If you’re looking to get your site picked up by the major search engines, then your copy needs to help attract their attention. The process of creating your content with the search engines in mind is called SEO copywriting.

The easiest place to start is with the title of your page or article. Search engines will initially look here, as this is the quickest and easiest way to judge content. Therefore, you need to know your target keywords and ensure these are incorporated.

As with most elements of web copy, conciseness is a virtue. The perfect title is 72 characters or less as this length enables search engines to display its entirety in their results, encouraging potential clients to click through.

Search engines are also very friendly towards unique content which is frequently updated. This means you shouldn’t duplicate your SEO copywriting across pages and create a regular update scheme for your site, such as a blog. Size also matters. Search engines are more likely to find individual pages if the copy is a substantial length – try to ensure all your pages have at least 200 words of text.

Throughout your content, it helps to have your keyword repeated a limited number of times. However, search engines also look at the number of times you’ve used your keywords in your SEO copywriting. While keyword density is a hotly debated topic, you should steer clear of excessive repetition. The search engines are wise to it, and it’s off-putting for readers too.

Talk to Write My Site if you would like to explore business blogging, article marketing or web content. All work is covered by our Quality Guarantee to ensure you’re 100% satisfied with your content.

Great websites are those which reflect the personalities of the people and business they represent. They don’t rely solely on facts and figures to get their point across, but dabble in emotion and anecdote. Such web content works because it creates a story for your business, reaching out to customers on a very human level and catching their interest.

Your web content needs to be compelling and memorable, and storyboarding your website can help you achieve this. We all remember the fairy tales we were told as children, but very few of us could re-sit a Science GCSE today – the facts have long since slipped away from our memories.

So how can storytelling work on your website? Anecdotes, either from yourself or as a testimonial, can provide a great structure for contextualising your content, creating an engaging story which will remain with your customer long after they log off.

Content that captures should reach clients on an emotional level, evoking a strong response through the images it creates in their minds and the concepts it expresses. Literary techniques such as analogy and metaphor are crucial here to help create a visceral content which doesn’t require pictures for the customer to see what you’re talking about.

An understanding of creative writing can be helpful here, but the real crunch test is when you read it back. How do you react? What images do the content conjure in your mind’s eye? Is this the kind of image you want to be projecting to your client? If the answer to the final question is Yes, then you’ve nailed your web content.



Talk to Write My Site if you would like to explore business blogging, article marketing or web content. All work is covered by our Quality Guarantee to ensure you’re 100% satisfied with your content.

For optimum website content, you need to achieve a very fine balance between copy and images. This is especially important as web content must be as concise as possible and the temptation to replace words with images can be remarkably strong.

Before giving in to this, you need to consider the drawbacks of losing web copy. You can’t have ‘key pictures’ as you would key words. Images are not picked up by search engines in the same way (although you can add an ‘alt’ tag to tell the search engines what the image is about). This instantly cuts down on your visibility to vital marketing outlets.

If you are worried that your site will appear text-heavy then keep paragraphs short, with plenty of white space in-between. This makes for more memorable writing, allowing your key messages to jump out at the reader.

When selecting images make sure they have an obvious relevance and are not open to misinterpretation. The relationship between words and images is crucial and should amplify meaning rather than confuse it. An excellent but apocryphal example of how not to choose an image comes from a baby food company, said to have put a picture of a baby and no text on their tins, only to see their sales drop in Africa as people assumed they were selling canned babies.

However, when used correctly images can add visual interest to your web content, emphasising key messages of the copy to create a more memorable experience for potential clients.

The internet has now become one of the first ports of call for customers looking to learn more about a business. Therefore, as with any good marketing material, your website copy should make a strong first impression and be aimed at driving enquiries and sales.

As Walt Disney once said, “always leave them wanting more”. Your website copy should be concise and provide enough information to hook your audience. Many companies make the mistake of attempting to answer every possible question on their pages, which can lead to text-heavy clunky sites.

So you’ve got to be focused. Once you have your website structure, make a list of key points for each page. The list should only be 3 or 4 items long. Stick to this list and ensure that pages don’t openly duplicate text across the site. You’ll also need to bear in mind your keywords and ensure these are scattered throughout with the necessary frequency to attract search engines.

As with your blog content, you will need to decide on your tone. This will be largely dictated by your corporate identity and demographic.

