There is one fundamental difference between SEO copywriters, and freelance writers who are not familiar with SEO. Skilled SEO writers are not writing for one audience, but two. Everything written for the web should be written for both readers and search engines. Most freelance copywriters are writing only for the client as an audience.

Keywords in Web Content

This distinction becomes most evident in the use of keywords. There is both an art and a science to the use of keywords for web copy. They must be grammatically correct, yet represent search terms visitors will actually use. Keywords should be unique to the website, and not overly competitive. Keywords that fit this criteria are hard to find, however. In addition, keywords cannot be over or underused in web copy, and should be placed in particular areas of the content for maximum affect. Writers who are new to SEO often have a hard time utilizing keywords with finesse. When used properly, readers should not notice them at all.

How Relevant is Your Web Content?

Relevancy plays an important role in page rank. Relevancy is used to describe how well the content of a page matches the search term that points to it. Highly relevant page content will be focused specifically upon the main keywords used. For example, if the search term used for a site is “Women’s wholesale clothing” then the content of that page should focus only on wholesale apparel for women. It should not mention men’s clothing, or anything that is not related to the keyword. By making relevancy a factor in ranking a page, search engines ensure that when users click on a result, they will actually find the information they are looking for.

Writing For Readers and Search Spiders

Writing content for spiders is not fundamentally any different than writing for readers. Copy should be written in full sentences, and should be grammatically correct. In addition, certain aspects of good SEO copywriting are beneficial to both audiences. Subheadings, bulleted lists, and other methods of breaking up blocks of text make reading easier. This kind of formatting helps leads visitors through the content, and the use of bold or italicized text indicates to spiders which areas of the content are the most important.

SEO writing is both a science and an art, and no good web content writer can function without knowing the basics of optimization, or knowing the client’s audience inside and out. It’s always best to work with a dedicated team of writers who take the time and effort to get to know the goals of the website, and the people who will use it.

Checking the competition is one of the best ways to find out what’s going on in the industry you’re involved with. What kinds of things are your competitors doing? What are they talking about? What are their worries and fears? If you know these things, you can use them to your advantage by telling your clients why your company is not worried about the fears of your competitors or why you can offer more than your competition can. Don’t just rely on your competition, though. Check unexpected places for sources, like the library. The internet is an incestuous place for information, because so many people borrow easy data from other sources. That’s why you can really bring something to the table by injecting new statistics and new lines of thought than what’s currently available.

You never know what you might find until you look. You might locate something that your competition didn’t bother to look for or locate. That could really make a difference in your SEO content research, what keywords you use, and how you present your company to potential clients. Be sure to use your newfound information to tell your clients and potential clients why what you offer is better than what others offer. It can be very difficult for some people to tell what’s different about one company’s product or service versus the product or service of another company. Don’t wait for them to figure it out. Tell them, instead.

Remember, if you don’t tell them why your company’s offerings are better than those that the competition has, your competitors will step in and explain why theirs are better. You don’t want to give them a chance to do that, and you want to be sure to counter anything that they’ve already said about their products with your own information about your products. If you’re offering a service, you can do the same thing – tell why yours is better, more reliable, less expensive, etc. Be creative with it. Consumers don’t want to read the same old boring things about company A, B, and C. They want to be entertained and enlightened at the same time, and you can give them that with good SEO writing and proper research.

Don’t slam another company if you find research that says it has done something wrong. Attacking your competitors isn’t the way to go. Instead, just show how your product or service is higher quality and/or better in some other way. You can’t always do that without solid research, but if you look around and make sure that you’ve gotten a great grasp of your competition’s offerings and the state of your industry, you can impress your clients and potential clients with a lot of interesting knowledge and get sales in the process.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you know what you’re talking about. If you aren’t knowledgeable on the subject, do your research. It’s not a good idea to pick a topic you know nothing about and just write ‘on the fly.’ If you get your facts all wrong, you could end up looking silly, being discredited, and having to work twice as hard to get any kind of reputation back. You could also lose a lot of respect among your customers and potential customers, as well as among other people in your field. Don’t let that happen to you! Make sure you do research and get your facts from reputable sources.

