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There’s a debate rag­ing in mar­ket­ing cir­cles: should you use SEO or Search Engine Opti­miza­tion tech­niques on your web­site or not?

First of all, what do I mean by SEO? Search engine copy­writ­ing requires that the copy­writer con­cern him­self with the strate­gic place­ment of key­words, tags and the like within his web copy to get the web page as high as pos­si­ble in the search engine rankings.

Accord­ing to a sur­vey by Enquiro and Mar­ket­ing­Sh­erpa on the role of search, over 60 per­cent of BTB buy­ers research prod­ucts online from 2–12 months in advance of a pur­chase, and 69 per­cent of them start with the “organic” (i.e. search engine) list­ings. So, rank­ing high with the search engines is important.

That said, there are sev­eral other points to take into con­sid­er­a­tion:


(1) How does “organic” web­site traf­fic fit into your over­all sales process? Do you drive traf­fic to your web­site using other means (adver­tise­ments, direct sales calls, sem­i­nars, free white paper offers, etc.)? And how qual­i­fied are the leads that come from the search engines?

(2) You need to make it into the top 10 or top 20 (any lower posi­tion is of lit­tle or no ben­e­fit). How much com­pe­ti­tion is there for the key­word? How likely is it that you’ll make it into the top 10–20 list­ings with­out too much effort?

(3) Search engines are con­stantly tweak­ing their algo­rithms (partly to pre­vent the “black hat” SEO experts from manip­u­lat­ing rank­ings) so just opti­miz­ing your pages is a mov­ing target.

(4) Ulti­mately, con­tent is king. Hav­ing plenty of use­ful (fresh) con­tent on your site will prob­a­bly do more for your rank­ings in the long-run than SEO will. More­over, con­tent is a more sta­ble con­trib­u­tor to high rankings.

(5) Incom­ing links (other web­site link­ing to your site, ide­ally web­sites that are ranked high and are highly respected) are gen­er­ally con­sid­ered more valu­able than sim­ple key­word opti­miza­tion and the like. See www.alexa.com to research web­site rankings.

(6) Key­word opti­mized pages can sound slightly strange; they often don’t read well. More­over, their sell­ing power may be weaker than pages that focus first and fore­most on the prospect, rather than the engine.

In the end, it’s prob­a­bly best to fol­low a 3-part strategy:

(1) Focus on writ­ing the most con­vinc­ing copy you can, aimed at the human reader rather than the search engines.

(2) Opti­mize the key­words, if you wish, but never change a word of strong copy if that change will weaken the copy, even if SEO best prac­tices dic­tate such a change.

(3) Once the page is up and work­ing (e.g. gen­er­at­ing strong con­ver­sion), opti­mize it for the engines by tweak­ing the copy, but test to make sure that those edits don’t reduce conversions.

So, do SEO, but use SEO intel­li­gently and always put your (human) prospect first.

There’s also a larger point here: besides search engine opti­mized pages and clever copy, what really dri­ves traf­fic to your web­site — and keeps vis­i­tors com­ing back — is use­ful, fresh content.

Con­tent is STILL king!
——

Paul Ari­naga is a pro­fes­sional free­lance copy­writer spe­cial­ized in help­ing soft­ware and other tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies improve their mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als to get more and bet­ter leads.
http://www.paularinaga.com
This arti­cle is excerpted from “The Soft­ware Marketer’s Toolkit”.

Arti­cle Sources:
• POP! PR Jots: It’s Not About SEO — It’s About PR — by Jeremy Pepper
• Matt Cutts: Gad­gets, Google, and SEO » SEO Mis­takes: Not checking …
• To SEO or not to SEO?
• Free Arti­cles and Con­tent Gen­er­a­tor for Webmasters

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