Regardless of your demographic, you should be aiming to galvanize them into finding out more. Calls to action are a frequent, and crucial, part of any website design. Make it very clear what you want the user to do: if you’re an ecommerce retailer you’ll need lots of prominent ‘Buy Now’ buttons. If you sell professional services and you want the website to act as a lead generator, you’ll need to make every effort to capture your visitors’ ID, via contact forms, newsletter sign-up boxes, or free information products in exchange for contact details. The psychology of many web users is to ‘look and not touch’. Converting your traffic to sales has to be the primary aim of your web content, so make sure you give you visitors clear incentives to leave their contact details with you.

Content has to be at the centre of a successful link building strategy. That’s the verdict from Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft which aims to rival Google. The search engine’s webmaster blog clearly states:

“We’ve said it before, and you’ll hear it said again: content is king. Providing high-quality content on your pages is the single most important thing you can do to attract inbound links.

“If your content is unique and useful to people, your site will naturally attract visitors and, as a result, automatically get good links to your site. By focusing on great content, over time, your site will naturally acquire those coveted inbound links.”

Here are Bing’s top tips for stellar web content:

•  Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content

•  Identify relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media people and let them know about your site and its content

•  Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant

•  Publish expert articles to online article directories

•  Participate in relevant blogs and forums and refer back to your site’s content when applicable (Note that some blogs and forums add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links created in user-generated content (UGC). While creating links to your content in these locations won’t automatically create backlinks for search engines, readers who click through and like what they find may create outbound links to your site, and those are good.)

•  Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)

•  Create an online newsletter on your site with e-mail subscription notifications

•  Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site

•  Join and participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums

•  Ultimately, strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry and let people know that your website contains your published wit and wisdom

Google and Twitter have announced a partnership which will give Google access to the full feed of every user’s “tweets”. The move is the strongest indication yet that the search engines are moving towards real-time search results.

Google has already been pipped to the post by new search engine Bing, which has already made Bing Twitter Search available in the US and has signed a deal with Facebook to add public Facebook updates to its search results.

Probably the best explanation for why real-time data has become so important to the search engines comes from Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch. Here’s what he had to say on the topic: “Tweets and other real-time data streams are valuable to Google and Bing because for many types of searches (news, events, sports, stocks, shopping, etc.), the most recent information is often the most relevant.

“And it’s hard to beat millions of people Tweeting out their thoughts … for real-time information about every subject imaginable. Google and Bing need access to this stream of data if they want to keep their results fresh and relevant.”

Google, of course, has already taken a couple of steps towards real-time search. Users performing Google searches can now filter their results to display only pages posted within a specific time-frame – even as recently as the previous seven days. They can also choose to search only blog results as opposed to all web results.

The shift towards real-time search has fairly obvious repercussions for the digital marketing and SEO industries. If a business wants a presence in the search results it needs to make sure it is adding regular content both to its own website and to social media platforms. Static web pages could soon be displayed so far down the search results as to be virtually invisible ….

One of the best ways to get your company name out there in cyberspace is to publish articles – both on your own blog and on other people’s. Ask other bloggers if they will publish your article along with a link back to your site – as long as what you’re writing about is relevant to them, and the nature of your business is not in direct competition with theirs, most bloggers will agree to let you do this – after all, they get some free web content out of it.

There are a number of things you need to consider when it comes to blog writing. First, you need to pitch your idea to the blog on which you want to publish an article. It’s a good strategy to pitch the idea before writing the article itself as a) you’ll find out straightaway if your proposed article isn’t of interest and b) it’s a good opportunity to get some guidance about how to shape your article.

When a blogger has given you the green light to write an article for their website, make sure you keep the readers of the blog in mind at all times. This will help you to ensure that both the content and style are appropriate for the people who are going to read the blog.

You also need to keep the blog owner in mind. What are their objectives? They are likely to want website content that’s optimised with particular keywords. Earn extra brownie points by finding out what these keywords are and working them into your article. If your writing helps the blog attract traffic from the search engines you will almost certainly be invited back to write for it again!

Finally, help the blog owner out by publicising the article you’ve just written. Link to it from your website and your social networking pages on Twitter and Facebook. Go back to the blog post from time to time in order to respond to any comments that readers have left. Keep the dialogue going as long as possible for everyone’s benefit.