So, how do you get more of these gold prospects? Where your site appears in the results (your ‘ranking’) is determined by a number of factors, which are kept a closely guarded secret by search engines. However, they include relevance (reflected by the presence of keywords in your site’s text) and popularity (determined by how many other sites link to yours). Ranking can also be improved by ‘off-page’ methods such as link building and syndicating content, but this guide focuses on the ‘on-page’ contribution made by the copywriter.
For the website writer, the overriding priority is to make sure that search engines can work out what the site is about. The main way they do this is by looking at your site’s text. When you publish content online, the search engines determine what it’s about by identifying the most important words within it – its keywords. To the search engine, keywords are those that appear frequently, feature in links and headings and appear in ‘meta content’ such as HTML page titles and meta tags.
For example, the principal keyword for this site is ‘copywriting’. It appears in each URL, each HTML page title, throughout every page and in many of the links within the site. This clearly indicates to search engines that the subject of the site is ‘copywriting’.
If your keywords match the text that people search on, your site will appear in their search results and, we hope, they’ll click through to it. So you want to identify the keywords that are those most likely to be used by those searching for your site and list them, ideally in order of importance. This needn’t be guesswork – sites such as Wordtracker can help you assess the popularity of different keywords (in terms of how many people search for them), and suggest alternatives.
Now read Part 3: Intelligent targeting
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