SEO is constantly playing a leading role in the development of quality traffic to websites. The obvious goal is to get the attention of visitors to your site with quality content and links. SEO, like everything else, is constantly changing and evolving.

SEO is great unless you are dealing with a site that is on its last leg.

Paying attention to content that will attract visitors and offering great links are the key to a solid foundation and something you can work with.

Many social media gurus will tell you SEO doesn’t matter, search traffic just happens. Well, if you produce unique content and make your site easily accessible, you can draw some decent traffic. Unfortunately, the right search traffic doesn’t just happen, it takes knowledge in telling search engines what you are about and that your product is something people are looking for.

What Are Visitors Looking For?

Content: Create great content by giving people what they really want. Once you have quality content and visitors — sharing and links will follow.

Accessibility: If search engines can’t access your content, your page cannot be indexed or ranked.

Visitor’s Experience: Your site must be easy for visitors to navigate through, in order to share you content with others. Visitors do not share content that is difficult to access, that’s just SEO savvy.

Marketing: One of the most important aspects to getting your site known is through word of mouth. Promoting your site is probably more important than just about anything else.

SEO Copywriting:

Copywriting is the meat and potatoes when it comes to the news media. You want to optimize everything in the best way possible. So let’s look at some of the essential elements for good copywriting.

The Title:

What phrase of keywords in your title will put your content up front and draw readers? Placing your significant keywords at the front of a title is better, it will capture the attention of those looking for specific information. People will zoom in on search results that are using the keywords they are searching with. This also grabs Google’s attention that your content is, in fact, the particular subject these people are looking for.

Meta Description:

Everything is not just about ranking, it’s about the representation of your content to search engines. Your meta description should be “peek” into what your content is all about. This in turn will influence whether a searcher clicks on your site or not.

Your meta description should be under 165 characters in order for the full description to become visible to search engines. Using WordPress allows you to create a meta description directly in the posting area, using Thesis or All in One SEO.

Content:

Your content is extremely important when it comes to making search engines happy. It cannot be emphasized enough, unique and fresh content are key in rankings. Your content should always be on target and centered on the subject matter of your keyword phrases.

Keep your body content around 300 words. Shorter than that will not draw the attention you are looking for. Too long will lose the attention span of most readers.

Whether including keywords in sub-headers will improve ranking is debatable. It is just common sense to include your keyword phrase in your sub-headers because that’s what the page is about.

The Frequency of Keywords:

“Keyword frequency is the number of times your targeted keywords appear on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of those keywords to the rest of the words on the page.”
It makes common sense that keyword frequency has an impact on ranking, but keyword density most likely will not. The only way to evaluate your keyword frequency is via the ratio of those keywords to the rest of your content.

The best way to evaluate the repetition of your keywords and whether they are really good or total spam, is to measure the frequency against the overall length of your page. If your density is greater than 5.5%, you are probably walking in spam and could be penalized by Google. Overloading your keyword repetition will not increase your ranking, it could potentially give you negative results.

Page Links:

Page linking is fundamental to a quality website. Search engines want a heads-up that your links are correctly connected to other pages and contents. This is search engine optimization. Here are a few pertinent linking practices that are quite acceptable within your content:

Link to relevant information early on in the body of your copy
Link to pages of importance, approximately every 120 words of content
Link to Interior pages that are relevant to your site or other sites
Link to anchor text that is naturally relevant

By covering important elements of SEO for good optimization using structure, keywords, fresh and unique content will give your copy the attention and ranking it deserves.