Copywriting for the web is an exercise in balance. Too wordy, and you’ll lose the attention of your audience. Too short, and you aren’t providing enough substance to sustain repeat visits.

The conundrum gets more complex when SEO is also a goal for your website. The reason is that text-based content is the food of search engines. As a result, content that is keyword rich is sure to get you some headway when it comes to search engine optimization. However, it isn’t as simple as loading a page with keywords.

The key to copywriting for SEO is balance. There are 4 factors to consider:

Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to the quantity of keywords seeded in your content, compared to non keyword phrases. Too many keywords in your content and you will do more harm than good. We recommend no more that 5% keywords.

Readibility
SEO will only get visitors to your website, it won’t make them stay. Misplaced keywords and unnecessary content will only frustrate your readers once they get there. Good well-written content will help encourage your website visitors to stay, explore, and even return again later, rather than bounce right off to the next site.

Value
Google values content, but it also highly values in bound links to your site. Link-based popularity means that other people like your site enough to link from their site to yours. To gain this popularity, you need to create value for your website visitors, not just for search engines.

Popularity
In-bound links not only help SEO, they also help drive website visitors to your site from referring websites. This is a great endorsement, and one that harnesses the true power of the web – your website visitors spreading the message about your website simply because they like it.

In order to fully optimize a website for search engines, it is necessary to do a full and thorough evaluation of relevant information about the website. This can often be a long and tiring task but several tools and resources can help make your job a lot easier. I’ve put together a list of the top 3 tools that help you gather information easier and faster than on your own.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics gets top marks in my books because it is not only a helpful tool for search engine optimization, but for user experience and information architecture. By adding the Google Analytics code to your website, you can track not only your page views, but also what your users are searching for, how they’re finding your website, how long they’re staying, and even the path they take as they navigate your website content. Other useful information includes a dynamic map that displays the geographic location of your website visitors, globally as well as locally. Another useful (and fun) feature is a site overlay that shows you exactly where people click when they visit your website. Yes, I love this tool.

Search Engine Simulator
How does a search engine view your website? Now you can find out. With this Search Engine Simulator tool, you can see your website the way that a search engine robot does: no images, no flash; only text. It is an enlightening experience! This is a good way to evaluate simple changes to improve your site, such as rewriting content to add meaning to often over-looked text, such as footer navigation and copyright statements. There is no sign up, simply submit your website address to the simulator, and immediately see the results – and learn from them. Now you can see like a search engine robot, and your website will love you for it.

SEO website grader
Are you curious how your website compares to your competitors? SEO website grader evaluates not only your website, but also those of your competitors. You can see how each site is valued by search engines for content, keywords, site structure, … It can be a humbling experience, but also exceptionally useful – it takes the guess work out of understanding your website, and how it matches up to the competition. You can learn from this tool, and from your competitors – and you can improve your SEO.

When I write a blog I like to attempt to add some fun activities or tidbits of information here and there – it makes things interesting. What is today’s activity you ask?

Go to Google and type in “Untitled Document”. How many results do you get? I got 44,500,000 search results and I have no doubts that you got more.

As Leigh mentioned in his 'SEO for small business' post, title tags are very important for the search engine optimization of a website. Websites get launched daily without title tags. This is often due to forgetfulness or bad habits on the web developer’s part. Could be a result of being rushed too. When a new HTML document is created, most of the time using templates, it includes a title tag of “Untitled Document”.

No matter what you’re selling, advertising, or wanting users to see, getting anywhere near to #1 under any keywords with an untitled document is not likely to happen and your target users are not going to find you.

Title tags aren't just for search engines either. They are viewed by your website visitor in a few prominent places:

• text that appears within the blue bar at the top of a browser window.
• On browser tabs, the title is also what appears in the tab.
• When a website visitor minimizes the browser window, the title tag is what is appears.
• The title is also what appears on the first line of search results in the major search engines.

The best SEO practices also keep in mind the benefit for your website visitors. Provided good meaningful title tags will help your visitors, as well as your search engine rankings.

So be free my friends – go and give the gift to yourself of properly named title tags and watch your website climb the rankings in the search engines.

“Help! I don't have much time to optimize! What can I do?”

If you’re a small business owner who also has the lovely task of managing your own website, then you may have found yourself in this situation….you know you need to do some search engine optimization but you just don’t have the time to do it all. Of course the first thing I’m going to tell you is to give us a call and we’ll handle it for you, but let’s say that’s not yet an option.

What I would tell you to do is to take a good hard look at your web page title tags!

What are title tags you ask? In laymen’s terms, title tags are the HTML tags at the top of a web page that tell the browser what the page is about. You know, look up at the very top of the browser window and at the left you’ll see some text about that page; well, that’s the title tag. It serves two main purposes 1) when displayed in the browser it helps human users identify what the page is about, and 2) it gives search engines an indication of what they can expect to find on that page as well.

Good title tags are arguably one of the most important aspects of SEO. Search Engines such as Google place a fair amount of value in these little guys! They are also one of the easiest tactics for people to both comprehend and employ. What is important is that you know which key words are important to your business, as well as which ones are relevant to that particular page. You’ll definitely want to create UNIQUE title tags for EACH page on your web site. Be sure to examine each page’s content carefully so that the title tags are reflective of the content message on the page. Whatever you do don’t put in keywords that are not relevant to the page content. This will not help you, your visitors, or the search engines! Try to include one or two keywords/phrases in each title tag. Remember to keep them fairly short as most search engines only support 50 to 70 characters.

Finally, have a good look at the content on the page and try logically insert these same keywords in to the content. You’ll want to have a nice keyword density on the page. I say 'logically' and 'nice', because you don’t want to overdo it and end up spamming your own web site with keywords. Just let it come naturally.

Of course there are dozens of more incredible things that you can do to improve your search engine optimization, such as inbound linking, page renaming and alt tags to name a few, but if you’re strapped for time and budget, you can’t go wrong with this approach! Good luck!

Today’s topic is about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and why it’s a better option for developing a website with good search engine optimization.

Spiders are sent out by search engines to crawl websites and index them in the search engine’s databases. These spiders use what is called “top down” logic, which means they index websites and crawl the content from the top of the source code to the bottom. Considering this, developing websites using techniques like tables and frames hinder your search engine optimization, because they add bulky unnecessary code that makes it harder for a search engine to read.

Using external CSS separates content from presentation which in turn will put the content higher in the source code. This also makes for less code altogether, making it easier for spiders to index apparent important information displayed through tags such as headers and titles.

Separating content from presentation also provides more time for making changes to presentation and/or content without searching through an endless sea of code, leaving more time to update the website with new and fresh content and/or presentation. Making updates, another thing search engines love!

Search engine spiders, as much as we’d like to believe of robotic things, are not stupid. Spiders can see the tricks you try to pull, so adding extra content with keywords and using CSS to hide them won’t help your ranking (putting white text on a white background for example).

Another thing that weighs down website code is JavaScript. Developers sometimes use JavaScript to make flashy navigation and menus; however, remembering the “top down” theory, this doesn’t help the spiders find your content. Good navigation and menus can be made just as easily using CSS and they don’t weigh down the code like JavaScript does, so it’s definitely an option to think about when developing your website.

So, in conclusion,

• DO separate content from presentation using CSS
  
• DON’T try to cheat the search engines by hiding content with CSS
  
• DO use titles and header tags
  
• DON’T use too much JavaScript where you can use other methods such as CSS
  
• DO keep the “top down” theory in mind
  
• DON’T write messy, hard to read code
  
• DO update websites often