Once you’re armed with the knowledge that you need, discipline your time. Know when you’re going to write the article and how long it’s going to take you. Don’t spend all day on it, but take the time to make sure you say what you mean and that you’ve included everything that’s important for the readers to know. Give them a reason to keep reading and offer them a call to action so they can take the information you gave them through your SEO and do something with it – preferably something that helps you to make money.

When you’re writing the SEO article, think about visual interest. In other words, don’t just write one big block of text. That’s hard for customers to read, and it can look unprofessional. Instead of doing that, break it up. Use shorter paragraphs than you might use for something that would be in print. Give your customers subheadings and bullet points, or a numbered list of things that are important to know. If your customers and potential customers find reading your article easy and fun, you’ve got a higher chance of making sales.

Last, before you publish that article on your blog or website, make sure you check your keyword density and placement. You should write the article naturally, but if you find you’re short on keywords you can always adjust something you said to include your keyword a couple more times. Proofread it, and have someone else look at it for further proofreading and editing. That person may catch something that you missed. When they send it back to you, make any needed changes and then publish. That will keep you looking professional and help you make an impact where SEO content is concerned, allowing you to be more successful.

Take a moment to check out some of the content that is currently on the internet. There are several excellent article resources like Ezine that online business owners use in their article marketing.  After reading just a few, you are likely to begin to notice the difference between quality copy, and downright horrible copy. This difference occurs for several reasons:  the author of a poor article is either not trained in SEO copywriting or does not speak English as a native language. The good copy is easy to read and conversational in tone. In fact, you are unlikely to even realize just what keywords the article is based on. This is the type of content you should include on your site. It takes a talented SEO copywriter, skilled in the art of content writing to create this sort of content.

While there are literally thousands of copywriters available on the internet, many of them are not qualified to write SEO copy.  When searching for a copywriter, consider a few important facts:

1. English must be their native language. Unfortunately, in most cases, English written by those who have learned it as a second language is often stilted and difficult to read. Even native level English may not be enough, however. If, for example, your audience is chiefly in the United States, British English and punctuation may be distracting to readers.
2. A complete understanding of keywords and keyword density is a must. It isn’t enough to simply sprinkle an article with keywords. Your SEO copywriter will be able to research relevant keywords and select unique words and phrases that will help drive traffic to you.
3. Engaging style and tone will make for better copy. Read several pieces written by a potential copywriter. The more engaging their style, the better.
4. Proper grammar and spelling is a must.

Many online business owners are hesitant to hire a ‘lay’ person to write their copy.  It is a mistake to think that only an expert in your particular field can write your copy. SEO copywriters will research a subject and break it down into common language that anyone can understand. You will find that it actually works to your benefit to hire an SEO consultant. Their ability to write for the masses can make even the most complex subject easily understood.

At its heart, SEO copywriting is based on science. Understanding how spiders crawl content and how people will search for you is all information that can be researched and proven. Truly great copy is more than just research. It is creative, thoughtful, engaging and easy to read. Finding a copywriter that can write copy that meets these criteria will make you and your company stand out from the crowd.

At its heart, SEO is aimed at attracting not human readers, but search engine spiders. Because of this, content written solely from a search engine optimization perspective is often difficult for a human reader. This content is often stilted and contains grammatical errors. For example, a company that sells homemade jam in Brooksville, Florida is likely to determine that a common search term used to locate their business may be ‘homemade jam Brooksville, Florida’ and decide to use that phrase exactly throughout their website. While spiders may recognize this as a common search term, human readers are unlikely to respond to it. It is for this reason, savvey online business owners turn to SEO copywriting to achieve their goals.

