In terms of building websites, time and time again we tell our clients that nothing beats good quality online text. If the pages on your website and the posts in your blog feature relevant and highly readable text then you’re already onto a good thing.

However, when writing for the web you need to consider not only your human readers but also your search engine presence.

Why is search engine presence important?

Let’s say you’re a small business selling baby products online. You’ve just added a page to your website that features a How-To guide on choosing a pushchair. It’s likely that it will be read by people who have visited your website and seen a link to the article. The more people read the article, the more you are perceived as being an expert on prams and the more likely you are to make sales on that product.

However, all these article views assume that people are already on your website. The key to maximising viewer numbers and increasing sales is getting your articles ranking well in search engines. If you’re not appearing on the first 2 or 3 pages of seach results, chances are that you’re missing out on a large number of visitors.

How to improve your article’s search engine rankings

Unlike writing for printed publications, when writing for the web we must consider how search engines view and rank websites. Google uses some complex algorithms to determine this. We won’t go into these as a) they’d probably bore you and b) no one knows them outside of Google! If Google made this public, people would take advantage of this knowledge and could potentially abuse the system to spam search engine results.

Despite this, there are some methods that are made public and are essential for your article to appear highly in search engine results.

1. Discover the keywords that your customers enter into Google

Before you write your article, it’s very important to have an understanding of the keywords that people searching for your product or information will put into Google. Know your target market and put yourself in their shoes, assuming you know nothing about your company. Also look at what your competitor’s are doing and ranking well for. You can use Google’s Keyword Tool to help you with some ideas.

Note that trying to optimise your article for the keyword “pushchairs” is far too vague. The competition will be very high. Instead, optimise your article for combinations of 3 to 6 words that your customers might use. So in our example, we want to optimise for variations of “choosing the right pushchair“.

2. Use these keywords in your page title and meta description

If you’re creating a webpage, hopefully you’ll be using web development software or a CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to edit your page title and give your page a meta description.

For our pushchair example, let’s take a look at how Mothercare have written their buying guide and how they could do it better.

The text in the grey banner at the top of this image shows the page title. As you can see, Mothercare have started their page title with “Choosing the right pushchair”. Google gives priority to keywords earlier on in your title so put the important keywords first. DON’T ever call your page title “Home”, “Index” or “Page 1″! These terms really won’t do you any favours when it comes to search results.

Note: Don’t put your company name before the keywords, e.g. “Mothercare : Choosing the right …”. If anyone is searching for your unique company name, chances are they’ll find your site no matter what. So don’t waste your ‘prime real estate’ space in your title by putting your company name at the beginning.

What you can’t see in this screenshot is that Mothercare have put in too many keywords. Google truncates your page title at 66 characters and ignores any words after that. You can see in the below screenshot of the search results that the remainder of the page title has been truncated with a “…” and so is technically redundant.

The meta description is the descriptive text that search engines show underneath the page title in the search results. For more information, see our article on writing a quality meta description or watch the below video by Google’s guru, Matt Cutts.

3. Use your keywords throughout your text. Early on, often and – where possible – in variations.

To feature well in results, use your keywords throughout your text. It’s amazing how often we see a web page talking about all the features of a particular product without even mentioning that product!

So Mothercare have started their article with …

Things to consider…

There are 3 really important things to bear in mind when you’re choosing your pushchair:

1. Your child’s needs

If you have a newborn baby, the pushchair you choose should…

but this would be far better as:

When choosing a pushchair (or pram, stroller, buggy or whatever your preference!) it is important to consider some key essentials. We often go for looks and forget important things such as safety, weight, budget and build quality.

3 steps to buying the right pram for you:

Here’s our three step guide to buying a pushchair suitable for you and your baby…

In our version, we have covered a far wider variety of keywords that might be used by people looking to buy a pushchair. Not all people use the word “pushchair” so we have added alternative names. We’ve also mentioned some pushchair aspects that people might search for (safety, etc.) and we’ve also targeted those people actually looking to make a purchase by using the word “buying”.

4. Upload images with descriptive file names (and alt tags where available)

Before you upload your photo to your site or a photohosting site, rename it from “img1032.jpg” to “pushchair-for-newborns.jpg” or similar. Use hiphens instead of spaces or underscores.

5. Write for humans!

Finally, don’t forget your marketing message and the ultimate goal of your article. In our pushchair example, it is to:

1. Educate the reader on what they should look for when buying a pushchair
2. Present our own company as a trustworthy expert
3. Direct the reader to our pushchairs for purchase

If you stuff your article full of excessive keywords, you’ll confuse the reader and could even lose your site engine presence altogether. Google’s ultimate aim is to find quality articles that are relevant to certain keywords. If you compromise the quality of your article with excessive keywords, Google may blacklist you as a spammer and so ignore your article altogether.

For any futher information or assistance, don’t hesitate to contact our small business online marketing team at Hot PJ.

Posted on January 4th, 2010 by Mark Lincoln
Filed under: Marketing