Review: Tweaking Your Site's Copy to Get More Search Engine Traffic

A How To Kit from Marketing Sherpa.

This kit comprises two reports and one interview transcript - about 140 pages in all.

Who should read this?

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants who need to edit the copy on their clients' sites.

 

• Webmasters and small business site owners who are doing their own site optimization.

 

• Professional copywriters who want to improve their SEO writing and copyediting skills

In this review I'll take a look at each of the two reports and the interview transcript separately.

1. The Nitty-Gritty of Writing for the Search Engines, by Jill Whalen.

This is a great little report. It's not long, just 27 pages, but it covers the fundamentals of writing for search engines.

It includes examples, case histories and before-and-after screen shots of optimized pages.

As Jill points out herself, this is not a report packed with all the latest updates and tweaks - which could all change again next week. Instead, she has covered the fundamentals...the things that won't change next week or next month or even next year.

I like this approach, because I think too many of us keep our noses too close to the monitor and obsess over this week's news and the potential of another, short-term tweak.

I don't think that is the way to go. We all have more important things to be spending our time on. So I think Jill is right to focus on the fundamentals - and in doing so covers 99% of everything you'll ever need to do to get high rankings.

2. How to Increase Keyword Saturation (Without Destroying the Flow of Your Copy), by Karon Thackston.

This report is also fairly short, at 28 pages. But it looks at an aspect of SEO copywriting that is both fascinating and essential.

As a copywriter, how do you get the right density of keywords in the text, without disturbing the natural flow of the copy?

Karon has some terrific advice to offer. I learned a great deal from this report and there are a few things I have started applying both to my own sites and to those of a couple of close clients. Really, there were some things here that were completely new to me.

Again, Karon uses plenty of examples and makes good use of screen shots to illustrate her points.

3. Copywriting Tweaks to Get maximum Search Engine Traffic.

This is an edited transcript of an interview between Anne Holland of Marketing Sherpa and Jill Whalen.

It's a fairly long document, at 80 pages, but well worth reading.

The thing about an interview is that it brings up points and details that wouldn't find their way into a formal report. A good interviewer will always manage to ask a different question or dig a little deeper.

This is a very useful document. It goes beyond just the fundamentals, and explores some important details.

But here's the best part: Listeners sent in the urls of site pages and listed the keywords and phrases they wanted to be optimized for. There are a number of these examples, each of them including detailed recommendation from Jill.

I found it fascinating to see how Jill approached sites that were so different in their needs, approaches, designs and audiences. For me, this is how I learn fastest - seeing what an expert actually, does, page by page and line by line.

In all, I was very impressed by the information included within this collection or 'kit'. If you still feel you have something to learn about writing for search engines, I highly recommend it.

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