This might come as a shock to you, but the best way for most small businesses to attract the search engines might be to ignore them. That’s right – I said it.
In a world dominated by trying to pull in the search engines, one of the best things most people can do for their web copy is to forget about the search engines entirely. Just stop trying so hard to make your web content fit into that magic Willy Wonka formula.
As an SEO Copywriter, you might think I am crazy to say something like that. Blasphemy! “Wait a minute,” you say with suspicion. “Isn’t it all about keywords, and repeating the keywords in specific order, and counting how many words are on the page, and making sure the proper H1 and H2 tags are used, and making some keywords bold, and using bullets in a specific place…”
And on and on and on.
The many “professional” tricks of SEO copywriting could fill a worthless eBook or ten. Everything from how many characters you have in a page to exactly how many keywords make the right number to have in the meta tag. Let’s not forget my personal favorite sham of all time: Measuring keyword density as a percentage, and making that percentage the primary measure of the page’s value. Yuck! I actually used to have to do this for some very well known brand names. Really dumb.
Welcome to the Machine
Search engine bots don’t “read” your page: they break it down into things they can easily quantify. Things like keyword density. It is math. Density is easy to measure, so a machine can do it – it can both write and read it. Quality is not so easy to define and contain, and machines will forever struggle to interpret or create nuance.
Machines, like search engines, enjoy math because it always makes sense – zeroes and ones. It is steady and dependable. It can be controlled. It can be measured with percentages. It is a part of SEO, for sure.
But just like in school, there is always going to be someone better at math than you – making the “SEO” part of SEO copywriting a pretty competitive place to be, to say the least. Believe me, there are some math experts filling the search engine results, and they will always be a few steps ahead of you.
Good writing is often the opposite of math. It can and should be delightfully unpredictable. It keys in on passions and is sometimes measured by connection. It is also usually a more attainable goal for most web-writers-to-be.
Keyword repetition will almost always seem forced –because it usually is forced. Using multiple keywords to impress the machines will not often result in copy that is going to retain the interest of the humans. The bored humans will leave, quickly. And all of the machines in the world cannot replace the value of the humans plugging-in to your website. When you are all about the engines, you simply have to keep relying on them more than your message. While it works for some this way, it is a colossal fail for most people’s efforts.
So when you are writing only to impress or trick the search bots, most people will lose. Doing it well takes years of constant practice, and the rules change by the day. And there are always people better at that kind of math than you. Some do it with huge machines so you have to be better at math than a machine to win. Sorry.
But all is not lost…there is still an easy way to come out on top: you earn it.
Writing for the Human Engines
Since most people want their web copy to work for the long haul, they are much better off trying to create something real for their customers than pouring verbs into a cauldron bubbling with some New Coke formula sure to bring them to the #1 page in Google this time.
For now, leave the keywords to the cauldrons, the machines and the experts. Become an expert on your business – on the services and products that make you the purple cow. If you promote your business honestly and with an eye trained on bringing more value to the user, I PROMISE you, your site will work well in the search engines. And I never promise anything, that is how sure of this I am.
When you create something of value, people talk about it. They forward it. Link to it. Become involved with it. In their involvement, your keywords (and so many more) will occur – trust me. It is the true nature of organic web building, and social media finally makes it pretty easy. On-page strength (the keywords you stuff in there) is only one small piece of the puzzle in how SEO works. A page with tons of keywords in it can lose to a page that is better aligned with links, and it happens all the time. So focus your content on quality, not keywords.
All it takes is the right idea to spark a conversation. This will trigger SEO power that can be brought into your website. (Notice I didn’t say keywords once)
Bottom Line
The bottom line is if you are just starting on the web and want to write pages that will do well in the search engines, you shouldn’t try to learn how to write for search engines. Yep, said it again.
Instead, learn how to write pages that connect with people: turn an ability to answer their needs into your direction. Be adept and fluent in what makes you great, learning to openly communicate (in strategic and carefully chosen platforms) the things that set you apart in a noisy marketplace.
If you become a good writer, learning the mechanical parts of SEO copywriting are a great way to focus some energy to be sure. Learning how to blend in the targeted keywords so they don’t disrupt the flow of a page is not rocket science, but it does take considerable time and study. And it only makes a logical next step, once you have first learned to connect with an audience.
I repeat: Get your message straight first. Focus on writing something that answers a need and strikes a chord. Stand out from the pile. Earn trust. Build relationships, and offer a platform for discussion. Feed the people what they need. This is the basic foundation for long term success.
Then you can worry about learning how to better feed the machines.
Marty Lamers owns a Freelance SEO Copywriting company named Articulayers. Since 2001, Articulayers has been fixing the world, one word at a time. For more information, visit: http://www.articulayers.com
Related posts:
