SEO Copywriting Tips – Things to keep in mind while blogging
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SEO copywriting isn’t the same as normal copywriting. It could be boring, to be honest. What what I insist my clients is, they never make a formula out of these suggestions. They are guidelines that you just need to keep in mind while writing on your blog. That way it is easy. But if you srrat counting the umber of words in the whole text and then divide it with the number of times the keyword is repeating to find out the keyword density and stuff, I don’t think this will be an interesting exercise.
- Give the primary keyword most importance
Always keep the primary keyword in mind while writing the article. While I don’t believe in taking away a writers freedom, it’d be good if you can write an article around the suggested keyword and maintain a keyword density of 6-8%in the whole article. Also make sure the primary keyword is evenly “sprinkled” around in the whole copy.The idea is to make sure that the search engines can easily make out what the article is about from the following things.
- Keyword density/ Strength
- Keyword occurrence/sprinkling(keyword density is the measure of the number of times the keyword occurs in the whole copy.)
- Use <strong> tags to highlight phrases containing the primary keyword
Make sure you use strong tags to highlight phrases that contain the primary content and the variations of it. Also make sure that you don’t go around highlighting every occurrence of the keyword but around 3-4% in the whole text and near the start/end of the entire copy is ideal.
- Use variations of the primary keyword in the article
Use variations of the primary keyword in a healthy ratio of 4% of the entire copy.
For example if the keyword is “Flower” the variations would be “red flower” “blue flower” etc and not “flowers” or “flowering”.
- Maintain a keyword density of 6-8% of the primary keyword and at least 3-4% of the variations
- While linking to other sites, use a nofollow attribute.
Use a nofollow attribute to external link sources wherever necessary, especially if there are lot of outgoing links in a particular article. I’d say if you run beyond 3 links in an article, it’s better to nofollow them while you can ignore nofollows for links less than three in number.
- Use titles for links
Use the “title” attribute for all links external or internal. In the title attribute, give a short description of less than 6 words containing the primary keyword or its variations.
Ex:- “More articles on Wedding” where “Wedding” is the primary keyword.
- Try to interlink to your own pages/articles with the appropriate keyword that suits the content of the destination article. Do not use nofollow attributes while doing this.
- Try to maintain a length of at least 250 words in the whole article.
This is to make sure that Google gets the chance to scan your copy and collect the keywords from it. If it’s a short article, the engines might not consider it a valid doc.
- When writing headings, try to make sure that the primary keyword is placed in the first three words.
Ex:- “Wedding Troubles – Article 1,2 and 3” where Wedding Troubles is the keyword.
- Pictures
- Use ALT text to describe the picture. Make sure you have the primary keyword in it.
- Use the “Title” attribute for images where there is occurrence of the keyword or its variations.
- Make sure the pictures are not cornered out (in the code) and lies within close proximity with the paragraph having a good keyword density.
- Use descriptive image paths where there are occurrences of the primary keyword.
Ex:- sensitive.com/troubles-life/wedding.jpg makes more sense thatn sensitive.com/wp123/xyz.jpg
Thanks a lot for these tips. I am doing some of them, but I will continue to keep a few others in the back of my mind while I am writing. I have the whole internal linking thing down pat.
I just went through and “nofollow”‘d a bunch of links that were in every post, in my sidebar, and footer… i only have 20 or so pages on my blog so far, but those were like 200+ links I was passing link juice on to, who really don’t need it. Imagine if I had 100 posts/pages… that would have been 2000+ links I was passing link juice onto for no reason.
I don’t mind passing link juice to great sites, but Feedburner and Alexa don’t need it. =)
Another tool I have been using to help me make keyword decisions is from wordsfinder.com My google traffic hasn’t seen a big increase on any of the three blogs, but I am seeing it from places like MSN and yahoo who are still important enough not to ignore.
Hi! I also block document formats like .doc, .pdf and others in the robots.txt file if they do not have any especially mission regarding SEO. I so, I link them together and make a separate sitemap in both html and the mentioned formats. Perhaps you could write something about this in your blog?
Best regards,
Trond
guess it is better to use a keyword density plugin rather than manually counting them..one more tip that i would add is to spring some italicized keywords and variations as well in the article…
hey there
thanks for sharing these tips, really useful
will try to implement at least some of them in my practice
keep it up!
Thank you very much for such a helpful tips for SEO .
I have been searching for those tips and you have presented it in such a systematic and easy ways.
Mani,
Everyone says to use nofollow on external links but my google page rank will not be affected by the no. of outgoing links..right..?
Then why should I nofollow the out going links..? Will the Search Engine Rankin go down if I have lots of out going links..?
Pls reply to this, I am subscrbed to the comments here.
Cheers
Not clear with the question..? pls let me know, I need this answer somehow. pls
Nofollow will not give the external link benefits to that link. And noindex will not even index that link from your site. This will not affect your pagerank. Right Mani?
Hey,
Nice post.
You are right copywriting and seo copywriting are different things.
These will definitely going to modify my seo copywriting skills.
Thank you
Thanks for the list mani.
It’s a good read.
There are a few things in your web page that you must make right before the search engines will even add your web page into their databases. Here’s the 4 most important factors that affects your SEO ranking:
* The Title Tag
* Importance of Meta Tags
* Unique Textual Content
* Keyword Density and Keyword Positioning
* Link Popularity
Thanks for sharing!
Hey,
Nice post.