SEO copywriting is directly related to generalized SEO techniques with one major difference: SEO copywriting strives to attract both human readers and search engine spiders. A talented copywriter can artfully blend keywords, in the proper density, with unique, relevant and informative content. When you consider the fact that your website and the content contained within it is actually the face and voice of your company, you begin to realize how important it is to write for both human readers and spiders.

Developing content that is easy to read and contains the necessary techniques and language to attract spiders is, in effect, a subset of generalized search engine optimization. When selecting a company to handle your optimization, one of the critical areas you should review is their ability to provide SEO copywriting. By reading several articles or webpages written by various copywriters, you will begin to see the difference between copy written by a general SEO specialist and one with experience in SEO copywriting. By carefully analyzing possible keywords and including them in the proper density, a skilled SEO copywriter will provide you with copy that is driven by the need to attract human customers while still increasing your page rankings.

The distinction between SEO copywriting and simple SEO may be slight, but it is very significant. At the end of the day, it is the difference between copy written solely in an attempt to include a requisite number of keywords and content written to provide readers with useful information. Choosing an SEO firm must be based, at least in part, on their ability to provide you with content that is written by someone who has a firm understanding of the difference between these two skill sets.

Many online business owners get stuck on the first step of content creation:  what type of content to include. The truth is that all content is good – as long as it is properly written, keyword rich and relevant. Topics should be closely related to your product or service. It should be fresh, professionally written and include keywords that are both relevant and unique.

You may choose from several different types of content, each equally valid. Blogs are a popular addition. Easy to write, personal and a favorite hunting ground for spiders, blogs can be an excellent addition to almost any website. Another option is SEO articles. Unlike article marketing, an SEO tactic in which articles are posted to various directories for increased visibility, placing articles directly on your website gives you a chance to educate your client base, present yourself as an authority and increase your rankings.

If we have learned that the type of content we include on our website really doesn’t matter, we should also know that the form of the written content does. In order to obtain maximum benefits, you must tailor your content to appeal to both human readers and spiders. When writing or proofreading content for your site keep in mind the differences.

Content for Spiders

This content must be keyword rich. Focus on 2 – 3 keywords per page and mind your density. Keyword density, or the number of times a keyword is used compared to the total amount of text, should be between 3 and 5%.  Spiders also like fresh content, so be sure to plan on updating your website regularly.

Content for Humans

Humans don’t read articles like spiders – we look at more than how many times a given word or phrase is included in a piece of text. For this reason, your content should be easy to read. Here is how:

• Use bullets or numbering to make important facts stand out
• Write short paragraphs of less than 10 sentences
• Use shorter sentences
• Use flawless grammar and spelling

Always remember it is less about the type of content that you include and more about how you create it. Be sure to keep your content clear and concise. If writing isn’t your strong suit, you may want to find a qualified SEO copywriter to work with. There are many professionally trained companies dedicated to providing businesses with the best possible content.

Writers for SEO companies will, of course, continue to be responsible for creating readable content that is arranged and worded in such a way that it generates traffic, but they may also find themselves expanding their technical skill set. Sear Engine marketing, after all, is much more complicated than simply repeating a phrase throughout an article. Writers who can claim proficiency in XHTML, search engine algorithms, and site design will have an edge in a burgeoning field. Writers with extensive SEM experience may even find themselves becoming consultants and teachers for the new wave of SEM writers this growth is ushering in. In fact, many companies already offer in-house training, presentations, and auditing for companies interested in making the most of search engines.

However, even as the more established places finally come around, the field remains tainted by black hat tactics. Spamdexing, the catchphrase for such tactics, is when illegitimate sites manipulate a search engine’s index and resources to improve their placement in search results. Though most search engines, including Google, have ways to combat and minimize such methods, it’s impossible to cut out completely. As such, any serious web content writer needs to have a code of ethics rivaling that of any journalist.

