Photo by Flickr user chrissy575

While it’s not the only thing you need to worry about when it comes to search engine optimisation, you do need to ensure that your copy contains a good chunk of keywords. That’s not the problem; the problem is when it starts sounding spammy:

Happy Husky dog kennels are the best dog kennels your dog could ever want! Lots of dog kennels are cold and draughty dog kennels, but your dog shouldn’t have to sleep in a dog kennel like that – our dog kennels are warm and dry and your dog will love sleeping in our dog kennels!

Sounds stupid, right? The sad thing is, I’ve seen copy like this on a lot of sites (and I bet you have, too). What often gets forgotten is the end user; the person who’s come to the site looking for information. Search engines actually don’t need as much keyword density as you might think; conventional wisdom suggests 5-10%. The above (made up) example shows the keyword ‘dog’ makes up 18% of the words, and ‘dog kennels’ makes up 10%. Sure, it’s a really brief passage (55 words), and that skews the figures, but it shows how easy it is to shove keywords into copy, to the detriment of its credibility and readability.

The trick is not to go overboard. Sure, if you can work in a keyword instead of ‘it’ or ‘our product’, do it, but don’t write slavishly for search engines. If you think about it in the right way, you’ll get your keywords but your copy won’t read like your copy/paste button vomited on the screen.

All dogs deserve a warm, dry dog kennel, and yours is no exception. Happy Husky builds premium dog kennels with your dog’s comfort in mind. Forget those damp and cold dog kennels at the bottom of the garden – for a happy, comfortable dog the best choice you can make is a Happy Husky dog kennel.

This is still a little more exaggerated than I’d normally like, but the ‘dog’ keyword is down to 12% and ‘dog kennels’ down to 7%. They’re still there, but they don’t jar nearly as much. And the best part is that you leave more room for persuasion – now readers know that Happy Husky makes premium dog kennels, and that their dog deserves to be happy and comfortable. (Well, I hope they knew that already, but it never hurts to remind them, right?)

But your designer reminds you that, to complete the project and get the site going live, you have to send them through some copy – information about you, your business, and your services. But you’re really busy. So late one night you knock out a few paragraphs for your homepage and a sentence or two about yourself, but you’re really tired and you have lots to do tomorrow. So you just write a sentence about your product or service, add ‘More information coming soon’, and email the document. You can always finish it properly when you’ve got an hour to spare. It’ll do for now.

Wrong.

It sounds crazy, but I’ve seen this on many occasions, and I bet you have too. Sites that are faultlessly designed actually have no useful information on them, although the owner has obviously intended to add in some eventually. I don’t know if they ever got round to it though, because I’ve never visited any of those sites again to check.

It comes back to what I always tell people – you can have a beautiful site, faultlessly programmed, stuffed with cool effects, but if there’s nothing useful to give people, it ain’t gonna get you clients or sell your product.

Also bear in mind that search engines love copy, so you’ll achieve better rankings if there’s actually text in your site that’s relevant to the topic at hand.

So when you set up, or redesign, a website, do make sure it’s all finished before it goes live. Don’t waste time and potential conversions on your intention to do it later, just take the time and get it done, whether you do it yourself or bring in professional help.

If you Google the term you’ll find that it returns more than one billion results, the first few of which relate to big guns like Adobe and Apple products. Clearly, if you want to get anything ranking highly in Google, it’s not going to be from being that unimaginative with your linking.