The Clean and Green Club

SEO Copywriting: Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, Volume 11, #4, August 2008

What’s the biggest difference in writing copy for the Web versus writing for direct mail, printed ads, or other media? Simple–when writing for the Web, you have two very different audiences: the reader, of course, but also the robots that spider your site for Google and other search engines.

And these two audiences have very different needs. Human beings want copy that flows, that leads the reader through, engaging both emotions and logic until that reader is ready to purchase.

But search engines look for things like keyword density, exactness of match with a search query, and other robotish attributes.

It’s a delicate line. If you want to get the search engines to return your page in a results page, you have to have a page that appears to conform very closely with the search string–but keeping that page readable and comfortable for human beings can be a challenge! And we’ve all seen those dreadful web pages that are written so much for the search engines that they’re really awkward to read.

Here’s how you can learn to create pages that work both for search engines and for human beings. Karon Thackston is a copywriter who has built her whole career on writing SEO-friendly pages that are also human-friendly. Her stuff is a whole lot less stiff and more flowing than most SEO-optimized pages. It was Karon who taught me years ago that you could break up search engine phrases with punctuation.

And that’s the first of many tips in her newly-revised and updated e-book, Writing With Keywords. If you want to bring traffic to your web pages, and you want that traffic to stick around and read what you wrote, you’ll want to get your hands on this.

Price is usually $39, but if you use my affiliate link, and do it before 5 p.m. Eastern this Friday, August 8, it’ll only cost you $29. Do it. Satisfaction guaranteed.