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How to write for SEO

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The idea of SEO is to help your site gain greater visibility, traffic and conversions, which means that all content on the page must be interesting to people.  This article looks at how to avoid the pitfalls of writing for search engines rather than the people you want to attract.

Spiders are used by search engines (not real ones obviously!) to go through your website recording the detail & information about the pages they visit.  What they find determines how well your site ranks for the keywords you’ve chosen for your site.  So how can you help them rank you highly?

  • When choosing your key words be very conscious that they need to appear naturally in the text you have on the pages
  • Use formatting such as bold or italic on your key words as spiders pay more attention to this
  • Make sure your keywords appear as soon as possible in the text on a page as spiders read left to right
  • Headings & sub headings are really important, so make sure they are relevant & contact the keywords you’ve chosen

As I said earlier, your website must appeal to the people its trying to attract & therefore all the information on there must be interesting to them.  By making your copy fun, interesting, relevant & grammatically correct you will provide everything that a real person looks for in a website.

People like elegant writing rather than just functional words, but make sure you don’t go overboard with long, involved sentences.  Online readers like to be able to read the page easily so go for shorter sentences & smaller paragraphs.  Overall try to bring some personality into your writing – if its people you’re trying to please rather than machines then talk like one!

Links are one of the more well known tools to help improve your SEO ranking.  Inbound links are brilliant & the main way to secure them is to create impressive content that real people want to link to.

Outbound links are another matter altogether & there is a commonly held belief that they devalue your site.  They are designed to provide credibility & relevant further information to the user giving them a positive impression of the page.

The official word on the matter comes from Google, who rather usefully provide us with 4 key principals when writing for SEO…

  1. Create pages for users not search engines.  Do not attempt to present different information to either group
  2. Avoid ‘tricks’ & question whether or not the action you are taking will add value to the users & if you would bother doing it if search engines didn’t exist
  3. Do not take part in link schemes & avoid linking to web spammers & bad neighbourhoods
  4. Do not use unauthorised computer programmes to submit pages & evaluate rankings.  These consume computing resources in violation of the terms of service

Search engines only want to deliver useful content to searchers so put simply make sure that every effort you make serves to enhance the experience of the real people who visit your site, rather than the fake spiders that crawl round it.

eBusiness UK : Web Design Lancashire : Provides Web Design, Ecommerce Web Development, SEO, SEM and Internet Marketing Services in the UK.