The poor reputation earned by black hat SEO may be part of the reason why some content-heavy websites have yet to adopt it. FOX News, for example, plans to begin charging users instead for its web content. They claim that people will pay for content if it is original and high quality. Yet part of the problem with such models is the assumption that optimized content isn’t equally capable of generating business and quality traffic. A good SEO article will be succinct and encourage readers to surf around the site the search engine brought them to. In this way, poorly written articles that beat you over the head with keywords might be just as bad for SEO’s reputation as link farms or keyword stuffing, two black hat tactics. It remains vital that writers for SEO companies continue to create engaging content.

Social media, much like SEM, is becoming another fundamental of online marketing. Even better, the two make a great pair since part of SEO is linking and being linked to and social media is an easy way to achieve this. Writers, then, are also likely to increasingly utilize social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to generate additional traffic for their articles, parent sites, and companies. As an added benefit, social media can be a great way to draw regular readership and develop a niche audience.

The start of this new decade already seems to be about writers for search engine marketing companies embracing the latest in internet media and technology and avoiding the well-established damaging practices like spamdexing. Seeing the top web fields grow and work together should make for a decade that’s worth writing in and about.

Unnecessary wordiness. “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery knew the value of a succinct writing style. If you feel like the writer is still talking, but not telling you anything new, you know that the piece has a problem. See also: using “to be” (or is, are, were, was) too much and general overuse of the passive voice.

No direction to the work. The level of involvement for every client/writer is different. Some clients want to simply be able to pass on a list of keywords, and get back useful articles. Make it clear that you expect your writers to develop the topic further. If you give them the keyword “Bandsaw,” make sure that they know you expect something with the title “How to use a bandsaw to build furniture.” Sometimes communication can make the difference between a good writer, and a bad one. Just make sure your SEO writer is both willing and able to develop your topics fully. If they can’t, it’s time to send them packing.

Failure to understand the purpose of the piece. You can waste a lot of money on copywriters if you’re dealing with ‘artists’ rather than commercial writers who understand your goals and objectives. If you need an article on the benefits of Vitamin B for an affiliate marketing site, and you get an article that says Vitamin B is useless, it won’t matter how well it’s written. If your writers don’t understand what the purpose of the piece is, then they’re not helping you.

Obvious grammar, spelling, and word choice mistakes. The good writer is constantly self-editing and striving to create the perfect sentence that communicates his or her ideas exactly. The bad writer does not reflect on their writing during composition nor does he or she comprehensively edit after writing. This is the sloppiness that creates bad writing. While even the best writers occasionally have a typo, consistent errors are a big red flag.

Figuring out whether what you are reading is “good” is a little more complicated. Bad writing loudly declares itself within a sentence or two, but often a work has to be read for a page or more before the reader can really discern whether it is quality writing.

However, there are a few important elements that are often present in good writing. A great piece of copywriting should not only be to the point, but have a clear point, and it should make that point with well organized, logical ideas. The reader should be able to read the work in the writer’s “voice,” which must be distinct and apparent. A good writer uses correct grammar and a varied vocabulary. Finally, and most importantly, good writing is interesting. The reader wants to read it – reading a well written piece is never work.

This does make the concept of spam a bit tricky, as it becomes subjective at this point. You can’t please everyone 100% of the time. So how do content developers make sure that what you’re putting out there in terms of content is both relevant, and useful to a majority of your audience? Here are some basic guidelines for keeping your content interesting, fresh, and totally Spam Free!

Have a plan – Don’t ever start developing content without a clear plan in mind of what you want to say, and who you want to say it to. Don’t waste a lot of time with intro copy or filler text. Make everything you write absolutely on-topic. If it helps, create an outline for everything you intend to write.

Know your audience – If you haven’t got a very targeted audience on your site already, then that’s something that should be addressed right away. The narrower your niche, the more easily you will be able to appeal to people in it. Once you have your audience narrowed down, make sure that what you give them will be new information that any of them can use.

