Everyone who works on your website can write to improve search results and help out whatever search engine optimization work is being done elsewhere.

Writing copy for search engines is for everybody

A great deal of search engine optimization will probably always remain mysterious and arcane to the uninitiated but many hands make light work and a lot of small contributions add up to a greater whole.

Everyone who contributes content should know the basics of building body copy with the keyword in city and prominence. Let’s get started…

Have you done your keyword research?

I am going to assume that you have already created a cheat sheet of keywords you wish to target across your entire site. If you have not already done so then back up a few steps, go back to your keyword research output and create just such a list.

OK, now with every content producing employee now having a copy in hand we can proceed.

Search engines look at copy according to some simple rules

Search engine spiders work on some very basic principles for analyzing body copy on an HTML page. The search engines spider assumes that Whatever comes first is most important and whatever is emphasized is even more important.  This is most important when writing your opening paragraph. Make sure that you kick off your content pages with a great opening sentence containing your favorite keywords and preferably starting with your favorite keywords.

Here’s your first sentence (which is ridiculously weak):

You should consider trying our wonderful services.

Now, let’s add a dash of keyword goodness:

You should consider trying our wonderful internet marketing services.

Now just a pinch of keyword prominence:

Internet marketing services don’t get much better than GDM. You should consider trying us.

And a drop of keyword emphasis:

Internet marketing services don’t get much better than GDM. You should consider trying us.

Top it all off by wrapping the keywords in <H1> tags:

Internet marketing services

They don’t get much better than GDM. You should consider trying us.

Note: <h1> tags have to be used sparingly. If you use them as you page header you are going to be golden! But subheads lower down on the page are good too.

Simple content tricks like these will not in and of themselves get you top ranking on search engine SERPs. As I mentioned earlier a great deal of search engine optimization is mysterious and takes place behind the scenes however simple tricks like this can it had just a little bit more of an edge to your website’s overall success.

Do you see how it works? Internet marketing isn’t so hard after all.