There are unfortunately many ‘don’ts’ in copywriting for optimisation. Yet far too many websites fall pray to the bad habits of copywriting and their business suffers because of that. SEO copywriting is all about balance. When you copy write for SEO you have a human audience and you have the search engines to please.

If you try to please the SEs exclusively and achieve high ranking, you will lose your human audience. Your human audience is where your sales come from, not the SEs. So creating a flowing balance that keep your human visitors interested, but also please the SEs, is imperative for successful SEO copywriting.

Key phrases

Do not overload your copy with key phrases; you will sacrifice quality completely and your users’ will experience will be poor; this is the best way to alienate your site visitors. Do not force key phrases into a page that does not apply to that key phrase. The key phrase will draw traffic, but it will be meaningless traffic because your product does not apply to what the searcher wants.

Example: if you cater for parties, using the key phrase party clothes is totally inappropriate. All you achieve is creating a poor experience for your users. Misspellings can be a good key phrase. But, if you mix correct and misspellings of the same key phrase on one page you come across as sloppy and amateurish.

The impression you give your site visitors can make them decide to do business with one of your competitors. Search engines do not really notice punctuation. This gives you the opportunity to vary your key phrase to make it read more naturally. Bring creativeness into your key phrases otherwise it sounds monotonous and boring.

Keyword application

Don’t accept keywords blindly; get a list of applicable keywords and their synonyms. Professional copywriters will immediately see which is the best to use for a specific piece of copywriting to make it sound natural and flowing. Never sacrifice natural flow of sentences to get a specific number of key phrases in that do not work in natural sentences.

Boxed in key phrases like that results in obnoxious word order that makes no sense to normal human beings. Do not try to use every type of key phrase for every single situation. Long tailed key phrases should be on specific product pages and not your home page. Aim for best application of keywords and key phrases for each part of your website.

Chain of protocol

For good SEO copywriting you should never try to use numerous key phrases on one page and be able to use every one only once. Decide on two or three key phrases and use them several times on a page. It is very important that the page ‘gels’ in that your all your coding elements back up your key phrases on a page. This means ALT tags, Meta tags and title must back your key phrases up. In this way the search engines recognise relevant and original content that has a narrow focus topic.

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