Divine Write Copywriting Blog

Just a quick post this time… I quite often find myself recommending tools or specific applications of tools for copywriting and SEO copywriting. So I thought I’d cut out the middle-man and simply publish my list and a few comments on each tool.

So here’s my list of copywriting tools and SEO copywriting tools. If you have any extras or any comments, please feel free to reply to the thread.

Popularity: 8%

Whether you’re an SEO copywriter or not, you’ve probably heard plenty of rules (accurate and otherwise) regarding how many words you need on each page of your website. Chances are, the loudest voices in the clamor are those advocating HEAPS of copy. But remember, the person with the loudest voice isn’t always right…

While I definitely agree that ‘content is king’, there is no need to write volumes. You can reach the top of the search engines with a page wordcount of between on most pages. As a rule of thumb, below 100 is probably too little for the search engines, whereas above 1000 is definitely too much for your visitors.

Don’t be intimidated into writing pages and pages of copy for your home page (or any other page where short, succinct copy is required). When it comes down to it, Google and the other search engines don’t count your number of words and strike you off the list if you’re too high or too low. They’re only interested in your word count insofar as it’s an indication of the helpfulness of your website. Typically a helpful website will have a lot of words and an unhelpful website will have very few. (It’s a very limited way of looking at the world, but you have to remember that search engines aren’t as good at assessing the relevance and usefulness of a website as humans are. Also, remember that they use other rules to help them decide what sites should rank highly.)

When it comes down to it, the one and only thing that you should absolutely do is write for your visitors first. After all, they may buy from you; there’s absolutely no chance the search engines will!

Popularity: 13%

The short answer is no.

The long answer follows…

As soon as you start optimizing your web copy, you’ll realise that it’s quite difficult to repeat your keyword again and again, without your copy becoming very unfriendly to readers.

This is particularly problematic when you’re targeting very specific keyword phrases. For example, for me, targeting “copywriter” is quite easy, but targeting “SEO website copywriter Australia” is a lot more difficult. If my web page has 200 words, my keyword has to appear six times for a keyword density of 3%. That’s fine if it’s a single word, because there’ll still be 194 words of normal copy left. The keyword won’t be so noticeable to readers. But if there are four words in the keyword phrase, there’ll only be 176 words left. That would make the keyword phrase a lot more noticeable.

What’s more, exact keyword phrases are difficult to incorporate into your copy in a natural way.

Fortunately, however, you don’t have to actually target the exact phrase. You can simply target the individual words. So instead of me repeating the exact phrase “SEO website copywriter Australia” six times, I’d simply repeat “SEO” six times, “website” six times, “copywriter” six times, and “Australia” six times. These individual repetitions could appear anywhere on the page.

Using this approach, I can achieve the density I’m after without sacrificing readability.

I will qualify this: it’s my understanding that when someone searches for “SEO website copywriter Australia”, all things being equal, a website that targets the exact string “SEO website copywriter Australia” will rank higher than a website that targets just the individual words. But when are all things ever equal?

As always, the important thing to remember is that human visitors are more important than search engines. What’s more, keyword density is not the be-all-and-end-all of SEO. (Please see my previous post on keyword density in your SEO copy.)

Popularity: 15%

If you’re targeting exact strings in your SEO copy, you’ll find it difficult to effectively target more than 2 keyword phrases per page. This is particularly true if you’re targeting very specific keyword phrases.

For example, let’s say you want your tennis clothing page to rank well when a customer searches for the following phrases (i.e. they type EXACTLY what you see below).

• “blue tennis shoes in California”
• “green tennis skirts on the West Coast”
• “purple tennis hats”
• “fastest tennis shoes in the world”

Let’s also assume your tennis clothing page can’t exceed 400 words before it becomes too text-heavy (and looks like a spam site).

Now, if you try to optimize your web copy for ALL of these exact strings, you’ll find that it becomes very difficult to read. Assuming you’re aiming for a keyword density of 3%, you’d need to include each of the above phrases more than 10 times. That would mean approx half of the copy on your page would be keyword strings!

