Submitted on:  04/17/2007

Do You Think About Your SEO Strategy Before You Start Copywriting?

SEO copywriting is another skill you should be capable of if you are portraying yourself as an SEO specialist. After you have written the copy, another copywriter can improve its quality, add marketing elements and make it speak to your target audience.  It is however, up to you to decide on key phrases for targeting. You are responsible for your overall SEO strategy.

SEO is all about keywords. You should think about them from the start if you are interested in achieving good SEO results, from the keyword research stage, until the end of the link building phase, which usually completes your task. SEO copywriting should be the core of your SEO strategy.  If you fail to utilise quality SEO copywriting any further SEO efforts could be wasted.  Your copy is what, for the most part, defines the relevancy of your site to your targeted key phrases.

Like anything in life, balance is the key. You cannot become too obsessed with your keywords as it will serve you no purpose. Crowding your copy with keywords will make your work appear unbalanced, will sound unnatural and be quite difficult for anyone to read. It may be pleasing to search engine spiders but your aim should not be directed at the search engines alone. Quality SEO copywriting is subtle, and with only a very experienced SEO able to guess what words or phrases you are actually targeting. Quality SEO copywriting is just like good poetry: you are restricted with the necessity to maintain an optimal keyword density, as a poet is restricted with his rhymes, but not a word should be out of place.

Copywriting Develops Into SEO Strategy

It’s a good SEO strategy to consider your key phrases before you start copywriting the pages. What should the home page contain? How are you going to link to other pages? Will it be logical and usable to include key phrases in the anchor text? If not, why not? It usually is.

A genuine SEO specialist would think from the start of the entire site’s structure, navigation, usability solutions – and regard all this in terms of keyword placement. When done right, it will make the final product consistent, harmonious, and soon popular with the visitors. When the site has already been created and launched online, with no signs of SEO work done, it can often be more work to correct the copywriting and fix other SEO aspects while maintaining the website's theme.  With current online search engine competitiveness, make it your rule: think of your SEO strategy first.

About the Author:

Name:  Irina Ponomareva Irina Ponomareva has been a practising SEO consultant since 2004. She joined Viscomp, a Russian web design agency, in February 2008. Find out more at http://www.viscomp-dev.com/