Mastering the art and science
of SEO copywriting is essential for the brand journalist.
SEO stands for “search engine
optimization.” This is the strategy we
use to attract the attention of Google and other search engines.
The easier we make it for our
target customers to find our web articles, the happier we make our clients.
You may have heard about also
sorts of secret formulas for improving SEO. Many folks think SEO is a job for the
information technology gurus. That may have been true, but Google ended that
with its most recent updates to its algorithm.
Google wants to put SEO in
the hands of copywriters. That’s good news for every brand journalist. Today,
SEO is primarily a function of how we write our stories, not how they are
coded.
The first step is to identify
the keywords you want to use in your SEO copy. These are the words that help
customers find your story with an online search.
Generally, the keywords are a
phrase that you will use frequently in your article.
For example, I recently wrote
a brand journalism article about diagnostic testing for the West Nile virus. Using
Google’s keyword search tool, I figured out that about there are about 310,000
searches each month for the words “West Nile virus” and about 110,000 for
“symptoms of West Nile virus.” So I made
sure to use those keywords often in the story.
How often? You don’t want to
“stuff” your story with keywords. Google will penalize you for doing that.
Aim instead to use the
keywords throughout the text as a rate of between 2 percent and 5 percent. That’s about once every 100 words. That level
of keyword density appears to be the Google’s sweet spot for SEO copy.
To get the most out of your
keywords, you will want to include them in:
- The title of your article: Keep it really simple. Write a real headline with a subject and a predicate. Put the keywords up front, if you can. For example: “How to diagnose the West Nile virus in horses” or “West Nile virus: How to diagnose the disease in horses.”
- Sub-titles: To make your brand journalism more easy to read, try inserting a sub-title every few paragraphs in each story. In addition to breaking up long blocks of text, sub-titles give you yet another opportunity to work your keywords into your SEO copy without a penalty. Google loves sub-titles, especially when they help it define what you article is about. Readers love them, too.
- The suffix of the page’s URL: What you don’t want is a long, irrelevant page URL, like this one: example.domain.com/news/article/0,,30200-1303092,00.html. Instead, aim to create a URL like this: example.domain.com/news/article/WestNileVirus. You can do this easily by typing the key words into your title and hitting “save” before you put in your actual headline. Some programs also allow you to edit your page URL later in the process. In some cases, you may need your client’s webmaster to help you out.
- Anchor text: This is just another phrase for the words we use to create links from one page to another page. Avoid using a link like “click here.” Instead, create a link using your keywords.
- Images: Google reads only text. It can’t see images. But it can see text that is embedded in the image’s menu. When you upload an image, go to the image’s menu and enter your keywords into the space marked “alt tags.” Now Google can recognize your image and will know how to identify it for searchers.
- Navigation menu: If your keywords apply to your entire site, consider adding them to the navigation links. That will also boost your client’s SEO by giving even more emphasis to the pages to which they lead.
Two other tips, both of which
may require you to work with your client’s webmaster:
- Create a site map for your client’s entire site.
- Enter specific keywords into the metadata for every page, not just the home page.
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