Copywriting for SEO and Internet Marketing:

Web marketing and SEO are the most heard about terms in the internet world today. There are thousands or self acclaimed gurus on these subjects, making great offers to website owners for making their website search engine optimized. But most of them offer services for great prices, which in its true worth have nothing in them, but some outdated strategies which will take you no where.

There is a large segment of this SEO business, still running, on the logic and practices which existed years ago buy have lost their relevancy in the current times. The search engines are constantly changing their search criteria, so how can the same old antiquated practices still rule. The ignorant and desperate website owners get trapped by these SEO firms, and they pay for something that will never fetch them any result.

The old timers always stressed on the keyword rich content as the most effective technique to gain higher search engine rankings. It could have been a useful method years ago, but the present day search engines are much smarter, and cannot be fooled by keyword density. In the recent past the webmasters have gone crazy to increase the keyword density, but by overusing the keywords the relevance and the charm of the content got lost and though this was able to get visitors to the site through search engines, it failed to keep them on the site for long, leave aside converting them into buyers. The earlier versions of the spiders, which were used by search engines to index sites, where very simple in their objective and did all the indexing based on keyword density alone. The higher was the density the more relevant a site was presumed to be. But much has changed since then.

The search engines have devised new and multiple means, to evaluate a sites relevance for given keywords, after all they also wish to remain in business and maintain their position in the search engine field. If the search engine fails to provide the user with the most valid and useful links for his search criteria, it will soon start loosing out on business. This was done to beat the keyword density strategy which was producing irrelevant search results just because there was only this one factor which was used for evaluation.

As of today the various search engines have devised several ways to assign ranks to various sites. The insider story of any of these search engines is not known to anyone, as the evaluation process is very complicated and a very securely guarded secret. There are frequent changes in the search algorithms to make searches more relevant. While some new factors of evaluation may be added, at the same time some of them are deleted, also changes are made to the weight-age to be given to each of the factors. So it is a very dynamic world at this end. For any search engine the algorithm of search that it uses is the most prized and the most valuable possession, and there are no ways to find out for certain what this algorithm consists of.

The tweaking of the search algorithms has lead to making of more sophisticated spiders or crawlers, leading to a more justified list of links for every search conducted. While they value lots of other factors today, key words are still important. But if you are under the impression that you can fool the spiders by overstuffing your content with keywords, then you are moving on the wrong track. As all spiders are very capable and efficient and can easily make out where you are overstuffing key words. There is much more that goes into SEO copywriting than keywords.

An important criterion for search is the freshness of the content. The spiders love a lot of fresh content. The spiders make periodic visits to the websites to take snapshots of the information that has been added to the site. The more fresh and relevant content you add to your site the more these spiders will love your site. If you are not adding content to your site on a periodic basis, you are sure loosing the page rank battle; in fact you will soon be pushed out of the game.

Search engines are constantly striving to improve the quality of search results. They want to provide the searcher with a more applicable and valid list of links which promise good quality information. Dont let your content sound more like a sales proposition; let it have more of information contained in it, and the sales text spread in traces in a few places. The quality of the content should be such that it offers some value to the visitor. A good copywriter will be able to make content which is informational and at the same time can induce sales.

The next thing you must check is that there is good value for the visitor to be on your site. Your site should have a purpose and should be able to provide some help to the visitor. Evaluate your site from this point of view that is there something on your site for which the site may be bookmarked by a visitor, if so your site is worth being indexing by search engines as well. It should have some strong point because of which the people may want to come back to it at least once.

When writing sales text, dont write hard selling stuff; instead use text that is motivational and informational. The visual presentation is not for spiders and spiders are just a means of getting visitors to your site but your site is for human use. So you must create a good presentation in order to create an appeal for the visitor.

To summaries it all you content may revolve around and contain keywords up to an acceptable level, but what is more important is how informative the content is and how convincing is it to turn visitors into buyers. SEO copywriting is affine art and not simply about stuffing in keywords into the content.