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Strengthen Your Advertising with SEO Copywriting
by Enzo F. Cesario
More Search Engine Optimization Articles
Published on this site: October 30th, 2009 - See
more articles from this month
Advertising should be part of any growing business. Regardless of
what your business does, customers have to know about your
product or service in order for them to use it. As the Internet
becomes a primary source for consumer knowledge and increasingly,
purchasing, it's imperative that your company gets its message
out through this medium. However, advertising on the Internet
works differently than traditional advertising in that the
customer must find the business instead of a business coming to
the customer.
Copywriting is the creation of text used in advertising,
regardless of medium. This covers every aspect of an
advertisement: promotional flyers, jingles, slogans, billboards,
and web pages. All of these strive to put your product or service
in the best light possible and are aimed directly at the
consumer; except for web pages. With web pages there is another
audience your advertisement must also target: the search engine.
What's a Search Engine, and Why Isn't it Finding Me?
Think of a search engine as being a giant phone book: customers
looking for a type of business will often look up that category
and start by calling the first listing. Because phone books are
indexed alphabetically, almost every category will have a
business with a name beginning with "a," or even "aaa."
Likewise, Internet users who aren't familiar with the category
they're looking at will start with the first link they see when
they search for something. However, dozens or even hundreds of
factors determine the placement of these pages. This is where SEO
comes in.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Like naming your
business "AAA" for placement in a phone book, SEO techniques
match web pages with the criteria that search engines use so that
they are placed as high on a search as possible. Web pages are
placed on search engines through the use of a web crawler. This
is a program that systematically searches for new web pages and
categorizes them. Because the Internet is so massive, these
crawlers are designed to weed out useless pages and concentrate
on unique ones that will be useful to people who are doing the
search. Search engines use dozens of factors in their algorithms
to find and place web pages. They are very secretive about the
specific factors so that no one can cheat their system by writing
a web page just so it will be placed on top. While the specifics
are unknown, there are a few things all search engines use to
categorize pages: the number of links to a page, its ranking on
website traffic sites, and keywords in the page.
Use SEO and Play By the Rules
We all depend on getting accurate, useful results from search
engines. Search engine companies actively modify their criteria
to keep spam from showing up on their pages and to keep their
users happy. Therefore the best way to use SEO to get people to
your web page is by playing by the rules; pages that have useful
information will stay on top of searches, while those that don't
are quickly removed.
So What CAN I Do to Get My Business Noticed?
Many search engines sell ads, but any reliable service will not
sell search placement, nor does advertising with them influence
your place on their searches. There are three things you should
be concerned with to ensure a good ranking:
- Keyword indexing: HTML pages can use meta tags that tell
search engines what topics a page covers. It is important to
include as many words related to the subject of a web page in its
meta tags. However, placing popular but unrelated words, such as
a celebrity's name, or hiding keywords behind backgrounds or
images on a page to generate search results will quickly get the
page ignored.
- Good linking: Links are very important to getting your page
noticed, but only if they're from reliable sources and are
written to emphasize keywords. Links from known link sellers will
not improve your page rank, and will cause consumers to distrust
your site. Linking within your site to appropriate pages and
getting others in a related area to link to you will help your
page ranking immensely.
- Limited web crawling: This may seem counter-intuitive, but
there are some pages that you may not want to show up on a search
engine, like temporary pages or login screens. Most search
engines consider internal search pages to be spam, and allowing
them to be crawled will lower your search ranking. This can be
prevented using the robots exclusion standard: a text file named
"robots.txt" placed in the root directory of a domain will
tell crawlers which parts of your web site to skip.
SEO is vital in copywriting for Internet-based advertisements.
Properly implemented, it will help keep your page on the top of
search lists. By creating good links, using accurate keywords,
and limiting web crawling to useful pages, you can ensure
customers can find you.
Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat.
Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art
internet distribution and optimization to build links and
drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to
http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/.
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