About Being An SEO Copywriter
People from my website often ask me, “Are you an SEO copywriter?”
I always reply in the affirmative. I think I’ve always been an SEO writer because whenever you are sticking to the core subject, right in the language that your readers understand and clearly state what your product or service aims to achieve, you automatically get search engine benefits.
Don’t know what SEO means? It means search engine optimization. So, what exactly is SEO writing and how the you become proficient in this profession?
When a searcher, for instance at Google, searches for a keyword or a key phrase, Google tries to rank the resulting links according to what they contain. Do they have information the searcher is looking for? What web pages have the most appropriate text? The job of an experienced content writer is to convince the search engine robot — in the right manner — that OK, this is the web page that talks a lot about the term the searcher is searching for. The SEO should write the content of the page in such a manner that it should look very convincing to the search engine robot?
But does this suffice? No. If I’m writing for you I don’t just have to satisfy the search engine is, my writing should also make sense to the readers, the human readers. The SEO content is written in such a manner that it should use the search terms enough times, but not more, and not less. Take for instance this article. The phrase SEO copywriter appears again and again, but unless your attention is specifically brought to it, you don’t realize that the phrase is being used again and again. This is the difference between an SEO spammer and a trained writer who actually means to add value to your website. An SEO copywriter knows how to write and how to use the required key phrase again and again without resorting to needless keyword-stuffing, as you may have witnessed on many websites.
It’s also important how the search engine crawlers go through the source code of your individual webpages. Being a former web designer I am at an advantage here. I totally understand the HTML tags that are used to organize various components of your content and how the search engine algorithms interpret content within those tags. Although it’s not necessary that an SEO copywriter should know how to create web pages, a fair knowledge of XHTML and the rudimentary tags can be of great help. It’s not enough that a page should have the rightly written optimized content (although for human reader this is enough). Quite often the search engine robots get lost in the quagmire of badly created web pages. For instances, all the header information should be there. The opening tags should be accompanied by closing tags. There should be no dead links. Preferable, the links should contain the key phrases being searched for. A proper sitemap should exist in the root directory of the website.
By the end of the day make sure you respect your readers first of all. Don’t mislead them, don’t write something you don’t mean to write. Write to the point, and unless you are experimenting with literary forms, be as succinct as possible.
On the other hand, being an SEO copywriter doesn’t mean you totally get trapped in the SEO stuff and start writing very rigid stuff. Always remember that your writing should touch the reader. It should leave an effect. You cannot succeed as a professional online copywriter if you can only bring in tonnes of traffic. That traffic has to generate business. You need to create music, and not noise.
