How your copy will help you get found in the search engines

Posted by: Krishna De | Posted on: January 16th, 2007 | 0 Comments | Posted in: Article marketing, Business blogging, Marketing online, Personal branding, Recommended resources, Writing

Whether your an executive searching for your next big role, a professional speaker looking for your next big gig or a professional services firm looking to attract your next big client, we all need to show up in Google – in fact if someone searches for us online and they can’t find us we effectively don’t exist.

Increasingly building our corporate brand and our personal brand online is becoming more and more important and this year I’ll continue to add strategies, tips and tactics here at Biz Growth News that will enable you to build your online brand.

One area that many of us know about and yet many of us fail to implement effectively is the importance of key words.  I learnt most of what I know about search engine marketing from my great friend and SEO expert Jessica Bowman.

I have to admit that I know more than I implement, but if you are good at implementing here are a few tips for you!

Key words as a strategy to being found in the search engines really only works if you ensure that your copy includes the key words that your potential clients search for you with.  When I did my key word research I realised that how I described my business in my copy was not the key words people search under in the search engines.

And I didn’t like the terms that they searched under!  You see I might have used terms like “grow your business” but few people search on that.  So my copy may have read really well for people finding it, but the copy itself was not helping me be found in the search engines.

So do take time to use key word research tools to find out the terms people key into the search engines when looking for services such as yours and then ensure that you build those words into your title pages, your headlines and also the main body of your copy of your blog post or website. 

It’s recommended that for every 200-300 words of copy you have no more than three key words and you need to replicate your key words around 5-6 times. 

I experimented last week and I adapted a blog post for an online article directory.  The post was short but very valuable content and was key word rich – the key words were relevant to the content.

Within 48 hours not only did I see the article posted on other peoples blogs (I track my name and my blog name with Google Alerts) but also in my Google Alerts for that key word.

Key word strategies really can work and can help you build your corporate brand and your personal brand online to expand your success whether that be finding your next great career move, attracting media attention or finding more clients.  But do remember three things:

1. write valuable content – don’t be afraid that you are giving your secret strategies away – if you only have one secret than you’re probably not yet an expert in your field.  If you do provide a host of content it positions you as the expert and a centre of influence in your chosen subject and that will encourage potential clients to seek you out as not only do you know your subject, if you provide all this content at no cost, what wonderous outcomes can they expect if they pay you for your expertise!
2. write for your reader – implementing a key word strategy is important to being found by the search engines, but you have to write fluidly so that it makes sense to your potential client.  So be mindful of your key words but ensure that your copy is fluid in it’s style.

I’d also highly recommend that you check out an excellent post by Brian Clark over at Copy Blogger about writing content that Google loves and also a great post by Jessica over at Search Engine Journal about Google page rank.