Copywriting Techniques - How to Optimise Your HTML Code for Search Engines

When it comes to designing your web page, you must design it to rank among the top sites in search engines. This is the basic rule, the line that every copywriter has to follow. Besides your META tags, the title, keywords, image, ALT text, text, and the overall design together form the position your website will rank in the search engines. To get the desired turnover, it is essential that your site appears among the first 10 or 20 results when searching by keyword in the search engines. Otherwise, your audience simply won't find you.

Website traffic originates mainly and significantly from Search Engines. The first priority is to list in the first ten and grab the reader's attention.

META tags are HTML code. These are notes within the code's header that provide aspects of your page to the search engines. This description will ideally focus on the main topic of your site and should not contain any generalisations. To get the best results, you need to include the most important keywords around the beginning of your description. If you make your description appropriately detailed, your visitors will know exactly what you are offering. However, make sure the description is not too lengthy, it should be not more than 200 characters including spaces.

The META keywords tag will hold the listing of relevant keywords and keyword phrases of your site and enable the Search Engine to point to you. You can also download a free software to help you get the best keywords your site needs at goodkeywords.
This site also includes a site popularity tool which will enable you to check your ranking.

There are four meta tags that should be considered when building your site:

1. Title
2. Keywords
3. Description
4. Alt

In the following, I will give some examples on how these meta tags should ideally look.

Title

E.g. < title>Copywriter : Proofreader : Creative Writer: Linguist< / title>

Since the title is the most important of the META tags, try to include the keyword in it at least once. The keyword should appear preferably towards the beginning of the sentence. Apart from its crucial importance in ranking your site, it is also having a huge impact on your Click Thru Rate. The text that you include in this title, will be the one appearing in Google in your listing. This is the part that a visitor reads first and decide to click on it. If you regard it as an advertisement headline, the better you make it, the more clicks you get from it. Google only displays 66 characters in the clickable part of your listing, therefore make sure these are your selling keywords.

Keywords

E.g. < meta name="KEYWORDS" content="Copywriter, Proofreader, Creative Writer, Linguist" / >

In the past, search engines would look at this line to identify the subject material of your site. Nowadays, only a few search engines follow that method. There have been some rules set up about how many characters this tag should include. Generally, you can go up to 300, however, there is not a strict limit set. Yahoo for example pays a lot of attention to this tag and assigns quite some importance to it. If you get this wrong, you will be penalized. In other words, you should not include keywords in this tag that do not appear in your copy.

Description

E.g. < meta name="description" content="Copywriter : Proofreader : Creative Writer: Linguist - Professional copywriter offering you reliable services in copywriting, proofreading, and creative writing" / >

Your keyword should be included in the Description at least once, since Search Engines do take this line into consideration for identifying your site's subject material. This text is also used by search engines as the description of your site. You can make this look like an ad to your site.
Google only displays 160 characters in this field including spaces.

Alt

E.g. < img xsrc="filename.gif" alt="Copywriter : Proofreader : Creative Writer: Linguist" title="Copywriter : Proofreader : Creative Writer: Linguist" >

Alt tag was designed for the benefit of visually impaired people who wish to use the world wide web. They need to use a software that will read the content out loud on their computer. This software, upon encountering a picture, will look for the alt text to learn what the picture is. Ideally, the picture uploaded in your site will relate to your keyword and content, therefore Search Engines do look at the alt text. You need to include your keyword at least once in this text.

To round up, depending on how many keywords you are targeting to use, you can use the same tags for various pages, or you can create different meta tags for each to be unique. It is always worth taking a look at your competitor's tags as well.