Know your readers’ tolerance for updates – Different industries will have different readers. If your demographic is retirement planning, a newsletter once a month is probably appropriate. If you run a gadget blog with hundreds of tuned-in readers, it would not be unreasonable to update five times a day or more. The important thing is to gauge how much they want, and how much is too much. Even great content becomes Spam if it feels like a nuisance. Make sure your pace matches theirs.

Keep Text visually interesting, but not overwhelming – Visually compelling copy will be formatted in a manner that’s easy to read. Bullet points, headlines, and bold text are all great ways to direct a reader through a page. Images and links are also great. Copy becomes spam, however, when visual elements overtake the message. If you’re relying on tons of links, and a lot of crowded images to get traffic, then chances are that no one is really getting your message. Don’t intimidate readers with too many elements, or huge blocks of text. Make an easy path through the work so that they can experience each element of copy comfortably.

It may take some testing before SEO writers really know how much content the audience wants, and what causes them to tune out. Don’t be afraid to experiment, but try to keep a handle on your metrics. Watch your site’s analytics to see how each type of content affects the audience, then use the best results to build your marketing plan on.

The purpose behind a blog is to increase your search engine rankings. Content is by far the best method for attracting search engines, and populating search pages with URLS that lead directly to you.

Google likes Content, and when you consistently publish articles on particular subjects and keywords, you look like an expert in that field, and your site is ranked accordingly. Google also recognizes that your site is frequently updated, and therefore, more valuable to search engine users.

There are many ways to utilize content on your site. How you set up your blog, and the types of content you use should reflect your company goals. Here are some important questions to ask yourself:

• What is your end goal for your blog?
• Do you want to increase Traffic to your site?
• Do you want to showcase special products or services?
• Do you want your URL to show up in more results on web searches?
• Do you want to set yourself up as an expert /celebrity in your industry?

Of course, you want all of these things, but to get the result you need, you will first need to prioritize your goals. Decide which is most important to you, and then use that as a framework for building your blog.

for example, if you own a company that sells swimwear, and your goal is to become known as the top knowledge base for swimmers, then you will need to approach your blog as a place to showcase ideas, information, and helpful advice. You won’t want to make a hard sell – you’ll rely on links anchored with your keywords to lead people to your products. If you have good content, you’ll get a dedicated following of readers, and they will be directed to your site through means like hyperlinks and your blogroll.

If, on the other hand, you want to be known as the top resource for buying swimwear, then your approach may be quite different. Instead of focusing on the sport of swimming, you may focus on how certain products can give swimmers a competitive advantage. You may showcase great deals on your blog, or lead customers who are searching for a particular product from your blog, right to the purchase point on your site.

Both of these approaches can be extremely effective, but you should know your goals beforehand, or else you risk a blog without purpose that jumps from one style to another, and doesn’t really meet anyone’s needs. It’s possible to use your blog both as an arena for showcasing your expertise, and as a direct sales tool, but in order to properly balance the two, you will need to plan this from the beginning.

There are some things you can do while you’re deciding on a strategy for your blog. Here’s a list of some things that you will want to set up first:

Keywords – your keywords are the main factor on which your blog’s success will be determined. Don’t start out with more than you can handle. Use a narrow focus to choose about 5 main keywords that you will use to direct people to your site through SEO. These should be long-term keywords that won’t change.

Anchor text – For the purposes of search engines, it’s a good idea to use your five keywords as the anchor text of your hyperlinks. This will tell search engines that the words that are linked are the most important words on your site. When people search for these words, the goal is for them to find you. When choosing keywords, try to choose a few that are unique to your particular product or service. “Goggles” will not serve you quite as well as “swim goggles” will.

Links – All links on your blog should reflect your purpose. If you’re using the blog as either a direct, or indirect sales tool, you’ll want your blogroll links to go to your site, or categories on your site. If you are using your blog to cement your authority as an industry leader, you may use some of your links to point to pages of articles on your website, or other valuable information for readers.

Tags - Tags still carry weight. Be sure you’re tagging all your articles, site pages, links, and images appropriately. Your tags should be consistent with your keyword selection.