Sarah Pooley of MSO.net recently wrote an article for PMLive.com giving advice and guidance on how to write relevant copy for search engine optimisation (SEO). The article was tailored for the pharmaceutical market but the theories also apply to any company writing copy for their website and wanting to get their pages up search engine page rankings.
The following is an extract:
SEO is concerned with understanding how natural search results are attained and assessing which boxes must be ticked to achieve a higher page ranking than that of the competition. Unlike paid advertising, where you pay to improve the position of a website, a resourceful SEO strategy can improve where your website appears in the search results without resorting to this short-term (and some would argue reactive rather than proactive) gains achieved with advertising.
Research and discover the most popular search terms of your chosen subject: knowing what your potential visitors are searching for is vital. One word of warning however: be realistic and weigh up the chances of your achieving a good position on the results page with a vague and generic search term — it probably will not happen. If your website is small in comparison to your rivals, the likelihood of your page appearing first on the search results page is remote, so concentrate on specific search terms instead.
Tips for Success
- Consider the subject of alcohol abuse and depression. The key phrase ‘depression caused by alcohol abuse' is currently a popular search choice; by including that term within the body of your content means that your page is going to return a well placed listing in search results.
- It is important to consider keyword density. Once your keyword search tool has deduced those key terms and phrases which prove to be the most popular, the next stage is to include them with regularity within the page's content. As a general rule of thumb, the percentage of words that should mirror your chosen key term or phrases is 3-10 per cent. Anything more than this is considered keyword stuffing and your website will be penalised. The term ‘alcohol abuse and depression' needs to be repeated often within the content — at least once every couple of sentences, if not more. One tip is to look at the ‘cached' version on a web page which will highlight where the key term or phrase appears within the page's content.
- You must also maintain an optimum level of keyword density, as the page will be deemed by search engines to be relevant to the key term or phrase and will be ranked higher than a page whose keyword density percentage may be lower.
- Include your key phrase in the title tags. Ensure that your chosen key term or phrase appears within a title and then give that title either H1 or H2 tags. A search engine will assign higher relevance (and thereby a higher placing) to this page than one that does not make good use of these tags.
- Make sure that when writing the medical copy that there is a good level of internal linking to other parts of your website. By doing so, you are ensuring that search engine spiders will find all the pages on your site and improve the chance of every page being ranked, which will increase the value of your site. Keep in mind that the hyperlink itself should contain the actual key phrase and not merely ‘click here' which, in isolation gives no indication of relevancy.
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