Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

For professional communicators these days, few things are more important than search engine optimization (SEO) – writing your web page, release or article so that the search engines will index it and you’ll reach a larger audience.

But lately, I’ve seen a lot of news releases and articles that were so loaded up with search terms that reading them was sheer torture. Here’s one piece of advice on SEO writing:

First, you decide what topic or keyword that you want. For instance, you’re selling decorative lamps, right? in the SEO article writing process, list down ‘decorative’ and ‘lamps’. Then think about other words that relates to ‘decorative’ and ‘lamps’…words that people use all the time to describe them. This is a very important part of SEO article writing because these are common words that your potential site visitors will use to find you.

When you follow such guidelines slavishly, you end up with sentences that are designed for machines, not for people. Sure, you may get more eyeballs, but those eyeballs are attached to people, who’ll find your copy dull and sometimes indecipherable.

There are two basic approaches to SEO-optimized writing. One is to work from a list of words, then smooth it out to make sure it’s readable. The other is to write the copy without worrying about search engines, then look back over it for places where you can bump the SEO without violating the readability (and the reader).

The second is by far the best.