Trial and error
There are a whole lot of tutorials, articles, videos and other media out there that offer advice to SEO copywriters who are trying to get traffic to their sites. However, when I began my job as an SEO copywriter, I didn’t have any time to do research, I had to work! I had to write!
Furthermore, I am not a technical person, I am a word person. So I kind of had to figure things out organically as I went along. Basically what that means is I wrote articles and checked back later to see how much traffic they’d generated until I started noticing patterns regarding which articles got hundreds of hits and which stayed in the single digits.
Keyword density
The number of times you use the keyword you’re targeting to try to get traffic is crucial. I recommend trying to use it in every paragraph if you can. This will feel repetitive, wrong and uncreative to seasoned writers. However, it’ll greatly improve web traffic.
At the very least, use your keyword in the title, first paragraph, last paragraph and as many times as you can in between, including in subheads. The more times you use a keyword phrase, the higher up your article will appear in the list of search engine results when someone searches for that keyword phrase.
Be different
Your best bet for getting a top ranking article in a list of search results is to write about something that everyone is looking for but no one is writing about. Of course, as soon as other SEO copywriters out there discover this term that everyone is seeking, they’ll jump on it too, so make sure you are first!
It also helps when people are using really specific keywords that are not exactly regular, plain English. For example, when Oprah’s web site was giving away coupons for free chicken from KFC, people were searching for oprah.com/KFC. I used that keyword, awkward as it was, over and over and over. The article got 60,000 hits because so few web pages out there actually had that term.
Granted, it did help that the queen of media was giving away free food — and lots of it — but there were a lot of other sites out there covering the same thing. My article got a high ranking on Google for a search term that was being used by lots of searchers and not many online media writers.
Stay focused
I have tried stuffing popular keywords into articles where they don’t really belong, and that really doesn’t work. The more focused your article is on what people are really searching for, what they really want to know, the higher your ranking and your page views will be. This also greatly improves the time people spend on your page, which is a huge factor for advertisers.
These are just a few simple tips for beginners on how to use Search Engine Optimization to generate traffic to your web site. Check back later for more SEO tips and tricks.
