SEO Copywriting Tips

There is a built in tension between writing website copy for people, and writing copy that is sensitive to search engines. Search engines read your pages in a different way and for a different purpose than people do. Trying to balance your choice of words so that content is well written for people, yet seeded with the effective keywords, is always a challenge. For example, when I title one of my newsletters I try and come up with something that will be intriguing to my readers. When I wrote about splash pages I entitled it "Splash is Dead." While this may be a decent title for my audience, it is actually a bad choice for search engines. If you were interested in the subject of website splash pages you would not likely type "splash is dead" into a search engine, rather you would type in something like "website splash pages." Words that make for compelling titles are not likely the words people would use if they were searching for that topic.

The choice of words for a web page's title are the most important, most heavily weighted words that search engines look at when ranking a page. In fact, there are two kinds of titles that search engines look very carefully at: the actual title displayed on the page, as well as the title in the "title tag" that appears in the top of the browser itself. Both these titles are extremely important factors in how search engines determine relevance. One facet of the struggle in designing a site for people verses for search engine optimization is whether to use HTML text for a page's title or to display the text using a graphic that can be typographically controlled.

From a human perspective it would always be preferable to use a well considered, typographically crafted, clear and compelling title for each page. From a search engine perspective, it would always be better to use a strategically determined, explicit, specific, and most commonly used phrase for a title. You would always use HTML text, never a graphic. Additionally, you would always use the exact same phrase in the "title tag" (that displays on the top of the browser) as you use in the body if the page itself. However, emphasizing search engine parameters, to this degree, would seriously limit the visual appeal and the flow of language used in websites.


On our site we've addressed these issues in a number of different ways. In fact we've made slight adjustments and modified our choices depending on which section you look at. We've written our page titles so that they communicate our vision, process and capabilities most effectively. One consequence of this decision is that the page that demonstrates one of our core capabilities, the simplicity of our content management system, has a title called "Content Management Included." This title does not communicate this subject in the best way for search engines. If we were naming our pages primarily for search engine placement, we would probably call it "free content management system user licenses."

Another example is our pricing page which actually has very good positioning (regularly between 3rd and 5th position in Google on the phrase "web development pricing"). However, we could probably hit number one if we changed our title from "How much is a website?" to "web development pricing." In this case though, we felt that the friendliness and straight forwardness of the title "How much is a website?" was better and worth the slip in position.

In contrast to our leaning toward marketing friendly page titles for most of our site, we decided that in our "applications" section, where we describe our advanced NewfangledCMS capabilities, we should use carefully chosen phrases for Google. Our email newsletter component is titled "email newsletter system" or "email newsletter software" and is used in the page title (in HTML text), the title tag, and is reiterated in the sub head on the page. These phrases tend to do quite well in Google (albeit somewhat unreliably) landing us between 3rd and 6th position. It's likely that on such a competitive phrase, if we used a graphic rather than text, our page position might slip off the first page of Google.


Bottom line, website copy and page titles need to work first for the site and those who read it. Secondarily, where appropriate, copywriting should be influenced by search engine sensitive key words and phrases, and it should be displayed using HTML text instead of graphics. When it comes down to it, if the site is not well written, well structured, and clear, it won't matter if it is effective with search engines, no one will stick around to read it once they get there.   next >