There are two ways to work around this:

1. Don’t target exact strings – Instead, target the unique words from the phrases, not the phrases themselves. In the above example, the unique (and meaningful words) would be: blue, tennis, shoes, California, green, skirts, West, Coast, purple, hats, fastest, world. (Notice that I didn’t include “tennis” or “shoes” more than once, and I also didn’t include words like “in” or “on”.) If you include each of these words approx 10 times anywhere in your copy, you’ll achieve much the same result as if you had targeted each exact string. (I say “much the same” because when someone searches for “purple tennis hats”, all things being equal, a website that targets the exact string “purple tennis hats” will rank higher than a website that targets “purple” and “tennis” and “hats”.) But even if you do this, you’ll still find it difficult to make the copy readable because over a quarter of your page will be keywords!
2. Create additional pages – This is normally the best way to go. Just make your pages more specific. Have one page for “blue tennis shoes in California”, one for “green tennis skirts on the West Coast”, one for “purple tennis hats”, etc. This way, you only around 10% of your copy will be dedicated to keywords. This results in much more readable, natural-looking pages. And in the above example, it would also result in a much more logically structured site; a well structured site typically wouldn’t discuss all of the above items on the same page.

NOTE: When thinking about keyword density, please bear in mind my previous entries on keyword density in SEO copy.

Popularity: 14%

Although you shouldn’t get too hung up on keyword density (see my previous post on SEO copy keyword density for an explanation), if you’re aiming for a density of around 2-3%, you’ll find that this isn’t easy to achieve, without compromising the readability of your copy.

The easiest way to do it is to be specific. (In fact, in most cases, this is the only rule you’ll need to follow.) As you write every sentence, ask yourself, “Could I be more specific?”  For example, don’t just say “our computers” or “our products”; ask yourself if you can get away with saying “our cheap second hand computers” (assuming, of course, that that’s your keyword phrase). Similarly, don’t say things like “with our help”; instead, say “with the help of our cheap second hand computers”. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find there are more than enough opportunities to replace a generic term with your keyword phrase.

Obviously, there’s a bit of an art to it. Sometimes it ends up just sounding like you’re repeating your keyword phrase over and over again. If this happens, you may just need to restructure the sentence or paragraph.

The most important thing to remember is, your site reflects the quality of your product or service. If your site is hard to read, people will infer a lot about your offering… Readability is all-important to visitors. And after all, it’s the visitors who buy your product or service, not the search engines.

Popularity: 5%

One of the most important aspects of optimizing your site for search engines (SEO) is your web copy. Google and the other search engines read the words on your page to figure out what your site is about and which searches they should display it in.

But they don’t read like humans. We actually make sense of the individual words and their combinations, (phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages, page hierarchies, etc). We even take visual design and aural elements into account.
Search engines aren’t that sophisticated (even Google!). In fact, they don’t really process meaning at all; they categorize a site’s subject matter based on the words that are used most often in the body copy, headings, links, etc. The logic behind this behavior is that if a site is about widgets, the word “widgets” - and similar words - will naturally appear in these places at quite a high frequency. (That’s a little simplistic, but it’s about as much as most of us need to know about how search engines work. Their indexing algorithms involve incredibly complex maths - more than my little brain can handle! Learn more about how search engines evaluate content.)

So if you want your site to appear in the search results for “cheap glazier”, then you’d use that phrase relatively often throughout your site. This is known as ‘keyword density’. Simply put, keyword density is a measure of the number of times your keyword appears on a page expressed as a percentage of the total wordcount of that page. For example, if your page has 100 words, and your keyword phrase appears 5 times, its density is 5%. (Here’s an easy-to-use keyword density calculator.)

Keyword density is a particularly problematic concept, mostly because people place great emphasis on it, when, in fact, the search engines don’t measure density like that at all. So when you hear all the rules about what density you should be aiming for, always bear that in mind. Don’t start thinking that the search engines are looking for a density of 5% or 3% or 10%; they’re not. Just use density calculations as a yardstick. A density of 3% will give you a page with plenty of instances of your keyword. If you can’t get a density that high without impacting readability, settle for a lower density. The important thing is that you use your keywords more often than any other single word or phrase.

Popularity: 14%