We all want to reach the top of Google & other search engines with the help of SEO: Because organic conversion is free, and users trust organic search results more than ads. After all, they’ve found the result themselves.

However, writing for search engines and in line with SEO rules is not an easy task. Writers used to only focus on content, but now we also have to take technical SEO requirements into account and focus on a keyword and supporting keywords. A challenging process. Our six tips show how to write search enginge optimized copy that will make your content stand above the crowd.

SEO advice 1: first content, then keywords

If you try and fit as many SEO keywords into a text as possible, it soon starts sounding quite stiff. So we recommend going ‘old school’ when writing a text: introduction, main section, conclusion. Make sure that your text is tailored to the reading habits of web users. Once the text is finished, it’s time to weave in your SEO keyword and the supporting keywords. SEO writing therefore comes at the end, another step in the process.

SEO advice 2: use synonyms

Thankfully, our colleagues at Google & other search engines are clever engineers, and are making their search engines increasingly smart. Their algorithms can now recognise synonyms and contexts. This means that you can use alternative words and even long-winded descriptions for your keyword and supporting keywords when getting your text SEO ready.

SEO advice 3: play with formats

Who reads all the way to the end of a text nowadays? A long article might make sense for specialist topics, but our experience is that people look for entertainment. Since search engines love what’s popular, text only is no good idea (retention time and page views per session are key concepts). Here’s a few formatting ideas to stop your SEO from becoming too boring.

• Advice article (like this one)
• Photos with captions
• Infographic with written explanation
• Interview
• Article with ‘decorative materials’ like titles, subtitles, quotations and info boxes
• Q&A article (buzzword: featured snippets in search engines)

Whatever presentation you choose, test the mobile view as well. Make sure that your SEO content is still easy and enjoyable to read on mobile devices.

SEO advice 4: dip into your bag of tricks

What every SEO content manual says but is often forgotten: body text isn’t the only place you can put SEO keywords. Make sure that the keyword is in the URL, title tag, all image and video names, and above all in the heading (‘H1’). This means that your keyword has already appeared at least five times without overdoing the text. However, with all these technical tricks, don’t forget the copy itself – so make sure that the SEO keyword appears particularly frequently in the first few paragraphs of text. Google & other search engines will love you for it.

SEO advice 5: do the maths

As a rule of thumb, an SEO keyword should make up 3-5% of the text. There are various online tools you can use to check keyword density, this is one we like.

The statistics for this text are the following
Main keyword: ‘SEO’ used 34 times = 4%
Supporting keyword: ‘keyword’ used 17 times = 2%

However, this is quite a long text. A 300-word text is enough for a search engine to work with. This means that the keyword needs to appear about 15 times. Instead of using a calculation tool we recommend just highlighting the keywords in the text and then counting them up – this means that you keep an overview, and you know how much redrafting you need to do to keep the search engine happy.

SEO advice 6: don’t forget the translation

Give your translation company the right SEO keywords – because SEO keywords don’t come from dictionaries, they come from SEO specialists. And don't forget to keep an eye on what the translation company is doing, since translators are not SEO specialists. Make sure that the translator sticks as closely to your guidelines (and these tips) as the original text does.

Learnings

The good news for all fans of relevant, exciting content: high-quality material wins the day. Google clearly emphasised this by

integrating a quality algorithm into the search engine’s core algorithm with Panda. And that’s positive news because it rewards good work and not only SEO technicalities. However - good performance is much more than just SEO writing. If you want to know what else it takes, you best talk to this person.

Checklist

• SEO advice 1: content first, then keywords
  Have you written your text? Now you can add in your keyword to work on your SEO.

• SEO advice 2: use synonyms
  Write the ‘right’ text and use paraphrases for your keyword.

• SEO advice 3: play with formats
  Use formats that suit your users (and your keyword) so they truly engage with your content.

• SEO advice 4: dip into your bag of tricks
  Weave your keyword in everywhere – URL, title tag, H1-Hn, alt text, image names, image captions.

