In some ways, copywriting advertisements for the web is different than creating them for printed materials or email, including the fact that the way they are written impacts whether or not they will appear in search results and if people are likely to click these results. What techniques or practices should be considered do’s or don’ts in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) based copywriting?

Do’s

1. If it is your responsibility, make sure the web page where the copywriting will appear has an appealing description tag which will make people want to click on the link in their search results. Use a related word for the page’s file name (name.htm) as well.

2. Try to use a particular word or short phrase related to your product, service, or other offering in each paragraph of an article. It should be a word people regularly enter in search engines.

3. Do pay attention to choosing a title which is attractive to click on in search results. Remember that people won’t read the rest of your text if they aren’t attracted by the title.

4. Aim to use some SEO keywords that competitors have not utilized in their copywriting. This may allow you to gain a high-ranking position in search results without having to surpass them.

Don’ts

1. When copywriting, don’t write a promotional article that is many pages long, as some web sites have done. This makes it more difficult to attain a good SEO keyword density, and will overwhelm readers who have limited time.

2. Don’t put an SEO keyword in every sentence, or so much that it is obnoxiously repetitive or obviously manipulated. Search engines dislike excessively high keyword density, and so do readers.

3. Don’t place the copywriting text inside an image or animation; this is harmful for SEO because search engine spiders/robots cannot read this type of text and will have little indication of the page’s content.

4. Do not sacrifice the quality of your SEO copywriting for keyword density by insisting upon a specific percentage. It’s better to have easily readable copy and a three percent density than awkward-sounding, redundant text at four percent.

Basically, SEO copywriting should use META tags, file names, and popular search keywords to its advantage, but not at the expense of readability or sufficient detail. Otherwise, SEO copywriting ought to apply the same techniques which make good print or email copywriting effective.

If you’ve been thinking about syndicating the content on your site to obtain backlinks there are some things to consider. Google considers this type of syndication duplicate content and having duplicate content may affect your site’s PageRank among other things.

One of the major problems may be that Google tries to determine the original source of a published article. If your article appears on a syndicated site it is possible for Google to get confused and credit that site as the original source.

Some confusion exists around the question of if Google will ignore duplicate content if the search engine has already seen it on another site. Google doesn’t ignore the duplicative content. The best way to handle this though is to publish the content on your site first and wait a short period of time before syndicating it. Once the article is syndicated then require a backlink to your site. All of this will help Google figure out that your site was the original source of the content.

Another question many people have is how much of the original content needs to be changed so that Google sees the link as a link to expert content. The best answer is that you can’t really alter the same article enough for Google to view them as unique. You’re better off creating two different documents to do this.

All told, the best way to syndicate your content is to publish your articles and things yourself. After they’ve been published for a couple of weeks syndicate them using proper linking structures. Doing this should help Google realize your site is the originator of all of the content and you’ll receive the benefit of the backlinks without being a site that has other sites content duplicated.

When using images in a website design which incorporates SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the way search engine spiders will react to them should be taken into account, as well as the most effective ways to make them appear in Image Search results. Search engine spiders cannot directly evaluate what images contain or look like, aside from their resolution and file size. However, they can read the alternative text provided for an image, which is specified by using an “ALT” attribute in the “IMG” tag for each of the images – thus, these are likely to have some impact on SEO. The words also appear on text-only web browsers, when a user places the mouse pointer over an image, or on pages where the graphics fail to load.

A benefit of using content-related images is that they give a website the potential to receive traffic through the Image Search features on search engines like Yahoo, Google, and AltaVista. Using images which are not too small, but display acceptably when reduced to a relatively small size, will likely produce a greater number of clicks. While of less significance, it should also be noted that large images are visible on search engines and directories which show thumbnail graphics next to their results, such as Alexa.com or Del.icio.us.

Some image search engines, including Yahoo, display the filenames of images below them. On the other hand, if a webpage has a caption directly below an image, this will likely be used as the caption for Google results. Google Webmaster Tools users can freely opt-in to the Enhanced Image Search feature. According to Google.com, this helps them more effectively index images on a site, partially through using an interesting feature called “Google Image Labeler”.

Words displayed within a picture will not affect the webpage’s SEO keyword density, and the page won’t appear in search results for words that only appear in the image-based text. Putting text which is unrelated to the page’s subject in an image might improve its keyword density for relevant words, which is useful for SEO purposes. Examples of such text may include contact information, advertisements, ordering instructions, or product specifications.

Using relevant images also frequently makes web content more interesting, useful, and attractive. This is beneficial to SEO efforts because it encourages people to voluntarily link to the page and makes it more likely to receive attention on social bookmarking services.

A search for the well-known phrase “content is king” returns over two million results on Yahoo! Search. It basically means that websites which provide quality content are likely to achieve popularity. However, some site owners and promoters have sought to use certain SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques as a replacement for content. Read on to learn why content is still “king” of SEO…

1. Various undesirable SEO practices which attempt to simulate real content have been cracked down upon by search engines, because of their deceptive nature. These have included putting lots of keywords at the end of a page in small text, or feeding entirely different text to search engine “spiders.” New SEO techniques of this type can still be temporarily effective, but search engines eventually catch on to and penalize them.

2. Quality content often generates voluntary links, a major aim of most SEO campaigns. Other websites, forum users, and bloggers are more likely to voluntarily link to a site if it provides good information. This requires much less effort than gaining links through reciprocal linking or link purchases, and is viewed more favorably by search engines.

3. Search engines rank duplicate pages less prominently in their results than unique text not available elsewhere on the web. Trying to avoid the effort or cost of original content creation, by obtaining articles from public domain sources or article directories, is unlikely to produce the same SEO benefit as unique material. Still, the unique text will more effectively gain traffic if it is SEO optimized.

4. Even if a website can attract visitors using methods which don’t rely upon quality content, there is a reduced probability that they will find the site useful. This reduces the chance that they will continue to explore the site, click on ads, return later, or recommend it to others. It is generally a waste of bandwidth and SEO work to attract internet users to pages they are unlikely to find useful.

Basically, SEO is important and often necessary for a web site to attain high search engine rankings and become more popular, but should not be used to replace quality original content. Providing material of this type is more beneficial to both website visitors (who want valuable information) and search engines, which want to provide the most helpful results to users. This is why good content should still be considered the “king” of SEO.

Recently Yahoo published a patent application that explains how the company analyzes web pages for related keyword phrases. Yahoo identifies several likely phrases from the content of the web pages and matches those phrases with a content dictionary. The patent application suggests that it is beneficial to use these related keywords close together on a web page so that search engines can find the relation between them more easily.

Currently, search results can include looking at different algorithms or ranking criteria that include the number of times the queried term appears on a web page, how close the terms are together on the page and the location on the page of the terms. The problem with this method is that it doesn’t factor in the context of the search terms in relation to other words on the page.

Yahoo’s patent application attempts to find out the context of the terms as a concept or phrase as it is associated with other related phrases on the page. This helps determine the most appropriate pages to return in a search query.

One of the ways Yahoo is trying to do this is by establishing meaningful phrases or concepts. A page’s text and tags let a search engine know what those pages are about. Yahoo sends the text and tags to a program that uses an aboutness extractor to break down the text, match it with keyword phrases in a concept dictionary and see if they are listed as concepts. A context dictionary keeps information that identifies related concepts, which are one or more keywords associated with a given concept. This understanding of concepts can help search engines better understand what a searcher is looking for.

The patent application covers quite a bit more on how Yahoo plans to discover better results in searches. If you are interested in learning more you can see the patent here.