Today I am focusing on copywriting that keeps both humans and Googlebot happy. Content is still king on the web and good quality content accrues awesome benefits over time. It keeps readers engaged, its uniqueness makes the search engine bots sit up and take notice and it is a fantastic source of good inbound links.

The copy should be good enough (to spiders) to make the cut and be ranked on top of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and the title and description of your listing should be inviting enough to be clicked by users.

A good thorough keyword research clearly indicates the demand and supply of the market of your choice in the form of searches made per day or per month and the number of competing sites on Google respectively. A keyword phrase particular to your industry that has an optimal supply and demand ratio should be an ideal term to target by way of a keyword focussed content page (KFCP) or money pages in short.

Let us consider the keyword phrase auckland budget motel. Let us assume this has a good number of searches and not too heavy competition. As this is a money page on your site, the copy on this page is focused completely on auckland budget motel. Do not dilute the focus of the page by dragging in other unrelated hotel or motel categories.

The term itself is well qualified by modifiers. Auckland is a geographical modifier, budget is another modifier that refers to the economy variety of dwelling and motel is a specific type of accommodation. Even a broad match of this term is so specific in its nature.

Spend some time doing a thorough research on this subject. If you are in the accommodation industry, you have a headstart. If not, take your time to study the pros and cons of the auckland budget motel industry and get your facts right,  to the minutest detail.

Now it is time to put your ideas together on paper. When you write search engine optimised copy on the web, you have to wear two hats, one to impress the humans who visit your site to buy motel accommodation and the other to make sense to the search engines and help the Googlebot clearly understand what your page and/or site is about clearly and unambiguously.

On Page Optimisation:
We will look at on page optimisation. On the web, short paragraphs of two to three sentences are easier to read on a screen. It is quite different to reading a book. Most of the time, users scan a page and read only if the content interests them. So it is important to arrange the content in short paragraphs under headings and sub headings.

1) Title tag:
The title tag in the head section of the page is a singularly important factor that still carries a lot of weight from search engines point of view. Ensure that you have a good page title that describes what the page is about and keep it short upto a maximum of 65 characters. On Google SERPs, anything more than that gets cut off. As far as possible, start off with the keyword in the title tag.

If you are in a dilemma as to whether your keyword phrase or your brand name should appear first, refer to my post on Title Tags and Branding.

2) Header Tags:
The most important header tag is the <h1> tag. It is a heading tag that is big in size and bold. It used to be a critical SEO factor. But latest tests conducted show that it is not as important as it used to be. My post on SEO Best Practices - Correlation Testing gives a good idea of the factors that influence search engine rankings.

Be sure to include one <h1> tag at the top of the page. The information hierarchy is clearly defined by the <h1> tag. It is the main heading for the whole piece of content. In our example, it can read
Budget Motels in Auckland-New Zealand

Note that the heading here is slightly different from the title tag. Most sites have the title tag and h1 tag almost the same. One of the main reasons is the use of Content Management Systems (CMS) where it is easy to set the h1 tag to be the same as the title tag. A close alignment of the title and h1 tags can lead to over optimisation penalty. A slight variation in both does not hurt. It is better to err on the side of caution.

It is ideal to have a couple of h2, h3 and h4 tags each if your content demands, as sub headings on the page. From the human perspective, good catchy headlines motivates readers to read the rest of the copy on the page.

3) Body of the page:
It is good to start with a nice introduction containing the keyword phrase towards the beginning of the first paragraph. Write naturally with flair and insert the keyword where necessaary throughout the copy. There is no point in stuffing every second line with the keyword phrase. The copy ends up looking contrived and artificial.

Keyword density used to be the rage a few years ago and the belief was that the more number of times the keyword phrase appeared in the copy, the search engines recognised it and ranked the page well. This is not true. Copy that is meaningful and appealing to humans is the most important criterion.

Arrange the copy under suitable sub headings to add clarity to the content. Readers will find it mighty helpful even when scanning the entire document. If you find all this going over your head, if you can retain the following concept, you are really well off. Always give way to humans and put them first ahead of the search engine bots. Your copy should impress your readers that enables them to take action on what you offer. A Googlebot will never buy your product or service.

The copy on auckland buget motel should answer the one question uppermost in your visitor’s mind - What is in it for me? If your copy does justice to this question, you have won the battle by converting your casual visitor into your customer. List the benefits of your auckland budget motel accommodation and prove that your motel’s features  and quality of service is way ahead of the competition.

If your readers are happy, the bots are going to find out by looking at the time they spend on your site, your site’s bounce rate and the number of times your listing is clicked on the SERPs. The bots will realise the high relevance of your content for a particular search query and reward it with high rankings.

It is a good practice to include synonyms of the keyword phrase where possible. In our example, something like
auckland cheap accommodation or auckland budget accommodation would be suitable. This is in line with the concept of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) which is the subject of many patents of the search engines in the past. The implementation of this in the ranking of results is not clearly known.

Finish the body copy with a nice elegant conclusion in the form of a meaningful call to action. In our example, it would be something along the lines of  - Book your Auckland budget motel accommodation. This should be the anchor text and the link leads to a booking page for auckland motel accommodation. You can include the relevant keyword as anchor text and this is an important factor in the referential integrity process.

Most times, I find websites that are really attractive and appealing with menus in nifty Javascript. The user experience is great. It is proved beyond doubt that Googlebot can read Javascript and follow the links. Again, it is better to take precautions by adding text links in the body copy to make sure that in the event there is a problem with the JS links, the bots can still find the deeper pages of content through the text links.

Also remember that Google gives lot of weight to contextual links, these are links that appear naturally in free flowing text. You get traction by putting the keyword in anchor text. It is beneficial in the overall sense and you have achieved your goal of writing effective search engine optimised copy and simultaneously  inviting the user to take the desired action on your site.