Search Engine Optimization is really just good copywriting. That's all there is to it. Sure, some technical skills are useful, but 80%+ of effective SEO is about writing good copy.
For example, if a customer is interested in purchasing a "widget offset attenuator" (fictional bizarre example here) they are very likely to enter this term into a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo!
Now, if you sell "widget offset attenuators" how do you ensure your web site gets listed towards the top of the search engine results page (SERP)? Simple, you write structured copy in a language that search engine bots understand. Bots are constantly crawling the web, visiting your web site, and recording the information they find on your site.
But having "widget offset attenuator" simply in the HTML of a web page is not enough. If the bot also sees that the name of the page URL is widgetOffsetAttenuators.aspx, the Title of the page is "Widget Offset Attenuators", and page description and keywords support this, then most bots are designed to conclude "Yep.... these folks are more serious about 'widget offset attenuators' than any other page I've visited. Let's rank them higher".
Here's a simple SEO page template that we use for all i-Dialogue marketing campaigns:
And a completed template might look something like this:
Each of these fields in an i-Dialogue web site is mapped to a structured tag in a page template that is guaranteed to be requested by each search engine bot and used in their evaluation of the web site.
So, you can see that the actual technical aspect of SEO, once the template is done and out of the way, is quite easy. i-Dialogue uses a database to store these values, but you can just as easily add them to your own HTML page template (
See more on META Tags here).
The really difficult part of SEO is having the discipline to complete this template for
every single public page in the web site, and writing effective, clear and concise copy. This is the
only way to achieve organic and enduring search results and is fundamental to every successful web marketing campaign.
An SEO copywriter must have the ability, in this example, to think like the prospective customer and know several other alternative keywords and phrases the customer may be looking for. Instead of "widget offset attenuator", some customers might try "widget adjuster" or "widget attenuator".
Customers will search on both singular and plural variations of your products and services. They will often misspell them (and yes.... you
should create pages dedicated to misspelled variations if you think the occurrence frequency is high enough).
Internet customers, as a whole, will tend to enter simpler keywords and phrases than more complex ones. Monitoring your own web sites search engine is a continuous, iterative activity that good SEO copywriters engage in to understand what customers are
actually looking for.
Things
not to do:
Some SE optimizers might think "If a few well placed keywords and META tags are good, then repeating the keywords several times must be
very good!". No... this is actually
very wrong and most bots will penalize your web site if they discover hidden text (white font color on white background or commented text) or duplicate keywords.
Duplicate copy on multiple pages is another thing to avoid. Bots believe that when this pattern occurs, that they are being lured into a "link farm", which is a common tactic to artificially create the illusion that a particular page or keyword is more popular than it actually is.
Your organization name should
not appear in any of the template fields, except for the home page, about us, or contact us pages.
So remember... it all starts with good copywriting. In a future article, I'll discuss how to build on these SEO fundamentals and pursue some more advanced SEO activities.