Your first step to building an effective online presence is making sure your website is picked up by search engines. But how can you incorporate Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) into your site while ensuring it still reads well and appeals to your target audience?

Do your research. For SEO to work best, you’ll need to undertake (or commission) good keyword research on words and phrases that are directly relevant to your organisation and industry.

You’re looking in particular for keywords and phrases that are often typed into search engines, but do not throw up a large number of results, so are not used by many of your competitors. These should then be included in your web copy, focusing on one or two different words or phrases per page.

Relevance is key. Make sure that your key words and phrases are directly relevant not only to your business, but to the content on the individual page. For effective SEO, your key words and phrases should be repeated within the same page three, four, perhaps five times (depending on the total length of text).

If your keywords are not relevant, this will make it far more difficult to maintain the flow of your text and the appeal of your content – which will, in turn, chase your audience away.

Highlight. Key words and phrases should ideally be highlighted on your web pages by, for example, including them in the page title, sub-headings, links and bold formatting.

Such tactics not only increase the chances of your keywords being picked up by search engines, it also makes your web page easier to scan by your readers – which makes it easier for them to take in information and therefore makes them more inclined to read more.

Blog. Regularly adding content to your website boosts its search engine rankings, so a blog can really help here. Plus, it encourages customers to return to your site on a regular basis, finding out more about what you do, what you know and what you have to offer them.

To get the most out of your blog, you need to attract interested readers – and that is often best achieved by your own active participation in the blogging community. Get out there onto the blogs of other relevant experts in your field, or related fields that your business may be relevant for – and get commenting, not forgetting to reference your own blog in your comments, to bring traffic back to your site.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in creating effective web copy is to follow all the SEO rules whilst ensuring that people still want to read what you’ve written. Contact us for advice on how to balance SEO with your unique virtual voice.