• SEO advice 5: do the maths
  4-5% keyword density is perfect for search engines.

• SEO advice 6: don’t forget the translation
  Give your translation company your keyword and supporting keywords– they won’t automatically know them.

The experts behind this article

Thanks to Fabian, Christoph, Jenny and Benoît for content and copy cleverness, and to Jérémie for the visual. This article would not have been possible without you!

There are different solutions to this problem and we assume we didn't find the perfect one yet, so maybe someone of our readers has some insights.

Here are our solutions:

• Remove the usernames from the page, when the Googlebot is detected. Could work. No negative impact to the general visitor. Just two questions: If Googlebot disguises itself as a different user agent, we deliver it the usernames nevertheless, what does it do with it? Add it to the index? Treat the site as “you deliver different results to Google than your visitors. You're bad. You lost your karma”? (which we have to avoid, of course). I doubt such a small change will trigger that alarm or that it will end up in the index, but no one knows for sure (at least I didn't find anything).

Conclusion: Could work, unknown risk that it does bad things.

• Use images instead of text. As long as Google doesn't do OCR, that works. The general visitor can't copy&paste, but apart from it, it works for him. But blind people do have a problem then and accessibility is important on that site.

Conclusion: Does work. But is not accessible and may look very strange.

• Use Javascript to write the name. Actually we do that as spam prevention already on our website (and generally in the CMS) for email addresses. Mine looks something like and the function “obfscml” does then deobfuscate it (as you can guess the algorithm is not very fancy :)). I thought that works (and it certainly works for most spam email harvesters), but when I searched for this email address at Google I was quite surprised to find that page on the top spot. So Google actually does execute javascript on the page (it's not just regexing or parsing or similar as I read on other pages, the algorithm is not that easy).

So I went to the next stage and put the actual function into an external javascript file and – just to make sure – exclude it from Googlebot with robots.txt. And a week later, it was gone from the index. So that worked (and if it wouldn't work, Google wouldn't play by the robots.txt rules and I trust them that much)

Conclusion: It works, if you put the javascript function into an external file and exclude this with robots.txt. People with Javascript disabled don't see the name, but everyone else does and wouldn't notice anything. Still not perfect.

• Last but not least: A combination of images and javascript. You use images and write the name with javascript into the alt tag. The only people not being able to read the name are blind people with javascript disabled (and that's usually not the case, AFAIK). But still: Only works until Google does OCR and it may look alien in your page.

That's what we came up with. Nothing is really satisfying and there's no official solution by Google, as far as I know. Excluding whole pages from Google is easy, but excluding just parts of it almost impossible without dirty hacks.

If anyone comes up with a way more elegant solution, we really like to hear it. The comments are open.

Is this the beginning of the end of Spam 2.0? If you need a high PR to get good money with textlinks, but your PR falls if you do that (and your search engine position with it), it's maybe a lot less interesting for the average and self-respecting site owner to do it. And if you do it correctly (with rel=”nofollow”), your clients don't get any linklove anymore and paying for them doesn't look that attractive anymore …

But maybe it's just a big plot by Google, so that everyone will use AdSense in the future, since that certainly won't have any decrease of your PR as consequence (but also doesn't generate linklove for the advertiser). It's certainly not only for the love of humankind Google does such things.

Via Markus Tressl

Is this for search engine optimization? Searching for it seems to prove my first assumption:

Use bold for your heading and summary as this helps to emphasize the importance of this content, and search engines give content that is bolded an extra value.

(from www.gerrymcgovern.com)

Guide the search engines to your key points with bold, strong or emphasis tags within the body of the post

(from www.businessblogconsulting.com)

Bold text is given more weight than ordinary text but not as much as H tags. As much as is reasonable, enclose the search term in bold tags when it appears on the page.

(from www.webworkshop.net)

It sounds more like voodoo to me than that it really can help. And for me personally, I'd rather don't use that “feature” than to annoy my readers with hard to read texts. High rankings are certainly also possible without that technique…