There's a great article in my inbox from WordTracker. The title alone is worth the price of admission: Stop the Slaughter of Innocent Copy!
Just as an exercise, I ran this article through the process outlined below. It's a great example of just how natural search engine optimization can look! The original copy is in red, the new copy is in green. and the keywords of interest are boldfaced and underlined.
While the headline is high art, though, the content is plain good sense. In a nutshell: website copy jammed to the breaking point with high-value keywords reads every high-value keyword—optimization or not—reads like a mile of bad road. Whatever search engine traffic you gain thanks to bad SEO, you will lose more because your the copy is just so painful to read on your website. Optimization bows to legibility, every time.
So what's the solution? Well, Profit Rank has one... we call it Organic Search Marketing [that's a hyperlink, by the way], and it involves allowing your market—rather than, say, WordTracker search engine traffic projections—to drive your copywriting effort.
Still, once you've written your copy, you ought to take a crack at optimizing it, and here's where the folks at WordTracker offer sound advice about breaking up keywords and such. At Profit Rank, we use a three-step process:
- Generate the copy. If you're sneaky, your customers and service reps will do most of the creative writing, so efficient copy generation involves a lot more editing than actual writing.
- Paste your copy into the Google Keyword Tool and see what comes up. Should you replace all your copy with high-value keywords? Absolutely not... do that, and you'll get generic copy. And you don't have a generic business. Still, you'll probably find some low-hanging fruit.
- Work the low-hanging fruit into your copy using keyword optimization techniques like the ones described in the WordTracker article.
Why does this work so well? Well, the short answer is that it achieves a balance: enough market drivers to keep the copy relevant to the idiosyncracies of your clientele, and enough search optimization drivers to reach a broader audience. |