Writing For Search Engines: SES, San Jose 2007

To please search engines, you need to be using the keywords you want to be found for. However, you also need to write in a way that pleases human visitors. Learn how to do both, a winning combination that brings you visitors and converts them into customers. Toward the end of the session, volunteers from the audience will have their sites reviewed to see how copy could be better crafted to please search engine ranking algorithms as well as human visitors, as time allows.

Moderator:

• Kevin Ryan, Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch

Speakers:

• Jill Whalen, Owner, High Rankings
• Heather Lloyd-Martin, CEO, SuccessWorks International

This session aims to cover the fundamentals of SEO copywriting and is an elementary lesson for SEO freshers. Keeping this is mind, SuccessWorks International's CEO Heather Lloyd-Martin.

Heather brings up the example of AmsterdamEscape.com which was banned from Google for a year and a half on the basis of duplicate content. Every month they spent $4000 on Google AdWords in order to attract traffic.

Heather's SuccessWorks International created SEO friendly and keyword rich content on subjects such as:

• "Do's and Dont's when visiting Amsterdam"
• "Amsterdam apartments"
• "Amsterdam nightlife" , etc.

With the help of content, the site reduce their PPC and save upto $48,000 annually.

Heather gave useful tips on how to make text pages attract humans and search engines.

• No matter what the number every page should have a unique title.
• Titles should be less than 75 characters as both humans and search engines cease reading after a while.
• Titles should be catchy and keyword-rich as both humans and search engines opt for interesting – sounding titles.
• If content does not convert, don't change text but start afresh again.
• If you are at a loss for words think of FAQs, press releases. Outsource SEO, hire a SEO consultant/copywriter etc.

Next and last was Jill Whalen High Rankings.

Important points:

• Avoid writing fictitious text such as unnecessary press releases or blogs.
• In all cases refrain from keyword stuffing.
• Write quality content – simple yet a precise description of your products and services.
• Do a keyword research to find out what the most popular keywords are.
• Bottomline is to aim for terms that garner high traffic.
• Content is most important to be indexed and not fancy presentations. Use Alt attributes. Remember that PDFs can be indexed, so use it to your benefit. For eg: Press releases etc.

In the end high-quality content does not mean your text is laden with keywords that serve no purpose to real people. If your users cannot connect or understand with the content they will not be interested in your services and henceforth will move to your competitor's.

Writing Tips:

• Describe your business well. Eg: Use "Our B2B Marketing Services" and not "Our Services".
• Avoid stemming. Use all possible variations of the world- singulars, plurals, different tenses and similes.
• Optimize important terms and not keywords as people search for terms and not just one word.

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