Importance of Good Copywriting Whether it is the traditional print media or the electronic media, be it advertising, newspapers, or a website, copywriting is the use of a strong blend of powerful, motivating and persuasive words that not only put your message across to your target audiences, but also brings about the desired results. In advertising, good copywriting grabs attention, creates user interest, holds attention, conveys useful product information and expects to generate more sales. You're right, we are talking A.I.D.A. formula! Grab Attention, create Interest, build Desire and bring them to Action! A newspaper article, on the other hand needs to be informative, interesting and absorbing. It cannot be denied that credibility also plays a crucial role. It is important to keep your audience in mind while writing: Whom are you addressing? Who are the people reading your article? What exactly are they interested in reading? Generally in most cases, be it web, print or electronic media, space and time is a constraint, not necessarily from the feasibility point of view but more from how long you're able to hold a reader's or a viewer's attention. This not only requires addressing the emotional needs of the people but also picking up their common traits, as no two readers are the same. What is Search Engine Copywriting? Search Engine Copywriting or SEO copywriting is re-writing text on the website page in such a manner that it continues to appeal to the site surfer while being compatible to the Search Engines. Search Engine copywriting is a specialized field that optimizes your site content so that search engines tend to rank your site higher when keywords related to your business are searched. One might question the need for Search Engine copywriting, when they already have the best of best copy on their website. The fact is that sometimes, even the finest written copy by the greatest copywriter might not generate the rankings on the search engines that you had hoped for, despite the fact that you have a great product or service, have spent an amazing amount of time and money in building that site. Interestingly, since Search Engine Copywriting attempts to focus on specifics, it usually improves even human viewers' appeal and clarity rather than hurting the creatively written copy. Search Engine Copywriting helps in optimizing your site in such a way that; a) It ranks highly on the search engine results with your business specific keywords. b) It succeeds in bringing quality (read targeted) human traffic to your site and generates more potential for sales and c) is intended to bring long-term 'free' traffic through 'natural' search engine rankings. What Search Engine Copywriting is 'Not' It is important to understand that Search Engine Copywriting is not developing 'creative' copy from a scratch. At the cost of repeating, Search Engine Copywriting is essentially a re-writing process of existing 'creatively written' copy. It is not an attempt to insert several disjointed, thesaurus-sounding keywords into the copy just to make it rank high in search engines. The fundamental difference is that Search Engine Copywriting is written (read optimized) for both human surfers as well as search engines. Search Engines and SEO Copywriting Many websites have a high degree of dependency on the Search Engines like Google to get traffic. Search Engines collect information from websites and match this with the keywords searched by a user looking for relevant information on different topics. If the Search Engine algorithms detect a close match on relevant search terms, your page is likely to be ranked higher. It is therefore important, from a SEO perspective, to have keywords strategically appearing in the text of your site. Search Engine Copywriting as mentioned earlier, is writing for these Search Engines, in order to bring higher rankings, quality human traffic and thus a higher potential for sales. Interestingly, a nicely done SEO copywriting job makes the copy even more appealing to the human visitors. What does SEO Copywriting do for Existing Copy? It makes the existing content more Search Engine friendly, without interfering or spoiling its natural and original essence. It makes the copy targeted for specific theme of the page by utilizing keyword phrases relevant to the content of the page. It makes the copy more structured. It makes the pages compatible to both the human surfer as well as the Search Engines. Effective Search Engine Copywriting Though there are no cardinal rules for effective SEO copywriting. You can follow a few guidelines that can help make your text Search Engine friendly. Here are a few useful tips: . 1. SEO Copywriting with Keyword Phrases Doing Keywords (read Keyword Phrase) research is one thing that all successful SEO Copywriters swear by. Targeting the right keywords and key phrases is a significant step in SEO copywriting because this way you would know what people are actually searching for. Good Keyword Phrase research removes guesswork. Focus needs to be on specific search phrases pertaining to what your site is offering. Once keywords have been decided they need to be used at several strategic places on your site. Keyword Selection Process The first step in the Keyword selection process is a good Keyword Research. There is simply no point in using keyword phrases that no one's searching for! Hence, it is advisable to do your keyword research by using tools like Wordtracker and Overture- Search Term Suggestion Tool Other search engines like Google also offer some tools https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox ), which can be used as a guide, although Google does not indicate the popularity count of each key phrase. Note: Wordtracker offers free use for one day. If you are organized in your planning, you can complete your keyword research in a day and use this benefit Lets take an example to understand keyword research better. Lets say, you have a hotel in Las Vegas and your site wants to get traffic for customers looking for your services. The first few keywords that come to your mind may be, Hotel, Hotels, Las Vegas, and Las Vegas Hotels etc. When we look for these keywords on Google, we are bombarded with several million pages of information. A lot of these pages talk about hotel chains, Las Vegas Gambling etc. The users usually refine their search to find more specific information. They may, for instance, type in 'Discount Las Vegas Hotel' or 'Las Vegas Hotel Reservation'. The benefit with focused approach is two-folds. One, you would get visitors who would be looking for 'exactly' what you are offering; Second, you would be dealing with far lesser competition in ranking your site high. Therefore it's evident that: When people search for information, they're searching for specific information. Hence it makes more sense to optimize for specific keywords. It is better to use keyword phrases than single keywords, as single keywords tend to be generic. Apart from that, many keyword phrases can be made out of a single keyword. Try using popular yet 'not so competitive' keywords, rather than most popular and competitive ones. They'll get you better ranking on the search engines and moreover, bring targeted traffic to your site rather than just junk traffic.