreadable by the human audience with the aim of building traffic first and sales second.
• Duplicate content – Repeating the same page over and over so as not to have to rewrite them, but to gain from the extra volume of copy that the search engines would see.
• And many many more.

These were collectively called “black hat” techniques, and as their purpose is to manipulate how search engines saw websites the search engines hit back. As corporate giants they could afford to employ the most skilled technical experts in their field to adapt their algorithms to recognise when websites were trying to fool them, their huge PR machine was able to spread rumours of penalties for such unscrupulous practices and it worked. The face of SEO and SEO copywriting changed.

The lighter side of SEO copywriting

SEO copywriting these days is all about good quality copy, sensibly optimised, intelligently positioned and in tune with the business and its operations. It is still an art to be able to balance keyword densities with sales orientated promotional copy that will wow your human audience, but instead of a complicated array of tactics thought up by those looking to subvert he system, SEO copywriting is now a far more sophisticated tool for website promotion.

The winning formula

One of the most recent additions to the SEO copywriting arsenal is corporate blogging. One of the most important factors of any SEO campaign is to ensure an ever changing or increasing volume of sensibly optimised copy on, or pointing towards a website. Therefore a corporate blog is the sensible excuse and repository for all this copy. An SEO copywriter can create countless optimised articles on a variety of subjects for a blog no matter what the client’s industry and this will drive excellent volumes of additional traffic to their website. It also has the added bonus of helping to build customer loyalty as well.

SEO copywriting has become an essential part of any SEO campaign these days, but a sensible piece of advice is to watch out for the old guard who are still around, though in small numbers, and beware of SEO experts who store their bunnies in their top hats!

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

This post was written by Richard Cohn of Scribbles Writing Service.