SEO Copywriting, Part 2: Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip, September ‘08
PLEASE VOTE FOR SHEL IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL-STARTUP NATION BUSINESS CONTEST! I’ve entered in Green and Innovative categories.
A few free search engine optimization tools (out of dozens, if not hundreds) to help you with optimizing for search engines.
First, Google’s own tool designed to help you write high-performing Google ads turns out to be also very useful for writing longer copy that performs well. Other services have keyword tools as well, including a freebie tool from the widely used commercial SEO package Wordtracker, Trellian’s Keyword Discovery, and more. There’s a nice roundup of free search engine optimization tools at https://tools.seobook.com/, too.
Second, the use of tags. I’m writing this on a blog platform that actually asks me for keywords. If you use Ken Evoy’s SiteBuildIt, the program pretty much demands these tags from you and lets you optimize on the fly to easily build your ranking in minutes, which is why SBI pages tend to show up very high in the search engines. If you’re writing in a conventional web page, you need to add the tags yourself. Keyword, description, and title tags should all reflect the content of the page and the audience you want to attract.
Third, the use of one key phrase per page, three or four times in the body, but in such a way that it appears natural to human readers (Karon Thackston has written a nice little e-book about how to do this).Can you guess which phrase I’ve targeted for this page?
Further reading: The Search Engine Optimization section of my Down to Business magazine contains 26 articles on SEO strategies, from some of the foremost writers on the subject.
