Why Your SEO Copy Should Have Personality
Writing SEO Copy For Real People
When writing web copy whether on-site, an article or press release it can be really easy to get hung up on packing in all of the SEO tricks of the trade. As an example, it is really easy to stuff your copy full of keywords, to the point that it doesn’t read very well at all.
SEO consultants may think that using a multitude of techniques in one piece of copy will win them favour in the eyes of the search engines, however, as well as being accepted as an authority by Google, Bing and Yahoo, it is important that the copy is read and understood by real people – ultimately that will lead to a sale for a business.
Adding a dash of personality to your copy will instantly draw readers in, encouraging them to visit your website, and browse your products and services.
Interesting copy could even help towards your SEO; article marketing is a popular technique used by consultants as it is a means of creating back links. Traditionally, if the information contained in the article is interesting and engaging, others would take the copy and use it on their website or blog with the back link intact, increasing the number of links to a site, hence working towards the SEO.
So how can you give your copy personality?
Vary your words and phrases – there is nothing more boring than reading a piece of copy that repeats the same words and phrases over and over. Try to vary the language in your copy, for example if you are writing about SEO, you could also use the words online marketing or search engine optimisation as slight variations of the term.
Write for your target audience – one of the most important aspects of making your copy engaging, is to know exactly who it is that you are writing for. Just as each business is targeted at a particular audience, so is copy. What might interest one individual may not connect with another. Try to write in a style that identifies with the audience, whether that is casual or formal. Also, try to inject the personality of the reader into the copy.
Add images – adding images to your copy is likely to draw your readers in more than a page full of text, it will literally paint a picture of what your article, website or press release is trying to convey.
Images could even help towards your search engine optimisation, as they too can be optimised. To optimise an image you should choose a suitable file name. Google Universal Search indexes images, if an internet user searches for an image of a computer and your image’s file name is ‘computer’ your image is likely to feature somewhere in the list of images for that search term. This is just another means of linking people to your site or copy.
As search engines become increasingly sophisticated, it has been argued that they are giving more authority to those websites that are human-friendly, after all it is humans that use websites. As much as SEO has to make a website search engine robot friendly, it also has to reflect the information that is most likely to be useful for real people.
