SEO Copywriting: Writing for the User and the Search Engine

Your objective in developing your site content is the same objective the search engines have in developing a good search engine - to deliver robust, relevant content to a web site visitor. In this context, each search engine uses various ranking criteria to determine the "relevance" of a web page to a user's search, the most significant of which is the actual text content of your web site's pages. It is necessary to create a "theme" amongst a group of pages within a web site to give each page legitimacy and relevance from the engine's perspective, as it is only a site's "page" that gets ranked, not the site itself - and a major qualifying (or disqualifying) factor for deciding whether or not to give a web page a high ranking is whether the site in which an optimized page sits has a themeIf there appears to be a "theme", meaning if the site contains additional text content that is relevant to the initial search and contains enough information that is easily navigated via multiple, text-rich pages, then the engine views the site page in consideration as a good starting for the searcher looking to learn more about their chosen topic.

As far as search engine promotion is concerned, your web site's text content is your key to success (or failure!). The search engine spiders are just like humans - they determine the subject matter of a web page based on what we read. Even if a web site has a picture of a dog on it, we don't know if that site is about dog breeders for that breed, dog food, dog training, or about a small animal veterinary practice in New York. Heck, the site could be about THAT dog in particular! Hopefully you get the point. It is by reading your text content that a search engine spider is able to determine whether or not your page should even be considered as a search result for any given query. And about that dog picture - the search engines can't really "see" Fido - they only see an image filename such as fido_headshot.jpg, and, hopefully, an alt tag (which, as you probably guessed, helps the spider determine what the picture is about - but it still cannot see it).

It is important to understand that the search engines exist for one primary purpose, and that is to provide the internet searcher with relevant results for their searches. Each search engine uses various ranking criteria to determine the "relevance" of a web page to a user's search, the most significant of which is the actual text content a web site's pages. It is necessary to create a "theme" amongst a group of pages within a web site to give each page legitimacy and relevance from the engine's perspective, as it is only a site's "page" that gets ranked, not the site itself - and a major qualifying (or disqualifying) factor for deciding whether or not to give a web page a high ranking is whether the site in which an optimized page sits has a themeIf there appears to be a "theme", meaning if the site contains additional text content that is relevant to the initial search and contains enough information that is easily navigated via multiple, text-rich pages, then the engine views the site page in consideration as a good starting for the searcher looking to learn more about their chosen topic.

Our experience has shown that five pages is generally the minimum needed to create such a theme. Anything less seems to appear to the engines as spam or doorway pages, and it makes sense - how many of your favorite web sites only have one or two pages? Ultimately, a good SEO web site has a wealth of text content - and such a site deserves to rank highly in the search engines if it provides searchers with a wealth of information.

At the minimum, you would have at least 200 words of text on each of your web site's pages that you are trying to obtain rankings for. In fact the more text you have, the better. After all, if you're searching on Google for "training for marathons" you don't want to pull up ten results pages that only contain one general paragraph about marathons, right? You want substance! Well, so do the search engines. You see, those search engines are a lot more like us than you can imagine. Take cloaking, for example. Would you like it if you saw a link in a search results page that read "Great Marathon Training Tips for First-Timers"... and when you clicked on it the page went to an information page for a fitness club chain? You would probably be somewhat displeased - and for this reason, some engines (Google, for example) frown upon cloaking technology practices.

Back to the subject of your text copy... You should try to write at least 300 words of text for each of your site pages, and focus your writing on one primary topic (or a subset of a topic). Go into as much detail as possible. Now, I'm not saying it is impossible to rank a web page highly for keywords if it only has 100 words on it.. But it can be somewhat more difficult. Drop the number of words below 50, however, and you are certainly next to Fido, barking your way up the wrong tree. Create enough relevant, engaging content and you will have a web site to be proud of with pages that both your visitors and the search engines will be happy with.