Search engine optimization involves many tasks. Some of the most important things are: link building, good copy writing, researching the competition, and website optimization.

Today we want to concentrate on copy writing for search engines. Writing for search engines is slightly different from writing sales copy. Sales copy is written with the visitor in mind. Writing for search engines is done with SERPS in mind. Writing for search engines means to optimize the website content so that search engines can easily identify the main keywords and key phrases a webmaster wants to be ranking for. Maybe you have heard of keyword density before. Keyword density means that your content is filled with specific keywords in a way that even if your article is about refrigerators, you can still rank for microwave ovens for the very same page. Of course this would be pretty extreme and kinda stupid to do. Usually you would want to write for the user or visitor of your website and hopefully the search engines at the same time.

Here are some important things to keep in mind when writing for search engines. Don’t over-do it. Too many keywords (keyword stuffing) will not get you to the top of the search engine listings. Be considerate when filling text with keywords. Pick your keywords you want to rank for upfront. This will make it much easier to write the content. Pick related keywords or phrases as well as it helps to smoothen out the edges. Structure your text properly. Make use of se-friendly HTML features like the H1 tag, bold text, italic text, bullet points, and good inter-linking your pages. Keywords should be included every 3-4 sentences to make sure the overall topic of your article is defined. If your article goes beyond 750 words, consider splitting the article into 2 pages.

Select your keywords and create a list of importance. Many well-known tools can help you to find out which keyword is searched for most often. Those can often be the keywords to concentrate on. However, those are most likely the keywords that will have the most competition. Now pick less popular keywords and combine them into sentences with the extreme popular keywords. Surround your good keywords with each other. This will definitely help search engines to pick up on both (popular and less popular) keywords and rank the article for both. If your article is spanning two pages, inter-link by using the very popular keywords.

Conclusion: Writing for search engines can be an art. You can easily mess up by using the wrong keywords in sentences with the important, popular keywords. Make sure your article still appeals to humans. The larger search engines are known to use human editors to decide on rankings in certain areas. If you can write for humans and still please the search engines, you got a winner no matter the topic you are writing about.