Website designers for recruitment, real estate and small business

This article provides some simple, easy-to-apply tips for the brave people that have decided to write SEO copy themselves.

The world of search engine optimisation is rapidly changing as search technology advances, and the search engines and optimisers continue to play a game of cat and mouse. With this in mind, for professional organisations there is simply no comparison between DIY SEO, where you have a go at it yourself, and getting a professional SEO that works on optimisation day in day out to spend a day or two doing a professional job for you.

However some clients just want to get their copy written fairly well from the start when they write the copy for a new website, so that it is at least slightly search engine-friendly. Others decide (perhaps erroneously!) that they cannot justify the investment in SEO.

Either way, because we like to help (!) we have produced the following guidelines to help you write reasonably OK search engine friendly content for your website!

Big fat disclaimer: search engine optimisation techniques changes much more rapidly than this article does! We will endeavour to keep this article relatively up-to-date, but please note that the information may be out of date. If you do want up to the minute advice or information on current SEO best practive, contact us.

There is another article on Search Engine Optimisation here which focuses more on Google, but also includes tips you can implement yourself.

When producing content for websites that you want to be optimised for the search engines, consider these points:

1. Identifying and selecting keywords
The first part of ensuring you write content that is search engine optimised is to identify which keywords your target users are regularly searching for.

To do this you can use WordTracker or the Overture Keyword Selector Tool. Punch in to these tools the terms that you *think* people are searching for, and you can find out roughly how many are people are searching for those terms, and also what other similar terms people are searching for. This helps you establish what people are actually looking for using the search engines.

2. Writing the content
Once you have identified your shortlist of keywords that you would like to optimise your web pages for, you next need to consider which pages you are going to optimise for which keyword terms. Most people currently recommend optimising each page for no more than 2 - 3 keywords or key phrase (where several words make up the search).

You now need to get these keywords or keyword phrases into the body of your page lots and lots, but without the text every becoming nonsensical, grammatically incorrect or parrot like. A good way to ensure this doesn't happen is to remember that the page should be useful and legible to a visiting user - it just happens that you are also trying to optimise the content for visiting search engine 'bots (their automatic programmes that read and index the content of your website). So look to make sure your keywords crop up as much as possible, but don't get silly about it. If you are able to work out percentages, you should aim for your keywords to appear with a frequency of 5%-6% in the page.

3. Tips on structuring your content
Some search engines do not read particularly deep into your page, so the current advice is that you ensure that the first few paragraphs of the page text contain your important keywords.

Search engines also give more weighting to page titles and headings, so make sure that your title, sub-titles and other headings include keywords where possible.

4. Getting page length optimal
To successfully be ranked highly on the search engines, your pages need to include a useful amount of content on them. Search Engine Optimised or not, if your web page includes content of less than 250 words, then you will be limiting the success you are likely to have on the search engines.

Search engines exist to put users in contact with useful, relevant content and therefore take the amount of content into account, working on the principle that a longer article is more likely to be useful to the user than an overly short article.

As such, the current thinking is that search engines like to see 250 to 500 words of text on a page in order to assess its keyword relevance. And many experts will advise you that the longer the text on your search engine optimised web pages, the better.