Whether you’re writing copy for a personal or company blog, website, or pay per click landing page, optimized content is essential.

If you aren’t a professional copywriter, this can be a difficult and demanding task. So what makes website content optimized for search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc?

1. Write Your Own Content! – If you copy and paste information from a similar website, you are essentially shooting yourself in the foot. How did you find that site you’re copying? Google perhaps? If Google has already indexed that site, it knows the content on the site. If you copy it, change a few proper nouns, and paste onto your site, Google will recognize it. And you will more than likely be given a duplicate content penalty to your rankings.

2. Use Synonyms to Make Your Information Flow – Sure, having valuable keywords will help your rankings in SERPs for the major keywords, but what about those synonymous words that get less searches? Utilizing those secondary keywords can yield a lot of (sometimes more) traffic due to those secondary synonyms being less competitively crammed into online content. Matt Cutts wrote an interesting blog post on Google’s usage of synonyms in search and indexing terms.

3. Use Anchor Text with Internal & External Links – Internal linking within pages of your website helps Google understand that your site is complex and interwoven, and most likely beneficial and relevant to users searching for information on your topic. And every SEO guru agrees that valid anchor text is one of the best ways to internally or externally link to other sites, boosting pagerank and page value in the eyes of search engines. When a Googlebot is crawling through a site, and sees an anchor link for “vinyl replacement windows” that links to Window World, the crawler recognizes that Window World is relevant to vinyl replacement windows.

But wait, wait, I know what you’re thinking; Linking externally gives away all my valuable Pagerank and Linkjuice, right? Yes and No. Don’t go willy nilly linking to every reference you make across your entire site, but link to valid and valuable resources, which you feel help the end user. Also try linking to relevant websites that may actually link back to you. Trading links is usually bad. But 2 relevant websites which link between one another is often a positive. Especially when both these sites have valuable, useful information on related topics.

4. Replace Some Names & Proper Nouns with Descriptions – Let’s say you are writing SEO content for a veterinary client in Chicago. You are likely going to include the name of the client often throughout the content. That’s fine, but when possible, consider replacing “Johnson Veterinarians” with something more descriptive like “Chicago Animal Hospital”. Making simple changes like these will help optimize your content for people who may go to Google and type in the type and location of a business in their area, without knowing the exact name or business they are looking for.

5. When Applicable, Include a Clear & Strong Call to Action – If your website aims at selling or promoting a product or service (like 95% of all websites online), your main goal is to make money by gaining customers. To do this, you must literally spell out what you want them to do. Don’t assume potential customers are smart enough to figure out what you want them to do. If you want a purchase, tell them to add an item to their cart. If you want them to schedule a demo, point them to the demo form! This may seem like elementary advice, but many websites and copywriters often overlook these small details which can make a big difference in your overall Return on Investment.

So use these tips to create more search engine friendly content. You may be surprised at just how much these simple tips will help. Please comment and tell me your thoughts, and what tips you have for optimizing your content.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 3:47 pm and is filed under SEO - Tip of The Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.