SEO copywriting does not only help search spiders to determine about the kind of information available on your site, but also make it easier for your readers to find the right piece of information by using site search. Additionally, readers could relate better to the text that contains the keyword(s) they are searching for.

In previous blog post, I have quite gone through the reasons why I think SEO copywriting is still required to certain extent for bloggers. Especially in a niche where there are lot of competitions, you want every advantage you can get.

Much of your efforts should be spent on writing great content regularly. But knowing a few SEO tactics could really help you when designing your blog template, compose the blog title and write copy that relate to your readers.

The beauty of having a blog is that once you know what piece of data you want to put on each part of the page, you can now design a search engine friendly template and use it throughout your blog consistently. Some of the pieces are one time design work, while others may require you to research on which specific terms exactly are your readers use to locate information from search engines.

So, without further ado, here are a few SEO copywriting tips every blogger must know.

1. Page titles

If you could not include your keyword anywhere else, put it in the page title. It is the most effective and powerful page element in SEO.

The catch is, sometimes for some reasons you just can not include your keyword in the blog title. For this situation, remember that writing for human is more important than search engines.

However, keep in mind that if a user search for “keyword” in a search engine such as Google, the keyword will be highlighted. Having the keyword appears on the title and highlighted attracts eyeballs instantly.

2. Meta keywords and meta description

Meta keywords are dead. It has practically no effect on search engine ranking nowadays.

We could assume almost the same for meta description but in cases where all of the factors are equal, the page with optimized meta description will outrank the page with none of the meta data.

I would recommend that you have the blog software automatically include the meta data entries in your blog pages. Perhaps the first sentence from the first paragraph will be appropriate, but not always. Having your keyword in the first sentence of the content is recommended tactic though, especially if you take the excerpt from the content or place Google AdSense ads on your page.

Forget writing meta description separately for each blog entry. It is a huge waste of time, in my humble opinion.

3. Header tags (H1 and H2)

H1 tags are effective page elements for SEO. Use them for the title of your blog posts. Needless to say, H2 tags are less effective than H1, but could be used to highlight the subtitles of your body content.

Subtitles are also the place to put your keywords. They act as stoppers for readers to rest their eyes. If you include keywords, they will get noticed. Search engine crawlers take these into account too.

4. Body copy

If you read some old texts on search engine optimization, you will notice the terms keyword density. After spending a lot of time writing the right copy, stuffing exactly the amount of keywords to achieve the best keyword density, you found out that still you page was not found anywhere on the first 10 pages of the search results.

Perhaps the ideal keyword density had changed since then..

Bad news for you. But also good news at the same time.

Bloggers could just ignore keyword density forever. They do no good for your rankings. They turn off your readers if you blatantly stuff keywords on the blog pages.

Finally, some of the factors you should pay attention to nowadays regarding body copy in blog post:

• Keyword prominence. How close to the start of the content before the keyword appears. The closer the keyword to the start of the content, generally the better it becomes. It is not a rule though. Just do your best with this bit of info.
• Bold and italics. Bold text carries more weight than regular text, and so does italics. Use them sparingly all over your content, particularly to highlight keywords. I often use these features to highlight important copy instead of keywords.
• Anchor texts. The right anchor text helps search crawlers that utilize this information to know what your page is about and the topic of the page you link to.
• Themed words / keyword variations. Place themed words and keyword variations in the body copy to increase relevancy. Google especially takes these keywords into account to determine the theme of your site.

In essence, while bloggers can do very well without knowing a bit about SEO or SEO copywriting, still having just a bit of knowledge about how search engines work could increase the chance of your blog posts to rank on search engines for particular keywords.