SEO - Writing Effectively to be Found

It is necessary to signal the search engines in order to get noticed and help achieve maximum website visibility.  You need to think a bit like a search engine when writing the copy for your website. Search engines look at the HTML code that makes up your Web page and attempt to find the information you have written.  The textual copy goes into the search engine's "index", which is a very large database. When a user conducts a search on the search engine, the database is queried to identify all the pages in the index that include those words on the page and/or in the links pointing to that page. So if your page does not include the words the user was searching for, it is unlikely that your page will rank well, if at all. The same holds true when none of the links to that page include the words that the user searched for in the clickable text that forms the link. 
 
Once pages have been identified, search engines order the results according to relevance. Relevance can be determined based on dozens and dozens of criteria, such as keyword prominence (how often your keywords appear on a page, and where they appear). As they begin to start thinking the way a search engine does, most copywriters will realize that they are being too verbose in the first few paragraphs. It also occurs to them as they are writing that the title for the page they are working on doesn't have the most important keywords listed first, but rather last. Moving the most important keywords for that page to the beginning of the title can help to boost your page ranking.  Also, be certain to code the title properly.
 
It is also important that you do not go overboard with what is called "keyword density". This refers to the number of times your keywords appear on a page. Too many occurrences of your keywords and the page will trip the spam penalty algorithm, which will damage your page's rank. Also, if you are going after a particular keyword phrase, your web page will appear more relevant if the individual words in that phrase appear together in your page copy.
 
Think through how you can best structure the information on your page so that your keywords appear inside headings, body copy, and other tags while still writing something interesting and compelling.
 
Once you have thought about each of these points, it is time to start writing. Try to write at least a couple of hundred words of page copy. This is not a rule, but a good guideline to follow. When you are creating links from text, be mindful to include good keyword-rich text in your link text.

Test the Waters