OK, that title is a little misleading, because I don’t advocate writing copy strictly with the intention of it being search-engine friendly. Any decent SEO (search engine optimization) expert worth her salt would tell you, rightly so, to write for your customers. If you write fresh, keyword-rich, engaging advertising copy or product descriptions, the search engines will find it as relevant as your customers will.
But, there is an art to writing copy with key phrases in the form in which people actually search for them, and a somewhat scientific approach to writing copy based on the knowledge of how search engines handle things like punctuation.
Pick three keywords related to your site, such as “soccer, teams, jerseys.” Go to Google and type in these keywords separated by a space. Next, type in the keywords separated by a comma and space. Try it with exclamation points or any other punctuation. The fact that these searches return identical results tells you that search engines ignore punctuation (for the most part). You can use that knowledge to your advantage when writing copy and product descriptions for your website by writing in such a way as to include phrases that would be awkward if written in a sentence.
As an example consider the fact that when searching, people tend to first enter the item they want followed by the location they are looking for, even though in everyday speech it is much more common to say the location first: “Portland soccer teams” rather than “soccer teams Portland”
Writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams Portland” would be nonsense, but writing “We sell customized jerseys for soccer teams. Portland has several teams with colorful jerseys…
Period ignored, awkward search phrase returned! As you do keyword research, (see MightyMerchant’s comparison of free and subscription keyword research tools) keep in mind the fact that search engines ignore punctuation. You just might be able to creatively work in some phrases you previously thought were too unnatural.
Posted on November 5th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Copy Writing, Search
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